Once pre-production on Great Falls was complete, Rhys and the band moved into Crouch Hill Studios to begin recording bass and drums. Here’s an extract from an online diary Rhys kept at the time.
Crouch Hill, London, England
4th June 2009
Quality first day. Back in the same studio where I recorded The Fire Stairs. It’s the crypt of a church, complete with stained glass windows and faintly ecclesiastical aura. It was originally one room, plus a vocal booth. Then Thomas put a partition in to create a control room. There’s now another partition at the back of that room and the windows have been blocked off for complicated acoustic reasons. The lack of natural light is offset by the addition of some plush looking crimson drapes. Feel like you were there yet? It’s all about the observational detail.
Sam lines up his sticks
Sam’s in at 11am setting up the drums, which sound great from the off. Enjoyable use of crappy old speaker as an extra microphone on the kick drum. Had actually read about that very trick the night before in Mark Lewisohn’s seminal book about Abbey Road, ‘The Beatles Recording Sessions’, which I first read in 1987 as a Fab Four-obsessed schoolboy. I get in at 1pm, which means an epic lie-in, followed by a high-speed rush around the house to get myself ready in time. Finally get going around 3.30 ish. Mark and I are in the control room. Mark has his own special monitor supplying deafening bass frequencies that make the floor shake. After twenty minutes, he wants some kick drum in there; after forty, the snare’s in too. I can feel it through my coccyx. (Am now having a crisis of confidence about how to spell coccyx. Cock-sicks? Cocque6?) What with the volume, the temperature and the aforementioned drapes, it’s like playing a gig to one person in the VIP room of a club.
We kick off with Red. This is fitting. It’s the oldest song on the record, predating the last album, the band I was in before it and the band I was in before that band. That tune has been knocking around since the last century and the writing of verse 1, verse 2 and the middle 8 lyrics has been spread out over more than a decade. I started it on holiday in Spain, hence the line about ‘the soundless wind [blowing] sand in my face’. It’s a pretty meaningless throwaway pop song, which others have compared to Elvis Costello. Never worked with previous personnel but it sounds ripping now. We do about four or five takes, preferring number 3 for now.
Then, after several hits of Thomas’ lunatic strong coffee (Sam: “That coffee was so strong, I got an erection then cried”) we move on to Masquerade. This song’s about a year old and features this album’s signature groove: the shuffle. It sits somewhere between Fleetwood Mac’s ‘Don’t Stop’ and Steely Dan’s ‘Reeling In The Years’. It begins at the moment with a harpsichord intro inspired by (i.e. ripped off from) Now She Knows She’s Wrong by ace 90s popsters Jellyfish. The song tells the story of ladies who take their clothes off for money in what the Local Government Association wants to re-classify as ‘sex encounter establishments’. But its central theme is really the connection between sex and death as debated by everyone from Freud to Foucault to Paglia. It seems death by natural aging didn’t catch on for millions of years after life developed and it’s only when we started experimenting with sexual reproduction that we started popping off before our time. So forget the school of thought that says we want to reproduce so much because our lifespans are finite (you’re going to die soon, so you may as well get naked). It seems instead that death is our punishment for over-reaching ourselves in the pursuit of pleasure. That’ll learn us. My favourite line is ‘Now I know why it’s called the dying art of romance’. Ho ho. Don’t worry if it sounds miserable. It won’t be. The sleigh-bells and incessant la la la’s will see to that.
