Wednesday, May 09, 2007

Unknown Quantity

So as I mentioned a few weeks ago I've been listening to our old Unknown Quantity CDs again. For those that don't know, Unknown Quantity was the name of the band I was in at school. Ever since I was young I was fascinated by the guitar and eventually I started going to a guitar group class after school in Bromsgrove. Unfortunately I was only 10 at the time and I had a full-sized classical guitar so my hands were far too small so I got really frustrated and mostly just messed around with my friend. Once I was going to KES my parents made me take classical lessons which I hated so I never practised. Grade exams were a major stress and eventually I failed grade 2. Initially I thought this was the end of my guitar "career" but a few years later one of my friends at school took up the electric guitar and began playing during lunch periods in the class room. Suddenly I realised that playing guitar didn't have to be about studying and learning pieces I had no interest in. I went back to my classical and with the help of "the internet" I started learning chords and spent a week or so moving from one to another until it became second nature. Two of my friends, James mentioned that he played the drums and Phil subsequently took up the guitar. In a few months we were sitting around and James said "so I suppose we should have a band practice then" and Unknown Quantity was born.
Eventually we found a permanent bassist in another friend, Raj. A little over a month later we were playing our first gig.

The gigs came every so often but over the summer we concentrated on writing our own songs. Thankfully we had Phil, who in addition to being a fantastic singer was fairly adept at writing songs. At the end of August 1998 we booked into Junction 7 studios in Great Bar for three days to record our first CD, The End EP. The name was us trying to be clever as it meant our first releaes would be called The End. We bought 200 CDs and actually managed to sell about 2/3 of them and so the following summer we returned with more ambitious songs for four days. This time around the name caused us some problems. We rejected naming it after a song and other titles suggested were Funky Monks (after the sound engineer Dennis suggested that the backing vocals on the first track sounded like monks) and Snake: 357 (during the recording we were getting our first experience of Snake on the Nokia 5110 and 357 was our best score). It's a good job we didn't go with that 'cos 357 is a rubbish score. Eventually we settled on The Blue EP after the cool (and at the time unusual blue colour of the writing side of the CDs). The gigs kept on coming including one at The Flapper & Firkin the day before Idlewild played there. We also made it into the NME gig listings. A few years ago James and I worked out the tracklist for a "greatest hits" CD and amazingly, the two EP names came together to give The Blend - perfect. The tracks from The Blend are available to download by clicking the links below.


The way things used to be
The first track on both The Blue EP and The Blend is a pretty short track. Phil left recording the vocals until last to get a more rough, raspy tone and the backing vocals over the second verse and outro were described by Dennis as sounding "like monks". I'm still happy with the funky wah-outro.

Simple minds
A track from The Blue EP that came together from two different ideas - the rocky intro and chorus and the palm-muted verses. The backing vocals and extra guitar overdubs were a result of our experience recording The End EP. This is one song where I'd really like to go back and record a different lead track - more subtle during the verse and faster during the solo. To those that are interested, the effect on Phil's voice in the chorus came from a Zoom 505 pedal with BL-distortion at a gain of 1/30. So, even those cheap multifunction pedals got some use.

Receipt
This is the big one. One of the first songs we wrote. Whilst Phil wrote the lyrics for all the other songs, I pitched the main lyric for this one - If life came with a receipt would you take it back? (at Selly Oak station, 1998). This actually became a fan favourite early on and is still a very good song. When recording The Blue EP we recorded a new version of Receipt with more overdubs and keyboard, but it didn't sound as good as the original - even with the mysteriously loud drum beat at 3.40'.

Nearly
People can say things that ruin songs. My roommate at Trevs told me that someone had ruined the Radiohead song Lucky for him by getting him to associate the line "I'm on a roll" with Thom Yorke standing on a giant loaf of bread. For us it was Dennis with some of his takes on our songs' lyrics. "Nellie? Who's Nellie?" he asked after hearing the chorus of this song where Phil bellows out "Nearly!" A finger picked opening leads to a nice 3 chord progression. I'm still happy with the solo although I should have been more adamant that it be turned up in the mix. "It's REM-like" said Dennis - "needs more balls" says I. We added more to the song afterwards and I still love the non-linear fashion of it.

Without You
This resulted from Phil and James messing around. Phil was playing Climbing up the walls by Radiohead and James kept telling him to "go higher" resulting in the A-D-E-G chorus sequence. This is one of the tracks that underwent the biggest transformation in the studio. Dennis encouraged us to break away from the same sound all the way through the record and as such we played around a lot with this one. The start is the result of hitting the body and necks of our guitars with everything from our hands to coins as well as the use of a Ugandan thumb piano that Phil's sister had lent to us. The lazy-dreamy lead guitar uses a heap of reverb whilst the overdriven guitar effect that comes in on the chorus was achieved by James lying on the floor and plugging in my guitar just as I played the chord. It took a lot of takes as I kept moving my guitar and it's only just occurred to me that it would have been a lot simpler to plug the other end of the lead into the amp instead. Finally the snare drum was given an echo which gave the impression of bats flapping around your head. Thankfully, we learnt to achieve most of these effects when we played live. It's under 3 minutes, but it's almost the perfect angst-song about loss.

Is it real?
After The End EP we took it easy on new songs and by the time we played the Farce & Firkin this was the only thing we had come up with. It's a playful pop song with a catchy start-stop rhythm part. The lead part almost wrote itself, but by the time it came to record the song for The Blue EP I still hadn't completely figured the solo. The one you hear on the CD is largely improvised and ends with a nice harmonising with the bridge-lead part. Unfortunately, for the life of me I can't remember how to play this at all.

Set on you
I longed for us to come up with a song or cover whereby when we played live Raj and James could start off and then I would come on and join in and then finally Phil would arrive. Instead we used the This Life theme as our opening to every gig. The verses of Set on you are based around a chord progression from that theme and the Fraggle Rock-esque chorus came from an idea I had floating around. Dennis' comment: "I will sit on you? What?"

R-song (remix)
This was the first song we wrote together. Phil had come up with the chords and lyrics and at one band practice we tried playing along for about 10 minutes and then pouring over the results listening for parts we liked. Amazingly, the first bit of lead I played was a hit (although it took me a while to remember what I'd actually played). The song became known as Our song as it was the only song of our own and later shortened to R-song. However, at this point we didn't have a bassist so when we played our first gig we simply played the song without bass. When we tried it in the studio it simply sounded wrong and anaemic without the bass so Dennis suggest we loose the drums and make it lo-fi. As a result James recorded a tambourine track and the lead was heavily compressed and lowered to create a very dreamy texture hence the (remix). Unfortunately, Dennis decided to fade the song out despite the fact that it had an ending. There are a lot of other songs that do this, but it's something I don't like - if a song has an actual ending, then let us hear it.

Back on track
There are some songs that have a moment - a split second where the hairs on the back of your neck stand up. The bit in Fix you by Coldplay where the drums and piano come in on the outro is a good example. Back on track is the song on The Blue EP that has our "moment". At 2.19' the smooth overdriven guitar chords make way for a return to the picking melody of the intro, but heavier complete with the pacing drumbeat. That makes no sense, but you'll understand when you hear it. James and I spotted (heard?) the potential when we were listening to one of the many run-throughs and worked on making it really stand out. In the studio, Phil decided to add the keyboard parts that we'd never really heard as a part of the song and, unlike the remix of Receipt, they worked really well. The end of the solo has got one of those "what happened there?" moments where the note is cut and then reappears as a harmonic. When planning set lists for gigs we always put Back on track after several quieter songs as it was a way of getting back on track with the heavier songs. One of my favourites.

The End
Title track from The End EP and in my opinion a bit of a mess. How I know that is because most of my lead part was improvised from basic ideas. Lyrically too I don't think this was among our best. The thing I do love though is Phil's guitar tone. The studio had an old Marshall 4040 stack, but Phil had just acquired a Marshall jtm610 - a 60w valve amp with 3 10" speakers. We nicknamed it "the big one" as it was absolutely massive. In the lull after the first chorus you can hear it sustain the rhythm guitar before it suddenly roars back into life at 2.08 - one of our favourite "moments" from The End EP.

Touch
This is the song that shows how far we'd come in the year since The End EP. Although Phil had the first ideas for the song in 1998 (I first heard the basic idea after the ridiculous "challenge of management" course we went on). Over the year it evolved with James creating the drums from a sequencing program we bought for him. Although we used minidisc to carry the track to the studio we had to use the old-fashioned 3.5mm jack cable to get it on and off the MD in the first place so we were a bit anxious about whether it would be good enough quality. Thankfully Dennis gave it the thumbs up and we were in business. Originally there was supposed to be a slide guitar part over the second verse, but the action on our guitars was too low and it just sounded awful. The remnants of this can be heard behind the "I am there" line. Dennis nearly (Nellie!) ruined the song again by saying "Posh girls don't say 'I'm cuming,' they say 'I'm there'" - thankfully I managed to get past that. The lead part in the second verse is based on REMs Drive the unfortunate triangle beat at the end (which we hated pretty much straight away) was our homage to OK Computer. Even the "yip-yip-yeah"s are likeable and the effect on Phil's voice is a "bathroom reverb". This song is by far my favourite - it sounds different and adventurous and for once I was actually fascinated by the lyrics. Depending on how you read them the song takes on radically different tones. Taken at face value the lyrics such as "I would reach for the sky, but I couldn't touch you" conjure up the impression of a love song, but if you dig a little deeper, it can also take on a much creepier interpretation as a song about stalking; "when your world falls apart...I am there." I guess the meaning depends on your outlook, but I frequently flit between the two ideas.

Fade Away
This was Phil's pet solo project. He wrote and performed it himself and was keen to use multiple vocal tracks to harmonise which led to much more on The Blue EP. In fact, when playing live, the rest of the band sometimes joined the audience for this song. Dennis' comment to the line "You shattered my fears" was "what was that? You shat on my face?"...


There are so many more memories - manhandling Phil's "big one" around (it was the heaviest thing known to man), arriving at the Bromsgrove battle of the bands (with James covered in Disney plasters) to find most of the crowd consisted of people wearing hoodies with slogans such as "I am the god of fuck" and thinking "oh dear...", meeting the PA guy at a gig who introduced us to his assistant whose first contribution to the conversation was to break wind very loudly (we may have gone to KES, but we weren't above fart jokes), the really nerdy time vs rock graphs we use to draw when planning set lists (OK this was normally me and Phil) and that's before all the tales from the studio such as Phil walking through Birmingham with £400 in his shoes (Dennis wanted cash payment and Phil was afraid of getting mugged) and the time we first went to look around the studio; Dennis told us that he had helped other bands out and gave us the example of a band who had the lyric "there's a knock at the door" followed by a few snare drum hits. Dennis told us he'd convinced them to change the lyric to "there's a door at the knock" to "shake things up a bit" which seemed ok to us. Then about two hours later we suddenly though "What?!?" The biggest thing though was the end of the first day at the studio when we went into the sound booth to hear what we'd done on Receipt. Upto this point we'd only heard ourselves via a tape recorder that changed the pitch on playback and had an auto-levelling microphone (so when the drums came in the volume of the other instruments went down) and even just hearing the basic track (drums, bass and one guitar) was absolutely amazing. We knew we'd done something special as it sounded not only amazing, but very professional too. A little known fact is that Receipt and Without you made it into the mp3.com top100 (with Without you reaching #52).

Sadly we haven't actually played together since we recorded The Blue EP as we've been scattered around the country ever since. Next year however I'd love to get back together and play a gig in August/September to celebrate the 10 year anniversary of The End EP. Whether or not this happens remains to be seen.

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