Work is continuing slowly but surely on the current batch of recordings with Hubcap. The main reason for this slow progress is the ridiculously high quality threshold we've set ourselves- on listening back to the last set of recordings we did together I realised that we'd let too many seemingly inconsequential little mistakes go uncorrected. They were just tiny things - a choked guitar note here, a mis-hit drum perhaps, a fractionally out of tune note on the vocal part- things that would be quite acceptable, charming even, on a record from the sixties, but to my ears (brought up on eighties high-gloss production and used to hearing modern records that have been ProTools-ed to perfection) they sounded like massive unforgivable mistakes. We ended up scrapping half of the songs we recorded, and vowed to be super-strict and utterly unforgiving next time round. In some respects, it feels like it might have been more honest to go with a more lo-fi approach and leave the imperfections as they are, but to do so when we have the skills and technology to fix them seems false in a different kind of way. It would be tantamount to deliberately setting out to make a sub-standard record, which is not what the whole lo-fi / DIY thing is all about, as far as I see it. I've made masses of lo-fi recordings in the past, but not one of them was ever meant to be that, it's just how they turned out due to the limitations of the technology available to me and my ability to use it (and as a musician, of course). At the moment I have access to all the technology and the skills I need to produce a really well-recorded set of songs, and to do otherwise would make me either a flake or a phoney. I have a horrible suspicion that I'm already both.
So far we've recorded all of Rich's drums, most of my guitar and Imogen's bass and sundry other instrumental parts on something like six songs. I think this week is mostly going to be spent working on Chris' guitar parts, and after that we're going to throw a party to record all the hand-percussion parts. Everyone who has ever joined us on stage to shake or hit something is invited, there will be beer and nibbles and maybe some massed singing.
Away from Betika, I'm attempting to read James Joyce's "A portrait of the artist as a young man", but the constantly teleporting narrative requires absolute concentration and I just don't seem to have the necessary attention span at the moment, there's too many things I have to do or think about. I can't see that changing for a while. I've been listening to "Antics" by Interpol, "Thunder Lightning Strike" by The Go! Team and various things I've been downloading from www.showandtellmusic.com . I've been laughing hard at the new series of "Look Around You" (BBC2, Mondays), and desperate not to be disappointed by "Nathan Barley" (C4, Fridays) the new collaboration between Chris Morris and Charlie Brooker (see TV Go Home).
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D von B
