Thursday 3 February 2011

I really like turning up to play overdubs on someone else's record. It's a very different discipline from being in the room with the musicians, where (hopefully) everyone is listening to everyone else and adapting what they do accordingly. In an overdub session, you're just trying to enhance and add to what's already in the can, which will take no notice of you whatsoever, so the process stretches you in unexpected ways. Anyway, yesterday I turned up with a car full of obscure instruments at the Diving Bell Lounge at the end of a lane in Dennistoun, and the dulcitone and Estey organ made themselves at home in amongst the many and various vintage guitar amps.  

I didn't expect to come across a brick 1870s coach house at the end of a lane in Dennistoun, still less one that's been turned into a recording studio.

But I spent a happy few hours with the team trying to wring out of me some useful parts for Mairi Morrison and Alasdair Roberts's forthcoming album, on dulcitone, harmonium, glockenspiel, and even piano. My piano parts might have been a bit too self-consciously smartarse to make it onto the record, but let's see: everyone else certainly sounds great. I took my otamotone but no-one invited me to play it in front of a microphone: I wonder why.

My ridiculous life vol.26: I couldn't produce the Napalm Death session for tonight's episode of Skins because I was in Canada at the time directing a ballad opera. If you'd told the 16-year-old me that such a juxtaposition could ever come to pass, he'd have been very pleased indeed.

I've been listening to the Dixie Dregs' Dregs of the Earth album a lot this week. Back in 2005, we had plans for our Lion quartet to do a version of Broad Street Strut but it never quite happened ... I wonder what it would have sounded like.