Volume II Side B

Volume II Side B of the Band of Georges.

These are songs composed by George in January 1983. They were recorded in his bedroom at 31 Cowick Lane, Exeter, in 1986.

We did not wish to fiddle with these recordings too much. The audio was lifted straight from cassette and simply normalised to 0 dB.

Having written these songs more than four decades ago, and having not heard these recordings for at least the last three, we asked George to make a comment on each of the songs.

Here is what he had to say regarding Volume II Side B of the Band of Georges.

“We used to listen to a lot of music on vinyl albums at this time. A whole vinyl album would – nearly always – fit onto a single side of a 90-minute cassette. When you were recording it, you’d flip the record over at the end of Side 1 then carry on with Side 2. I always thought of these cassettes I made as being like one whole album per side, rather than being a double album. The first half or so of the tape would be Side 1 of the LP, so that would begin right here.”

A Slightly More Optimistic Meteorological Outlook: This one was rather ruined by that weird vocal harmony. It would have sounded a whole lot better without it. There was nothing wrong with the idea, but it would have needed to be much further back in the mix and mixed with other, different harmonies as well. Probably easiest would have been to not actually have it there at all. I quite like the chords though, and the different guitar parts in the lead department.

I Want: This is hard to listen to! Therapy for my 16-year-old aching soul. Written on the date of my sister’s seventh birthday, apparently. Probably after she was in bed. Yes, it was a struggle. This was an attempt to draw the poison from my soul, I never offered this to a band. I quite like the Electric Mistress on the guitar. It sounds… cold.

Non-Lens Contact: This is also hard to listen to! This is a stupid song. Even the title is stupid. That should say it all, really. There’s a track of blapping! Ha, I’d forgotten about that! And a jar of Simon’s mung beans! This has a lot of redundancy in it, especially in the words, but then, if you took it all away, there would be – well, nothing. I somehow manage to use up a lot of airtime saying nothing at all. Bizarrely, Rough Terrain were going to do this. I’m not sure if they ever included it in a live set in the end. Written on the same day as I Want, apparently. I don’t really think much of this, it’s a poor effort.

“This would end Side 1 of the vinyl LP Volume II Side B of the Band of Georges, and Side 2 would begin from here.”

One Day: The very first time I attempted to play slap bass! Some compression would have helped but it’s not too bad. The whole vibe of this song is rather good. Funky! B minor, both Ibanez guitars playing rhythm together. Oh no, our cat! I’d completely forgetten! Haha, I shouldn’t laugh really. Kinda funny to appear in the song like that. Poor Lucky, she was squashed by a lorry on the main road outide our house. She’d lived at the end of a sleepy cul-de-sac in Sidmouth for a few years before we moved to Cowick Lane, one of the busiest roads in exeter, with traffic thundering past at all hours of the day and night. A strange memory and a dear little pussy cat. We kept one of her kittens, William, and he lived to be a ripe old age.

I Hate You: Oh, this was fun! A good old punk song. Not as serious as the title sounds. The lyrics may be true, but this was not at all serious. Some people are just… never argue with an idiot, a wise person once said. Life is really too short. I seem to recollect that the guitar was one take and I had no idea what I was going to play in the instrumental break, then I probably laid down the bass. The vocal was recorded last and was most probably also the first take. It’s not too bad, this.

I Don’t Care Now: I remember how this song seemed to grow at me from the Tascam as I recorded it. There didn’t seem to be much to it when I started with a guitar and bit of paper with the lyrics, but by the time it was done it seemed to me like a pretty decent song. None of the bands I was ever in took it, but I still quite like it. The message is positive, although there may be more than just a little bravado at play here. Many years later when I was able to be in touch with the girl who was so suddenly taken hundreds of miles away by her parents, she told me how she had felt about the whole situation. It was wretched for her as well, poor girl. Life is brutal sometimes. I believe this is the very first time I recorded a song using Van-Halen-ish two-handed tapping.

Four: This felt like quite a special song when I wrote it. I’d had this strange dream that came in four parts, and tried to describe the four parts in the four verses of the song. It felt like it needed to have an epic scale to it and was probably the first proper progressive rock song I ever wrote. There’s an interlude of sorts, where everyone leaves the stage so the guitar can describe some strange scenery, and then the song carries on at a higher tempo with a heavier feel. Wud took it on, but Ken didn’t like it much, although some of my friends thought it was a classic. Ha! I remember being disappointed by this recording. The level of the piano isn’t very good, maybe I’d had to record it on a low gain or something, perhaps there was other stuff going on at the house at the time that meant I had to do that. Or maybe I just didn’t really know how to set the mic and made a poor job of it. Phasing perhaps. There’s also a massive hiss on the vocal mic, I wonder why? Low battery in the (Selmer Scintillation – Ed.) reverb unit? Dodgy cable? Normally I found in mixing that a certain amount of constant hiss was tolerable and turning a channel on to suddenly introduce a bit of hiss before the part started was a distraction for the listener. In this however, the hiss was so bad I turned the channel off when there was no vocal. If this was written on January 24th in 1983, that must have been the same weekend that Marc first took me to his place at Willow View. Simon was with us too, and that was the very first time I ever met Marc’s Dad, Speedy Pete, and Sammi, who was just a little two-year-old toddler at the time. It was just a day or two after Pete’s wife’s 21st birthday, she’s Aquarius like me, and a very early one. She gave us some of her birthday cake and there weren’t enough cups to go round, so I had a cup of tea in a jam jar!

That ends Volume II Side B of the Band of Georges. Volume III Side A is next.