BRONZ

The Making of

Shaun Talks Click here!

At the very start what was later to become track 1 on the album, “Can’t Live without your love” was recorded at the Roundhouse studio as a separate session from the rest, with Pete Solley producing.

This track was the only track to be recorded to analogue tape, on a Studer 24 track two inch machine.

The band at the time only consisted of Ian on vocals, Clive on Drums, and myself (Shaun) on Guitars, the bass was played by Charley McCracken as a session, the keyboards were played by another session guy who was working at the time with Trevor Horn and Frankie goes to Hollywood, whose name escapes me!

Backing vocals were performed by Ian, Chris Thompson (Manfred Mann’s lead Singer) and myself.

The drums, bass and rhythm guitars were all recorded at the same time, with keyboards, all vocals and extra guitars being overdubbed later.

We only spent two days on this track including mixing, which was done in the mix room at the Roundhouse on an SSL desk.

However the track was recorded on a 96 input Harrison, which was the desk in the main control room at that time.

Later to be replaced by an SSL desk this was used for the rest of the recording sessions on this album.

Following the session with Pete Solley, we as a band were now a full line-up with Mickey ‘O’ Donoghue also on guitars and Lee Readings on bass.

At this point we went into writing mode for the album, working at Clive’s house in Hounslow, recording demos of the new songs onto a 4 track porta studio with me (Shaun) as the technical guy, with live drums, and only one mike and four tracks to work with!

We spent several weeks there, thrashing out various versions of the songs that we would later go on to record with Max Norman.

We wrote many more songs at that time than we recorded for the album, but we chose the ones we felt worked well together.

Following on from the writing session’s we moved into John Henry’s rehearsal complex in Brewery road London, doing pre-production for the forthcoming recording with Max Norman as both producer and engineer on the album.

We worked well with Max as we all got on like a house on fire.

It wasn’t long before we were ready to get into the studio and start recording.

We kicked off by recorded the drum tracks with the whole band playing live at the same time, including guide vocals from Ian to make working to the arrangements easier; the studio headphone fold back in the roundhouse was for that time quite revolutionary, given each person had control over what they needed to hear – by way of personal individual monitor mix controls.

We had decided to record this album digitally and as we got into the flow of things it soon became apparent that working in the digital domain whilst revolutionary for the time, was proving to be very frustrating.

It was very early days for digital recording back in 1985, in fact this was to be only the third album to be recorded digitally, as the Roundhouse studio had the only digital multi-track in Europe at that time, and that was a 3M 32 track machine. This unfortunately tended to have a mind of its own!

Many an hour or 10 was spent amusing ourselves while one of the in house technical engineers would tweak the various aspect of the machine to get it to behave as you would hope. Swapping over the input cards and the like, to get the dam thing to stop producing extraneous pop and clicks to tape, while we were recording. This was to prove to be a constant frustration throughout the whole of the recording of the album.

However we ploughed on regardless.

Eventually we had all the various Drum tracks recorded so we moved on to the rhythm guitars, this took Mickey and myself several days using various combinations of guitars, amps, cabinets and mike positions.

To make life a bit easier we would have the guitar amps in the control room so we could control them from there and run a feed down through the tie lines into the live room where the Cabs where being miked up. Mostly during the making of the album we would be in the control room while playing, it just made communication much easier with Max while we worked.

At the stage of finishing the rhythm guitars, next was bass, and Lee did as we did and worked in the control room with a feed down to the Bass rig and cabs in the live room.

Next was the guitar synth and keyboards.

The Roland 707 Guitar synth, whilst a very unique sounding and looking instrument, that features on many songs on the album, was quite a challenge to work with. It had a habit of playing notes randomly of its own accord. Mainly due to the fact that the tracking of pitch to voltage was not at this time all that you would wish for, but with the use of gaffer tape and a lot of patience we did eventually get all the parts down.

Phil Lanzon (Uriah Heeps keyboard player) and friend of the band was brought in at this stage to help out with the keyboard overdubs, using a mixture of keyboards Korg M1, Yamaha DX7, and a Fairlight amongst others, the Fairlight we had sitting in the control room the whole time.  Mostly that was used just to entertain us, we would play a sample we had of a bow and arrow going across the stereo picture, this was after all very early days of samples and sampling, so it still held enormous fascination and amusement for us.

Most of the keyboards where done by Phil but incidentally the middle section in “Figure in the dark” was played on a Yamaha DX7 by Shaun and Max during one of those all night sessions that we seemed to have got into the habit of.

During the time we were doing keyboards we moved to the Power plant (London) to carry on working with Phil, and also to record the female backing vocals on “You & Me” and “Man Girl Machine” these were performed by Stevie Lange and Suzie ‘O’list, who were brought in by Max.

It was at the power plant that Gary Barnacle did the lovely sax solo on “Carried by The Storm” and also “Man Girl machine”.

Some of Ian’s lead vocals where recorded at the town house also, most notable was the Ballard “You and me”.

On returning to the Roundhouse studios the following week, a three piece brass section comprising of two trumpets and a trombone where brought in to do overdubs on “Man Girl Machine”.

It was about this time that it became apparent that all was not well with the record company; the writing was on the wall…………………..! They basically were going down.

Things started to go missing in the studio?? Bits of gear where being repossessed, the coffee ran out the fruit ran out after it….!

The staff all looked rejected and we just had to keep our eyes on the ball at all costs.

Not the best moral booster I can tell you, but we just ploughed on with the aim to get the album finished.

It was like trying to record an album on the Titanic after it had hit the iceberg; time was now very limited.

At this point even Max stopped turning up, so I took the helm for a couple of days while Mickey did some guitar overdubs.

Fortunately after a band meeting with Max he decided to carry on (despite the raging storm).

We finished the various guitar parts, and then moved onto vocals both lead and backing.

Ian spent a week or so doing his vocals on all the songs, then we all worked on the various backing vocals that where needed throughout the album.

We had now finished all the recording, so Max had an assistant engineer join him for the mixing sessions which we as a band just let them largely get on with.

He would play us the mixes as they came up and we would all give it the thumbs up or down.

Time was running out Max had to be in the States to start his next project/album, so that was it at that point in time.

I fortunately had kept all the mixes we had to date on both D.A.T. and 1/4” tape; little was I to know at that time they would be what we ended up using many years later.

The record company as expected went into receivership, the master tapes where carted off by the official receiver at that as they say was that.

Well it was for now……………….!

For one reason, contractually or otherwise it wasn’t possible for us to get the album mastered, finished and released at that point in time.

Many years came and went, and I had been running my own 24 track commercial recording studio in the West Country near Bath called “The Kirk” at the time, until one day I had a phone call from Ian to tell me that Lee had throat cancer, and was basically dyeing.

It was that news that made me decide to finally finish the album with what I had, by digitally editing the various mixes, and compiling a finished version of the album, so Lee could hear it the way we wished it had been had it been finished and released at the time in the eighties.

It was that simple act that made me realise having finally finished the album for Lee to hear we now had an album that we could release commercially.

And that is basically where we are to date; the album was finally released on 01/01/10 which reads as 010110……….. very digital!!

So recorded digitally on a 3M 32 track multi-track, (except, “Can’t Live without your love”, recorded on Studer 24 track 2 “) then the whole album was mixed onto both D.A.T. and 1/4” transferred back to hard disc (in 2004) for editing, compiling and mastering.

So hear it is, having been “Carried by the Storm”

Bronz’s second studio album 25 years later….!

“Carried By the Storm”

A long labour of love and determination, enjoy.

Regards Shaun Kirkpatrick.