Download a free EP from Captain Horizon containing tracks from the Radiostasis sessions.
You can download the EP for FREE from the Captain Horizon Store.
The EP contains the following tracks
- Turn Away
- El Nibre
- Climbing the Waterfall
- Strong Enough
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0 Album Recording Blog #1
I couldn’t have looked more silly if my legs were wiggling about in the air.
“Ooooooohhhhhhhhhhhhhhaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeaaaaaaaaaaaa… Ok, found it… what note is that?”
Silence greets my question. I pull my head out of the bass drum and look at Alex, who meets my gaze with the business end of his camera phone. So you recorded that, ya bastard, I think to myself. I walk over to a guitar and hum the note to myself, looking for its match on the fretboard. E flat. The bass drum resonates in E flat. To get the biggest, most booming sound I can, that’s what the new drum skins arrayed on the floor around Mez will have to be tuned to.
Alex can’t really believe it’s taking so long to tune the drums, but man is it worth it. Eventually even Mez gets bored and goes home early for a “3 course meal”, smug look on his face as he leaves me and a practically weeping Earl to finish fine tuning the drums, ready for the first new album recording session tomorrow morning. Who needs instrument techs? Eventually the drums are tuned and in place. Up go the microphones – I’m trying a new drum miking technique, aply named “the recorderman method”. It’s supposed to get a tight and punchy drumkit sound. Will it survive my idiocy? We’ll see about that. I grapple with a tape measure and enlist spare hands to hold lengths of rope for me while I place the mics. With that sorted, Alex’s bass tone takes all of 5 minutes to set, fine tune and test. We perform a little victory dance, and leave for the night to go and get a Tesco pasta meal. One course, of course. More gruel, sir?
Friday night comes and goes. Saturday morning is cold but fresh.
We’re not your typical rock band, a fact the empty streets around our studio complex probably didn’t appreciate as we pulled up before the doors even opened, early on Saturday morning. The complex owner arrived and let us in. Safely in the warm, Mez and Alex make hot drinks. I opt for a tasty red cylinder of sugar (coke) and a little red square of sugar and wafer. KitKat – Can’t Record Without One (still waiting for my endorsement money Nestle!). It’s cold in our studio, and while the electric radiator does its job Mez warms up with some paradiddles, and Alex uses the time wisely to berate friends and loved ones. Sickened by his cruel duplicity, I call the session to order. Time to do something worth doing.
I pressed record.
1 My Take on Recent Events!
Guess Who? You got it, I’m back for round 2 of the Blogging world of bloggages and the same rules apply as the last one: I WILL go off on a tangent; it’s just the way I work so you might need to read back at times. It’s the Quentin Tarantino effect lol.
I’ve been listening to a lot of music recently, well I say a lot but what I really mean is about 15 songs over and over and just when you think you couldn’t possibly listen to them over again…………………………….BAM!!!…………YOU WRONG FOOL!!! You slap them on again cuz you need to learn them but it’s no bad thing cuz they are really cool, they are the demos for the album we are currently working on. All of the songs appeared in the form of acoustic guitars, dotted in drum beats and bass notes and of course the rare pleasure of hearing Josh’s voice fronting all of them, quite lovely!
My initial thought when I heard them was, “SHIT! I’ve got lots to learn” and really, I still do. But in all honesty I thought, “my god this guy is a fucking genius” they sounded beautiful, the blend of acoustic and Josh’s vocal is really nice but the songs had words with so much meaningless meaning* (Josh will understand what I mean) to them that I didn’t think anything we do could make these songs better than they already are. *meaningless meaning = means more to the listener than the artist. I’d love to say I mean every word but a lot of the time its just a fictional encounter, I’d have nothing otherwise lol.
I’d been having a shitty day at work and we had practice on that evening which I was looking forward to but I’d been listening to these fucking songs for ages, I was anxious, I mean we’d had a go at the odd one or two to see how they sounded, but on this day I was infuriated to the core for why I cant remember (most likely them fucking retards up and down the country thinking it’s a good excuse to steal and terrorize people “cuz we don’t get no respect from dem” dick heads!) but I wanted to get it all out in the studio. Email: Really wanna play the whole album!!! Sent! Lads reply: “why the hell not?” Fucking brilliant I couldn’t wait, I was clock watching.
I got there, late as per usual but I believe so was Earl Grey (Alex) if I remember right, might’ve been Mez, anyway, we kicked off with track 2 as track 1 was one of the aforementioned and BOOOOOM!!! I felt all that fury starting to lift off my shoulders and by the time we were on about track 5 it was almost disbelief that we were doing really well for a first time attempt. The work started to become more intense, yet the ideas seemed to be flying out of every hole, ok not all of them were good but we were making good progress every time we played them. Although there were also them songs that are, what we say in the trade “bastards” only because I was/am struggling with them but rest assured little progress is still progress.
We’d been rehearsing for a while with few gigs, so we could now concentrate more on the new songs and record a rough version for referencing and where to improve blahblahblah. So back to listening to the songs but instead of JW and a computer it was Captain Horizon now, and proved very informative too. We had a little over a week before we held a “secret airing” to a few people to gain their opinions and critique so this must mean, you got it, NEW DISORDER FEST was the coming weekend.
I must say for such a small festival it was bigger than Woodstock in heart, there wasn’t an ego in sight or at least nobody was flaunting it anyway, you know what I’m like, I’m a pain in the arse but never usually an arsehole so what I mean is there was everyone pulling in to make things work for a great cause ‘Rock Against Child Pornography’ who have been doing such a tremendous job and this festival has helped project it further. I arrived to the raucous sound of me good mates Signify, which I was chuffed about cuz I thought we’d end up missing them, as it was they’d just started and they were kickin’ ass and taking names, but just seconds earlier I was greeted by a pink & purple putty tat with the same coloured hair by way of Cathy G which is always nice to see Cath but you’re missing the point she had her face painted!!! Haha, I joke but it was my calling and I had all day to ponder what I was having so after a few beers and chats with friends old and new it was approaching set time, composure is key really, but I’m a last minute kind of guy so while everyone else was setting up and his Earlship most probably ironing those hideous trousers I decided to go get me face painted. I had a lazy idea of evilness on my face and decided on a zombie to which Red Imp created in 5mins as she assured me, well it was more like 4mins 15secs so I had time to spare lol. I wont give you a rundown of the gig cuz I cant remember it all I know is it was awesome! What I will say though is when I saw Alex in them fucking trousers I didn’t think my evil face would look very evil pissing itself laughing at him all set but, composure is key you see! Pretty much everything after that set became a blur until I woke up in Signify’s van freezing cold, bad time’s man, hungover in the cold, bbbbrrrrrrr thanks a lot for the lift home Kendo appreciate it man.
Moving back to the album we had two rehearsals to practice before performing them in front of people for feedback. Mez was cacking his pants and Earl was nervous too, me and Josh however seemed to be pretty cool about it well I felt good cuz even if we did fuck up that’s the time to do it, while it’s being shot down lol. But as Sunday loomed and I’m talking like Saturday night into Sunday morning when I started to show signs of concern, but château nuef du pap!!! this wasn’t a gig, it was a critique and it was just like recording when its just me alone, but this time I wasn’t, there was people there but it was like a reverse of the recording because of the nudeness that surrounds me, I felt sick and just wanted to get it done but once I turned up I felt ok, more tired than anything, perhaps I had trouble sleeping? It started out quite badly as the 1st track came under scrutiny before we played a note but that was fine until we played a note and I came in wrong and had to start again but I laughed it off and away we go lol. It was a really good exercise as it opened our eyes to what needed doing and what was actually not as bad as we made out and ended up being fan favourite’s, so food for thought and time to get a move on cuz we’re nearing the recording dates now.
My ramble is now over for another crazy chapter, so until next time………
Its not goodbye…..
just………………….Bonjour!
0 The Song Does Not Remain the Same
I think the hardest part of writing a great song is knowing when you’ve written a great song. You’d think you would know. Sometimes you do. Sometimes you think it’s horrible and it takes hundreds of people slapping you on the face with a wet fish before it sinks in that it’s got legs.
The song, not the fish. They had their chance.
Good is the biggest stumbling block there is on the way to great. Sometimes it’s easier to go around good and strike out towards great from the safe and familiar ground of being totally shit. You might be wondering what I’m talking about. And yes, I am drinking whisky.
What I’m trying to say is, you can work on a song and make it good. You can endlessly write a more appropriate chorus, work on the perfect drum fill, put in your favourite chord shapes. And you’ll end up with a good song, pat yourself on the back, and feel like a right little songsmith.
Doesn’t mean the song’s great though. It might be insipid. It might not move a mollusc, let alone a discerning music lover. But because you can point to all the good things in it, you’re blinded to the fact it just isn’t inspiring or inspired. And conversely, a song can be shit and then suddenly make the leap to brilliant. You can point at all the ways it doesn’t work, is boring, or fails in its intent, yet for some reason it all suddenly clicks together. We’re lucky – it sometimes happens to us. I’ll let you in on a secret: I didn’t think Poker was a very good song. It was terrible for the longest time, only when Mez and Whitty performed it with such wide eyed conviction did we see that there was more to it that a workout on the bass guitar.
We’re working on songs now. Songs that started life as acoustic demos I recorded during my sojourn from work in May, while the leaves grew on the trees and the sun shone down unnoticed by me. I was in a little bedroom with recording gear and an acoustic guitar. The curtains were shut, and I was on my own. Now we’re hammering them out in the practice room, sometimes reeling off new ideas with ease, sometimes bouncing off the walls in anger and pent up frustration at the songs, each other, our own fingers…
The things I’m noticing are interesting. As we make these songs our own, they change. They become leaner, we distil them down. Songs that I thought were ok when it was me and an acoustic become forces of nature with the band pounding them out. Songs I arrogantly thought would be immense and emotional might not work at all, or prove to be flat and samey. Then one of the guys will take the song and fix it with an idea so simple or so obvious that I’d never have thought of it in a million years. More than at any point in the last few years I’m feeling a connection with my three brothers. I can’t describe how it feels to watch these guys take my ideas in their hands and actually treat them with respect, with passion, and with belief.
When I first played the other guys what I’d been working on, they were my songs. Now I listen to that CD and it sounds so boring and flat. Those songs have changed, grown up, and they’re not mine any more. They belong to the band. I absolutely cannot wait to start recording them, because thanks to Alex, Mez and Whitty I think we’ve got something special on our hands.
1 Album blog chapter 1: MENU -> ENTERTAINMENT -> RECORD SOUND.
Have you ever wondered where songs come from?
Welcome to 2011: they come from my mobile phone. At least, that’s where the songs we’ll be talking about in this blogfermented. Some became stronger, more purified and lean. Others turned to mushy mulch, wet and stinking, straight from the bottom of a compost heap.
I play the guitar at home quite a lot. Sometimes I’ll be noodling away and an idea will just fall into my head all by itself – a guitar riff, a lyric idea, a special effect that I think would be cool in a song, even just a feeling that I want to try to capture in music. And when that happens, I know I’ll forget it totally within minutes. It’s a race against time to catch it before it vanishes forever. So out comes my mobile, with its handy voice record function. I bet your phone has one too, have you ever used it? I use mine almost every day. If it weren’t for mobiles, I’d have to carry a Dictaphone round like a rogue reporter who’s never had a scoop in his whole career. I record the idea, be it 10 seconds or two minutes. Then, safe in the knowledge that the idea is safe in my phone, I forget about it. Having an idea is much easier than finishing a song – ideas are always great because of their potential. Songs are crap because you haven’t lived up to that potential.
I’ve been working like that for about 5 years. A few months ago I decided to sort through the recordings I had and try to turn the best ones into songs. Only one snag: there were 1,500 of these buggers: little snippets of the embryos that would one day grow up to be music. Oh, crap, ah’m gonna be a daddy!
But I’m nothing if not industrious (read: stupidly obsessed) so I listened to them all. I was really harsh – if I didn’t think what I was hearing was special in some way, and had potential to be a song, I’d delete it. Sometimes I’d hear an idea recorded years ago, then recorded again much more recently, with different words or a slightly different hook. Sometimes the same idea would be a recurring theme in loads of different recordings. Often I’d hear an idea that had since become part of another finished song. It took about 5 days, but eventually I had 300 ideas that I felt might, with a bit of hard work, inspiration and luck, become finished songs that didn’t totally suck.
How do 300 sound clips, probably averaging 20 seconds long, turn into the basis for a Captain Horizon album? Ideas are only one ingredient, and they’re easy – anyone can have an idea. Turning it into something good is the hard bit.
For me, the second ingredient was something very bitter indeed. The week I finished sorting through the clips, me and my workmates were called into the Bosses office at my job and told there was no work for us that month: We’d either need to take unpaid leave, or face redundancies. I left work that day facing three weeks of unpaid nothing. Some people would have looked for another job, or at least temp work to fill the time. Maybe some would have gone travelling or visited friends or at least tried to get some sunshine.
I set up a studio in the spare bedroom, and closed the door on the world.
0 Whitty’s Blog, Episode 1
Right then me old Chumley Warner’s, this is my first and most probably my last blog on here as I don’t really seem to do incredibly well with computermibobs! You will find that this blog will mainly be how a conversation with me would go, ie; I will quite often be talking about one thing and thinking of 3 others, so I WILL drift in and out of things as confusingly as I normally do and will have no real structure, so please bear with me.
First and foremost, all of what these ass hole so’ bitchiz said derogatory about my good person is bullshit! Now that’s cleared up I can persist in doing what I do best……………. That’s correct, everything ha-ha..
Well, what’s it like being the front-man of the best inventive, ballsy and most kickass band of our generation yet to be noticed then? It’s quite cool actually! It’s a rollercoaster at times, I’m always worried about my delivery though to be honest, be it in the recording studio or live at gigs, and I hate being off key, especially in the studio.
As it is I don’t really worry too much about live performances, for some reason I always seem to get a boost from somewhere, even if I’m flu’d up to the arsehole I manage to pull through un noticed. In recording on the other hand I find it very hard to get the same pulse, I don’t know why really, cuz when we’re writing the song I get to the point where the song is all I want to hear and all I want to play (there is also a point where I end up hating it too). Also, I feed off people at gigs you see, be there 1 person or 100 people, I feel its my personal mission to make them feel like they’ve seen a great show, and rightly so, they’ve just paid to come and see a night of music and they fucking deserve it, I cant stand seeing a band who stand there looking at their shoes with their dicks in their hand looking like a bunch of spare pricks at a wedding, I AM BORED NOW!!! I get that sort of thing while recording, I try my damn hardest to get into gig mode, I’ll try anything to get that Zen, like I’ll do some push-ups, jog round the block, drink hot water with lemon and sugar with countless energy drinks, wind people up, slap my own face and shout at myself to name just a few, because, I hear every little snag and glick so it really knocks me confidence when I’m hearing that absolute bullshit that comes out of my mouth cuz at that point I’m thinking I’m one of those dick-in-hand geezers, but fuck that, time to man up (see told ya I’d ramble a bit).
During the recording of our first EP it was in an old Tudorian house and I spent the night there, woke up, had breakfast, drank hot lemon and honey, and feel I really pulled the proverbial shit-storm out of the proverbial global-shit-bag because we were on a schedule and there was someone new to perform to I guess, but with Radiostasis I was alone with Watson and I felt nude. I was aware of all my mistakes, but together I think he brought out the best in me by reassuring me I was doing well. But after singing El Nibre for the 367th time I was getting restless so we downed tools and it was left for another day. I was dreading it for fear of ruining what was already sounding like a great album-to-be and there I was fucking up everybody’s hard work, but that little siesta was all I needed after having worked stupid hours over Christmas and generally feeling run down I came back like a new man after a welcomed rest, to finish off a song that never made it to the EP, hahahaha, ironic really.
Different subject while I’m thinking about it, during practice, I have a terrible case of the giggles which is usually due to someone flinging the odd BUM note in the mix be it vocally or musically, usually its Thomson, all I have to do is look at him and I fucking crack up, I really don’t know why but he proper slays me, maybe it’s the fact (to me anyway, and he’ll hate me for saying this so sorry dude) that he has a wonderful voice, I mean very well spoken, so when he curses, (to me anyway) it sounds hilarious it proper tickles me, so for a while I find myself laughing out loud, “lol” as it is most commonly known nowadays “lol”. Each one of us is a completely different person to the other, which is most probably the reason we all work so well together. I also know that I can be a reet pain in the arse most of the time but that’s just the way I am, so there.
If I’m honest with you all, there is one person who hardly ever gets mentioned as part of Captain Horizon but our Pete is an absolute hero he is the 5th member of CH as far as I’m concerned, I owe a lot to him. Like Mez (obviously) I’ve known Pete for a good 10 years and Mez is my brother, we’ve played together in all our main bands from thence.
Pete, has been a huge part of my progression as a front-man, in-fact he’s been like a guardian to me, I mean if I fall 50 feet away from Pete he’ll be there to stop me from hitting the ground hard, and shit like climbing onto the bar, I’ve got Pete to thank for that and pretty much all of my stage antics. For instance way back in Final Redemption we entered the “Ultimate Live Battle Of The Bands” competition at the “Robin 2” venue in Bilston and cuz Mez is a lefty drummer, sound guys shit themselves like their life has just folded into the depths of Satan’s gusset, so we either had to open or play first, basically if you had a lefty you had to open the show, so me being young and fiery it pissed me off, I mean its no fucking hardship to switch the kit the other way its just fucking lazyness if you ask me but that’s a different story (as I do have a lot of respect for sound guys, as long as they take pride in what they do and not just going through the motions). So Pete, to calm me down and in all competitive form said “go out there and make them follow that!” what I heard was “go out there and shit in their faces and tell them to follow that” that’s what I heard, so good as gold I went up there all full of youthful spunk and smashed it then at the end of our set I proceeded with the line “FOLLOW THAT” at the top of my lungs and I immediately saw all the other bands completely shit down their legs, the Robin 2 stunk lol. I look back now and think ‘what an arrogant little shit I was’ but I feel like if you’ve got it, flaunt it lol. Basically, Pete is mostly to thank for what I do on and off stage, he’s the one who’s always at the front giving me a bollocking for not making a show of it.
Pete has taught me a lot in this game so, Pete this part of my blog writing future I dedicate to you thank you me old mucka I love you man x
I’ve enjoyed this blog shit to be honest so I think I’ll be back soon,
Thanks for reading hope it’s not been too confusing
Peace, Love & Bananas!!!
Whitty x