Steve Albini’s tuna dilemma

“Could you have a go at mixing some of the new Follow The Sun tracks?” asked James.

“Yes” says I, blissfully unaware that the first track is a little over 11 minutes long. It’s ok though. It’s 11 and a bit minutes of hopeful gorgeousness that sounds like Eno on a particularly good day. Also, I have a new mixing desk and I wanted to try it out. It’s a right proper posh one that has tiny weeny robots in it that push the faders for you so you don’t have to strain the muscles in the tips of your fingers. It’s a criminally under publicised issue that recording engineers suffer with severe loss of finger tip manoeuvrability when they reach an older age. Apparently Steve Albini can’t open a ring pull tin of tuna without at least some sort of assistance.

We are quite a decent way into the making of a new Twin Falls record, taking a bit of time off to play a couple gigs. One of which was a 5 minute walk from my house in Somerset - a festival run by Simon who used to play in The Chesterfields back in the day and now Design right now in this day (both good bands). It was a lot of fun and I got to walk home afterwards.

Things are going well though on the record front. It sounds very different to Slow Numb. Some songs were written from one point of view - not so much a full on story but from the voice of a character I made up, who also happens to be the last man on earth. It’s not a concept record though, it just felt like an interesting way to keep things fresh and write a little differently.

I’ve been pleased to learn that there’s new Mitchell Museum material on the way. It looked grim for a while, with them actually splitting up and then reforming. I still listen to their first record a lot. People who bought the ‘50minutes’ compilation that my old label released back in 2006 might remember track 2 being a band called After Christmas, which was (in a way) the first incarnation of Mitchell Museum. We befriended them a bit after they travelled 8 hours on a National Express coach from Glasgow to London to come play a gig for our monthly club night.
I remember a lot from that gig: the band not bringing a keyboard stand with them and realising there are no London music stores open on a Sunday. There are a lot of big department stores open though, and somewhere I have a photo of a rather lonesome looking ironing board, abandoned outside the Buffalo Bar after it had been put to clever use and thus solving the problem. I think we all ended the night drunk in a £10 a night hostel that John Kelly later described perfectly as “the Futuristic Zone from The Crystal Maze”.

They also remain the only band to ever hand us a demo with a song written especially for us. A track written about making the gruelling 8 hour trip from Glasgow to London to play our gig. They put it right at the end of the demo too, presumably to check whether we listened all the way through or not. That was clever.

Anyway, I still think they’re great. So here you are.