Blackburn Sessions 2017

Following from the release of West we were very excited to move onto the next thing. During this time Brendan had to step away and another good friend and mental-multi-instrumentalist Oli took up the mantle of bassist. Oli is a special kind of musician and was brimming with new ideas. We got to work on our next set of tunes and Jon arranged for us to spend a weekend at Blackburn farm down in the Scottish borders. Joe drove up and joined us as our sound engineer / producer. We didn’t have any complete songs before we went to the farm so there was some feeling out involved.

If you’re weak don’t bare your fangs (AKA Fangs)

This was the half formed song. I had written it but we hadn’t finished learning it at the time. We just jammed it out a few times and ended up splicing two recordings together to make the final track. In particular the triumphant ending was something that sort of just happened, we all got caught up in the moment and I remember being very surprised at the notes my fingers were playing during the guitar lead section. This song continued to evolved over time and is a firm favourite of all of ours. Specifically, it is usually the first one we play after a long time apart. Here’s a performance from the Meridian launch gig.

Powertoke

This is the song that was not even a song before we went to the farm. Brendan had written this absolutely incredible stoner-rock bass groove that we sometimes jammed, we decided to play around with some ambient stuff and then transition into this. The fun part initially was us messing around, Gaz and Ali were both playing Ali’s kit and I had an ebow which I was using on my guitar whilst changing a harmoniser pedal to create a strange auto-tune style melody. I think this one also ended up being two parts smushed together but both performances were very raw and were chosen from just a handful of takes. We ended up making a music video for this one as Joe had actually got footage of us playing the takes that we ended up using in the recordings. This also prompted us to start applying loads of overdubs and having fun with it. A lot of fun and another crowd favourite emerging from confluence of a bunch of friends having fun on an old farm.

Without going into too much detail the other track we recorded on Blackburn Sessions was Defbones. Named for its excessive use of what we call “the Deftone’s chord” (11th). Such a good chord. This one was also very fun to play live as we would get incredibly intense at the end, something becoming a bit of a theme with us.

Joe once again knocked it out of the park with this project and did so much work that we are incredibly grateful for. The entire weekend was absolutely magical and featured many fun hangs as well as making music, including Gaz getting obsessed with finding the source of a dripping tap, orchestrating an army of cows and arguing over who would have to sleep in the creepy “someone for sure died in here” room.