This week is clearly one of reflection. That’s a good thing, sometimes. Evaluation, innit – where you are, where you might be going, sometimes a case of never knowing . . . “try as tried” the Magpie cried.
Early September 2010… I was finalizing the contents of the box-set when something struck me, a strike of light provoked by a comment dAn had made via this website about what the boxsets might contain.
It suddenly dawned on me that despite the rich and hand worked contents that had been plaguing my days for the last few weeks, nearly all was art based. The only music included was the new album and 7-inch vinyl – both of which would be available in some form or another from other sources. This would not do. Something musically exclusive would have to be included – but what?
I recalled a 15 track demo I’d given Tom, what felt like many moons ago. Selfishly, I now wanted to locate these original demos for personal reasons, the collector-come-ego-maniac within me eager to obtain copies of my own material. After all they were documents of the past, perhaps to be of interest sometime in my future – old of age, reflective and worn by memory.
A panicked and excited hunt began.
Having moved house many times, close to every 6 months for the past 10 years, there are boxes of poorly ordered pictures, paintings, notebooks, loose CDs, cassettes, floppy discs, photographs and crumpled magazine clippings all about my current home. Many more in my Father’s attic and God knows what scattered around my previous haunts come make-shift homes back in Medway.
I began the search with what I had to hand, wading through these haystacks with little hope of finding anything, though find something I did. As if luck was rewarding today’s obsession, one of the last batch of scratched unmarked CD’s that clung to an old spindle turned out to be that very same 15 track CD dAn’s comment had brought to mind. Did I actually give this CD to Tom after all?
Understandably, some of the tracks were corrupt, unlistenable stutters and skips, though enough was still intact to call this preliminarily search a success.
Rather than jumping on a train and bounding around Medway in search of more long lost CDs, I used the same means dAn had used to inspire this hunt, and fired out emails to Jay Allen, Hg, and Cale Wolf, all of whom I knew had either kept safe my material or may have acquired it through some means or another.
Before long, I had over 20 listenable tracks of unrealized material in my possession. As a fitting distraction to the making of box-sets, spurred by brief moments of surprise and nostalgia, I got to compiling Original Sins. Skeleton structures of songs and home recordings I’d long forgotten, discarded or simply damned to hell at the time, and others that by now had developed far beyond how they had started life. Of course there were some unworthy of a place in this present, but others, at least I felt, deserved to be heard by someone other than me as an old and loathsome man.
To me, a fitting breath of fresh air, a revealing naked take on the actual album, and a chance for some songs that were never even considered for the album to make a minor debut in a place where faults and flaws are more welcome than not. As the cover says, “these songs were never meant for public consumption….” but that’s why I reckon it’s important to have given them up . . . .
These first six were the only songs retrievable from the 15 track CD. It was last time I had gone to Canterbury and recorded at Delta Studios with Julian Whitfield. House Martin was briefly worked on during Chris Austin’s time with us, post Iscariot the Ladder, but the band was in the mist of internal disorder, soon to prompt our trip to New York and subsequent shift in direction, desire and line-up.
The existence of these two was unknown to me, versions that Jay Allen, unbeknown to me, had recorded from the sound desk during one of the many open mic nights I used to attend at The Barge in Gillingham. This remains the only recorded version of Bird In Tree, a pleasant discovery.
After returning from New York with fresh fire in our bellies, a week before we headed in Jim Riley’s to record a one day session that would go on to become Great Fears and Curious Predictions EP, we recorded these very rough versions during a quiet afternoon at The Barge, thanks to Jay Allen once again.
This song was first recorded just after the release of Iscariot the Ladder and was even considered for inclusion on the Matthews Magpie EP release. It was deemed unfinished and too scrappy, which I still stand by today. Lyrics that went onto appear in Beauties and Beasts made their first debut here.
The above were recorded and mixed at Cale’s house during 2009, in between recording sessions at Jim Riley’s, all except for the drum tracks which were lifted from a daytime session at Gillingham’s Sunlight Centre. As with Impossible Loss Brigade, Scare Crows and Little Treasure these are my personal experiments into the world of recording, mixing and production. The backbones of Pirate’s Wife and Scissor Kick also formed part of this same episode, though obviously the later two songs were deemed more successful, hence their inclusion on the final album. Chris Garth, of UPCDOWNC, makes an appearance on The Art of Sadness and 13:13 during the same afternoon he made his lovely contributions to Scissor Kick and Scare Crows.
As for The Crooked Man, my obsession with this poem, or should I say my reworking of it, aside from giving way to The Crooked Family concept, was originally intended to be included, in its entirety, during the crazy breakdown in Lest We Connect the Crooked Family. That never happened, but this weird spoken / shouted version remains inherent to this entire period, and so a fitting and twisted finale to this compilation.
Eventually, when it became obvious that demand for the box sets would massively outstrip supply and that time could not be spared to create further boxes, I was persuaded by Hg that we should also make Original Sins available as a “bundle” with The Pros and Cons of Eating Out – exclusively via the website. We agreed that it should retain its status as a “bonus” CD and not be available separately. The Pros and Cons is the culmination of the cruel and crooked path that we’ve trodden over the past few years and Original Sins, alongside the previously released EPs in 2009, forms the map that shows you how we got from there to here.
If you made it this far, well done, if not, no worries.
With love, THE croOKed MAN
