Melbourne

In 2001 I travelled to Melbourne to spend three weeks writing & recording with my long term friend Lindon. We had decided to revive a project that we had begun twenty years earlier in a dingy cellar studio in Woodhouse, Leeds.
On that day we produced 4 tracks from scratch, putting the work out for the first time under the Heat Distance banner.

Two decades later we were going to recapture the spontaneity & fun of that earlier session. Parameters for the project had been heatedly discussed in a long three month e-mail conversation between Melbourne & Auckland prior to my arrival there. They were : Nothing to be brought to the studio except ideas, Do not fall in love with anything because it will change, Three weeks time limit, Everyone contributes.

The differences between the two sessions in terms of technology & equipment were vast, instead of analogue tape we had access to two digital studio's, A digital mixing desk & an unlimited number of effects to play with. The cost would be nothing as Lindon owned the studio, the original had cost Forty pounds for the day.

Work began in studio two, where I assembled basic drum tracks along with various loops & samples to use as "atmosphere ". While Lindon finished a previous commitment in Studio One, his day job. Tracks were then transferred to that studio, where work began in earnest shaping & arranging the material. It was at this time that we began working on a cover of a track from our mutual past, a version of XTC's " Senses working overtime " such an English choice for a couple of Ex Pats living at the other side of the world ! To do this we brought in Langdon on bass & Mike on drums.

When rehearsing the song it was suggested by these two that we lose the soft acoustic guitar intro & speed it up. So a punk version of the song was born, I recall Lindon muttering darkly that he was there the first time around before launching in to a blistering version of the guitar track.

We finished in the end four tracks, plus one incomplete piece, with one day to spare. It was exciting, it had highs, lows, mutiny & lots of opinions about everything. Yorkshire people have an opinion about EVERYTHING, it did however revive that day back in Leeds, if only for three weeks.