Trashin' The Beeb

Tuesday, Mar 24th, 2009 - by Michael McKeegan

Another busy day today. Andy is straight up to Cool FM to do an interview and play an acoustic song or two whilst Neil and i go drop one set of equipment and then pick up another set of gear for our radio session. All goes smoothly and we're set-up and ready to rock come 1pm. It's basically a 'live' session, we play the tunes, the guys record them straight to DAT, no retakes, no overdubs and no mixing. Pretty exciting and its really brilliant to be able to finally play the new songs in a live setting, especially as they are sounding great. To say we're excited about the forthcoming tour is a bit of an understatement!



Pretty soon we have "I Told You I Was Ill" and "Don't Try" recorded to our and the engineers satisfaction. The room we're recording in is huge(normally used for TV sets etc) so there's a lovely natural ambience which comes through on the recording. The last track is a new idea we've been jamming called "Treacle Feet" and we goad the Beeb engineer to "go wild" on the panning effects as we record it.



After a couple of run throughs we feel we have a good enough version to use and we head back out to the mobile studio to hear the playback. All sounding good and lively with "Treacle Feet" sounding particularly 'trouser flapping' as Andy puts it. In fact i got so excited i managed to lean against a small flimsy leadge/table bolted to the wall which gave way in a totally unintentional fit of punk rock aggression. Bloody mdf…

The sessions was also filmed by the good folks at Bandwith Films so expect to see some footage of us up there soon…rumour has it you'll be able to hear the session on the ATL show on BBC Radio Ulster next Tuesday but let me confirm that one first…

Mikehellx

ps. many thanks to everyone who made the logistical end of these past days happen…James,Jimmy, Cj, Rory, Charlie, Russ, Robyn, Willy and Bernard.

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