Category: Dry The Life EP

I like to think that after many years of using technology in my business I am reasonably tech savvy. So I’m capable of managing a WordPress blog, reasonably good with social media, delivering Periscope broadcasts, and messing competently with video cameras and semi-complex Powerpoint presentations. But there are days when the whole house of cards comes tumbling down, and last Thursday was almost one of them.

The Dry The Life video came about largely because I’d been in Salisbury to film a factory operation for the day when the fully charged battery on my previous video camera decided to refuse to work. Being just five years old, its batteries were obsolete in Salisbury so I had little choice but to buy a new camera to complete the filming project. I could I suppose have spent half a day trawling the internet to find a shop in Bristol or somewhere, but time is money.

So stuck with a new camera, it was important to get maximum use out of the thing. It seemed appropriate to film as much of the making of the Dry The Life EP as possible, so that’s what we have done and it has taught me a few things. Once you get into the process of recording you tend to forget the camera is there, apart from when you need to change the battery. So that has led to a video account of the natural and intuitive way in which Ali and I seem to work together.

Before I became serious about writing and recording songs in the last year or so I imagined a recording process would be tense, fraught, and packed with conflict. But while I was reviewing some footage last night, I realized that we have actually been filming the second part of the development of a close friendship. For that reason, it feels very special and the right thing to have done.

Filming has also helped us to remember some of the more technical parts of the recording process, stuff that will never be aired but that will enable us to repeat procedures that we may otherwise forget. It also teaches a musician about posture for pending live performances, and for me has shown that almost anything is possible when you are working with the right people.

So I had been happily taking all this footage and transferring the video files to my MacBook after each of the recording sessions, until the MacBook decided it had had enough. One morning while hard at work for the day job I found the thing was not doing things at quite the speed I had been accustomed to, and so committed to buying extra hard drives to store some of these enormous video files. Then I found I couldn’t format and partition the hard drives as instructed, and needed Ali’s knowledge and help to put that right. It’s when someone of his experience finds it hard to fathom a problem that you know you are really in trouble!

Eventually, he was able to partition the drives and sussed out enough to be able to move files across, a process I now have to repeat for about 40 videos. Yeah. I know. Stupid! 40 videos was always going to slow down my machine, but I hate technology just about as much as I love it so I tend to avoid dealing with the bad stuff on the basis that “it will sort itself out”. At some stage there will be a video compilation of The Making Of Dry The Life, but we have to concentrate on the music first and have a few exciting and different things planned. You will of course read about them first on here.

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The conversation went something like this…

ALI: “You know, you are really good at writing about political stuff, nature, and things like that, but I want to see what happens when you write a song about something emotional”.

JOHN: “Oh alright then”. That evening, back in February, I wrote the lyrics to SHE CRIES and the following week I put together the tune.

SHE CRIES is about women whose partners take them for granted, and how sometimes it can lead to the heartache of a break up, or it can lead to mistrust or damage to the relationship in other ways. The song was originally going to be about women who have to find shelter and safety away from an abusive partner, and how the law fails them. There have been several disturbing cases of abuse in the Manchester area in the last few years, and one in particular that led to the murder of a young girl with a baby son and a whole life ahead of her.

It might just have been possible to shoe horn the original idea into The Breeding Ground Of Vile album for next year, with an emphasis on the failings of the justice system as government cuts take a tighter grip on public services. Then I thought about the different levels of abuse that mainly women have to tolerate in relationships, and that led me into different territory. So SHE CRIES is a sad song and unlike many of the others that I have written, which do tend towards protest and the constant but vitally important fight against injustice.

Yesterday, 25^th August I arrived at Ali’s studio to find him stressed out over potential technology failure. I hadn’t had a great morning myself, with a whole pile of work trying to get in the way of our agreement to sit down and talk through the structure and mood of the song over a cup of either ginger tea (because he is now hooked) or Moroccan mint tea (because I’m now hooked on that instead). Four hours later we had nailed the song. It was as if the session took our heads away from the earlier stresses, and gave us a keener focus.

There are contributions to be had from Emma and Kate, and possibly others, but essentially SHE CRIES is all but complete. For me, the most difficult thing was to get the vocal melody right. I’d had one in my head for months that sounded too much like the song that follows it on the EP, so one of the tasks for the day was to try out a few vocal lines to see what worked. Ali left the room to make our respective cups of tea and came back five minutes later to hear me singing the melody we then used. Job done. And that’s how the rest of the day panned out. I will share some of those stories another time, but we did some special stuff on the day that we can never reveal. Mystery is good, and secrets are better. Ha!

The DRY THE LIFE EP will comprise seven songs and will be available later in the year.