Brain boxing

Day Off! so… i did this -

…and some other stuff. Fake Problems are a band from the USofA and they stayed at my house a couple of weeks ago. I unfortunately missed them play due to work, however this didn’t prevent me from staying up all night attempting to complete The Legend of Zelda: Twillight Princess with them, eating toast, sipping on rum, ringing every cab company i knew in Brighton to locate a missing blackberry (TM) and watching Transformers (I know, i know, you’re thinking, “he really couldn’t have shown them a better time if he tried”). They really were a lovely bunch of chaps, they liked my LHC tattoo, at one point i was declared “the funniest man i’ve ever met” (unfortunately i found out later this man hadn’t actually met anyone before) and they liked some of my drawings so they asked me to do a t-shirt for them. I obliged as you can see from above.

uh. I think that’s it.

no it’s not… my friend Alex Curtis sent me an email. yes! she’s a good one. Hi Alex! i’ll reply in a bit. :)

Break

Long time no see!

Illness definitely has its benefits, these are as follows – watching Twin Peaks (although the delirious, weird and quite scary dreams you get from passing out halfway through episodes are quite unwelcome), watching the Jeremy Kyle show, having dinner cooked for you and, of course, updating websites. Nothing but fun.

Without further ado, i will get on relaying information to you that you WILL find interesting. ok!

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THE NORTH POLE
Our CD, ‘Expostion Vol. 1′ is now done! This we did all ourselves. Burton recorded the drums the same time i did mine for the Hot Damn 7″ (more on that later!)… here is an exciting shot of him ‘laying that shit down’ -

He’d probably just done another first take. the wanker. I also have some more high quality shots from that session, here are our fantastic recording help team duo, Tom and Heli Cook, go team! -

ANYWAY. the rest of it we did over the rest of summer in short bursts stretched out over a pretty long time. We’re all real happy with how it’s turned out. I think Luke and I are getting better at this recording malarky and we managed to not balls it up in the mix. hooray for us. If you’d like to hear a song, gp to The North Pole page on the At Home site -

HERE!

YEAH! It’s not that bad is it? So… we decided we wanted to do some nice packaging for this one, cue a collaborative effort between Luke and I on the over-arching concept of the band, much discussion, cutting and pasting, photocopying, screen printing of recycled cardboard sleeves in freezing temperatures with the well-oiled machine of Luke, Burton and I, tearing up of nature journals (thanks booth, again) folding, stamping, midnight vigils, pie-charts, graphs and projections and here we have it -

Lovely. These will be available from us at gigs or if you’d like one in the post then email athomemusic@gmail.com and we’ll organise you paying and us posting. To celebrate the joy at having finally done this, we’re playing some musical concerts, these are as follows,

- Sun 23rd Nov @ The Prince Albert, Brighton – Git Some (U.S.) + Attack! Vipers! + The North Pole + The Quarry.
http://www.myspace.com/punkerbunker
- Wed 26th Nov @ The Fighting Cocks, Kingston – Smalltown (Swe) +Southport +The North Pole + Serf Combat.
www.myspace.com/elguapopromo

Come! It’s science! next up….

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THE STEAL
Have had some activity in the last few weeks, incredible, we don’t even get out of bed for at least 3 grand these days. Luckily Radio One is bloody loaded. Yes, that’s right, radio one, fantastic.
We recorded a session for the Punk Show last thursday and it was a lot of fun, even more so compared to our last experience there… bleeding throats and sssstressssss….
This time around rather than being sloppy and under-rehearsed we took the precaution of learning the songs before doing the session and having at least one member (dave doesn’t count) who wouldn’t make any mistakes, cue John Wright (of The Don Ramos Players fame) on second guitar. He did a sterling job and put up with our extreme unprofessionalism (i’m certain that’s not a word). The list of our unprofessionalism will now be bared for all to see -

• Despite knowing about it for maybe at least a month, we still only managed to get together the night before to practice 5 songs.
• We all forgot to ask John if he could do it until a week or so before, i think we assumed ‘he’d just know’
• I was using my drumkit which hadn’t been touched for 2 years, just gathering dust in Dave’s childhood bedroom.
• Lindsay had absolutely nothing to use that belonged to him for the practice or session.
• On the way to our practice the night before i forgot to pick up Pavey. Yes, i forgot the singer.
• Whilst setting up my drums for said practice i realised i’d forgotten my cymbals.
• After breaking a part of my kit, i said i’d remember to get my spare when i went home. I forgot to do this.
• To prepare ourselves for the long day ahead we spent up until 3 in the morning driving around kingston, then sleeping in the un-heated drum ‘n’ bass section of banquet records. fresh.
• Remembering my forgotten ‘broken drum bit blunder’ we spent the journey there looking for an open drum shop to rectify the situation, also so I could sneakily avoid any ‘what? richard has no drumsticks? blunder’
• When we got there, (only 10 minutes late!) I remembered another 3 things I’d forgotten.
• Pavey, still not knowing the words to the songs, had print outs of the words, unfortunately we found out after recording the session they were pre-edit versions of the lyrics and many were wrong.
• Whilst being asked about our new album in an interview we manage to a) barely answer the question and b) within seconds to get into a lengthy discussion about what constitutes a ‘party of hornets’. answers in comments please.
• Don’t even ask pavey about his descendents tape…

Apart from that we were slick, we were tight, we managed within an hour of getting there set up and nail four songs. Which the engineers found “impressive”, they also said we had a “solid session” and one of our songs was “catchy”. We recorded the following songs – The Angles & Fashionless (medley of sorts), Disconnected, Dave Gets Mad and Got Ideas.
We are overall extremely pleased with how it turned out and 95p for a baked potato in the canteen? go BBC! After all that blethering from me, you can go listen to it for yourself on the Radio one website. Myself and the others are extremely grateful to Mike Davies for asking us to do the session, it’s an amazing thing to be asked to do… I mean recording in MV4?! come on.

After that intense bout of activity you’d think we’d go and have a lie-down. Well… we did. Then pavey got up and and did this -

I can’t bothered to re-iterate what Pavey has already said so here it is,
“Hello Friends,
I have just updated our big cartel merch page with a new glow in the dark tshirt design. The design is going to be printed to order on the 2nd December and is available to pre-order for 2 weeks until the 1st December. After that the screen will be cleaned and the design wont be reprinted. Rich drew it and I’m going to print it. I’ll even throw in a few goodies with the first few orders. The Shirts are white American Apparel shirts in Xs,S,M,L,XL and the print will be a greenish blue and glow in the dark. They will be shipped in time for xmas. They cost £8 + £1 p&p.”
You’re going to get one right? I mean GLOW IN THE DARK! how good is that? I suggested it as a joke but he’s bloody well going and doing it isn’t he… what a man.

Righto, although I haven’t covered everything I wanted to i think that’s probably enough for now don’t you think? I’m going to go eat some garlic, wallow and sleep. Hopefully you’ll find something as entertaining to fill your time with.

bye bye.
x