A GATHERING REALISATION

Well, the fun has started. It has taken just over a year to put the basic songs together for Moorscape. Even now, after the lyrics and tunes have been tweaked a few times, it is not certain whether further substantial changes may need to be made to some. There was a sense of a gathering realisation in the first dry run session with Ali that there is much more to this recording mullarkey than I had imagined. I knew I would have to do several takes of the same song, but not how many. I knew there would be an element of sitting around, but not how much. And I knew that it was important to involve Kieran and Jad, but I did not know how important their skills, support, and friendship would be. Knowing all those things as I do now, and expecting further periods of delay and disruption, I feel calmer about the whole process. That is probably also a result of gaining both personal confidence and confidence in the work itself, that it may actually turn out to be at least as special as I intended it to be. After a weekend of messing about with ideas for the title track, I visited a number of music shops yesterday to find suitable percussive instruments by way of contributing to the atmosphere of the album. Ozzy is really not sure about percussive instruments. Even if we end up not using any of them it was enormous fun banging and shaking and rattling and clicking until I found one or two things that I felt fitted the bill. And tomorrow’s session is the fourth in the process, with just me and Ali this time around, and it promises to be very interesting indeed. Don’t forget to follow @DWaldeaux on Twitter – for some reason, they didn’t like the ‘r’ but such is the life of Les Waldeaux.