‘I heard all things in the heaven and in the earth. I heard many things in hell. How, then, am I mad?’
The tell-tale heart, Edgar Allen Poe
In the little room in the loft… Meditation was not yet a weapon in my war against insomnia… I lay there anxious about it sometimes – most times. It might have been a fear of the dark – the dimmed light in which I hid suggested so. My mind seemed to go into over-drive when engulfed in the colour of nothingness. The room started creaking, and a cacophony of thoughts swirled around me. For fucks sakes. Leave me alone.
At about 1.30am, in the little room in the loft, I set up the 4 track and hyper aware of the folks that slept in the floor beneath me, I quietly strummed a chord progression into the mic. I had no idea at the time of time signatures – turns out it was 3 beats per bar. Sarb said so. Course it was.
In the rehearsal room, Sarb was all over it. He added swagger. He allowed us the opportunity to strut a few steps before he launched into action and cleared the path for his beat to take centre stage. And on Ghost story, his signature hip hop-infused, intricate yet ferocious, hats and crashes were born.
In the little room , I hummed words out. Melody lines were consistent with swirling thoughts and the fear of falling in to the surrounding darkness.
‘Tuning is a problem’ my mate rav told us when we tried to record this in his house. Me and sarb and tom looked blankly at eachother… this is just what it’s meant to be like we said. You gotta be in tune he said. ‘Is it? Ok. We’ll see what we can (be bothered to) do’.
In the rehearsal studio, when Tom plugged in his Les Paul clone, his first stabs at putting down his guitar parts were unsuccessful. We wanted more from him. As we ask of eachother from every song… He needed to be better than he had been. Sarb and I prodded. Tom resisted and then relented. He went again and again. Tom doesn’t get angry, he quietly seethes. He seethed quietly. And then he violently let rip a swirling all engulfing lead guitar that wrapped it self around the song. His knowing smile meant he didn’t need anymore prodding. He was done. We didn’t prod anymore. ‘Cos he was.
We left the gig deflated. We wanted more. We’d seen a band better us. That never happened. They had evolved songs. We wanted more than the high octane punk songs we were thrashing out on stages. We weren’t making songs like the ones that we loved. Upto that point we were just releasing energy and caught up in the excitement of being in a band, living our dream. So, Ghost story evolved. Painstakingly we tore it up, and put it back together. It became a journey, and followed a similar path to the one we now found found ourselves walking.
In the little room, I pressed stop on the four track. Dawn was beckoning, and the darkness retreated. The swirling had stopped. In the silence I lay down and put myself to sleep.
