Little Fish
Links
Elsewhere on the web
Latest Twitter updates
Site powered by Tumblr. Theme based on One Very Important Thought by nostrich.
Photo // 4 notes // Comments
Gaz Coombes’s gig at the Rotunda on the 9th sold out so quickly that he’s added a second night and asked us to support him. The Rotunda gigs are being organised by our friends at Oxfork, and it sounds like they’re going to be pretty special.
So we’ll be playing at the Rotunda (a small, strange room in a garden somewhere off Iffley Road) on Saturday 10th December. Tickets look like they are selling fast, but there are a few left at WeGotTickets. See you there!
Photo // 22 notes // Comments
We hit 50% funding on our Unbound book yesterday, which put us in a particularly good mood for the Wonderful launch gig (which was awesome – we’ll post more about that later…).
Miranda has been posting some updates in the “author’s shed”, which is what Unbound calls the bit of the site you can only access once you’ve pledged. But she’s away in New York this week, so we thought we’d post something instead…
Unreleased demos
At the end of 2010 we went down to Gaz Coombes’s basement to record some demos for a new album. Nobody’s ever heard them, and now that Nez has left the band we won’t be releasing them. So we’re going to post them in the shed over the next few weeks as a treat for the supporters of The Handbook. The first two are Blue Morning and Halloween Mary. If you’ve pledged, you can go and listen to them now.
We’ll be posting ten demos (or thereabouts), and they won’t be released anywhere else. Just saying. ;)
— Ben
Text // 34 notes // Comments
This is the news…
If you haven’t been following our tweets, you might not know that we’re recording our second album at the moment. I thought you might be interested in how we’re doing it, so here’s a bit of an update…
Demos
Back before Christmas we were under pressure to get an album made quickly. At the time, we didn’t know if we were going to stay with our label and they wanted to put an album out in time for a particular tour. Juju knuckled down and wrote. She finished some songs that had been in the works for a while and wrote some others from scratch. We recorded some of them as Fish Bowl Sessions along the way.
Just around the time when we were deciding where to record them we ran into Gaz Coombes. With Supergrass recently split up, he has been recording his own project in a studio in his cellar. We had a chat and he said he was up for recording some demos for us. So we crammed all the gear into his cellar (guitar amps under the stairs, Leslie cabinet in the wine cellar) and bashed out demos of three songs that we had been playing live for a while (Hollywood, Innuendo and Only A Game).
We recorded everything live (rather than one instrument at a time), and there was no chance of “fixing” parts later because we were all in the same room and the sound for one instrument would bleed into the microphone for another. If you haven’t been around recording sessions before that might not sound like a strange way of doing it, but these days it’s quite rare. The technology exists to make everything sound perfect so most people use it. That’s what pop sounds like - shiny and bland. We wanted you to be able to hear the three of us in the room, as if you were there with us.
The tracks sounded great, so we went back in and recorded another ten songs in an afternoon. When you’re recording live you can get a lot done in a day. We would play two or three takes of each song, then pick the best and move on.
Wonderful
We enjoyed working with Gaz and everyone who heard the demos loved the sound of them, so we decided to carry on and record some singles. The first single is going to be a song called Wonderful.
Wonderful started life as a Fish Bowl session called Disco Feet. Remember this?:
Juju wrote a new chorus for it, and it became a great driving rock song. We went back to Gaz’s last week to finish it off, recording a few extra bits to really make it sound huge. I even got to play Polychord on the iPad:
We spent most of the day building the ultimate handclap, ending up with a combination of live claps, 80s drum machine claps and the sound of me hitting drum skins with a big cardboard tube:
Meanwhile we got Nick Gill to make letterpress printed Fishy Paper Squares using the lyrics to Wonderful, which we sent out to the Paper Clubbers, and asked a local artist, Valeska Hykel to design some new Wonderful-themed t-shirts for us. We saw her design yesterday, and it’s beautiful. We’re going to use it for the single artwork too. If we can work out the costs, we may even make a limited edition 7” vinyl…
I can’t post the single here yet (it’s not quite finished), but here’s a video Petrus recorded of Juju and me playing Wonderful at the Drawing Room in Chesham last week:
As soon as it’s finished and we start sending it out to radio, we’ll let you know. Now that we’re independent it’s even more important that we get this song on the radio. We know we’re going to make an AWESOME album, but we don’t have squillions of pounds to spend plastering our heads all over billboards. We’re going to need you to spread the word…
The album
We’re working on the rest of the album now. It doesn’t have a name yet, but it already sounds exciting and great. Juju has written 16 quality songs, and we’ll probably end up with 12 or so on the album, and maybe a couple of B-sides. We’ll keep you posted…
— Ben
Video // 3 notes // Comments
Recording Little Fish demos with Gaz Coombes
We went over to Gaz’s place to record demos of 11 new songs in 2 days (!!!), and this is a little snapshot of how it went. Ever seen Juju play the violin…?
