These last 10 years have been a wonderful time for me as a songwriter and performer. They've been by far the most productive, most creative and certainly the busiest in my life so most people who come across me now assume this is when it began but of course, there's more. I have a murkier, muckier, more experimental past that I rarely admit to. It's been easy to keep it locked away in the box marked 'musical development' partly because very little evidence of it exists but a while ago I received an email via the website from a random stranger, I guess from Scandinavia judging by their name, who found some of this rare evidence.
I've no idea who posted it on YouTube, apparently someone in Nepal but it caused a random stranger in Scandinavia to ask if they could buy a copy. Sadly none exist except for the one that hides in my personal collection and a similar copy belonging to its co-creator, David Croft, the masters lost for ever. But it made me remember that time and the making of this record in 1978. It was a great experience for the 20 year old me. I'd been signed to an indie publishing company based at the studio so we had an infinite amount of free studio time in the gaps between paying clients. Paying clients were beginning to pile up so we shared the studio with both The Police and Godley & Creme. Nobody had heard of The Police at this point but we all knew 10cc so it felt like the eye of the Rock Music hurricane. Godley and Creme had rented a huge variety of musical instruments, the studio was full of drums, guitars, synthesisers and all kinds of orchestral percussion novelty. It seemed a shame to waste them so we scattered our enthusiastic performances on all of them across our recordings, drunk on the endless possibilities.
Listening to it now it's clear that, while there were some good ideas and half decent songs, there was absolutely no overall vision or discipline so the result was mostly a mess. What we lacked was a decent producer and I began to wonder what might have been if the 70 year old me, with 50 more years of experience, could travel back to 1978 and play the part of a very mean producer who wouldn't take shit from my 20 year old self. I know this is pure self indulgence and you can't really go back and fix the past but the thought persisted so I contacted David to see if he might be interested. He's had his health challenges in recent years and he's more or less retired from music but he said he'd be curious to try. The idea is not to re-create the original recordings but to re-imagine them. To treat the original recordings as demos, take them apart, re-shape them with some judicious editing and rework, create new arrangements and new performances but keep that 70s Rock vibe.
So work has begun and I have to say I'm really enjoying the process. One of the great blessings of my off-grid career is that very few people know my work. Work by famous artists becomes the property of the fans, and the fans get angry when people mess with their stuff. I on the other hand have no such responsibilities. I can, and frequently do mess with the old stuff, re-writing and re-arranging with a free hand so here I go again. I need no forgiveness from history, I have no history except maybe for a YouTuber in Nepal and a random stranger in Scandinavia. To them, I apologise!
What a fabulous story, can't wait to hear the results!