Blab number five -Fear of Girls. Once Jack Endino agreed to produce our third album Fear of Girls we started corresponding. This is back in late 1995 so the main form of correspondence for business was by fax. I got a bunch of faxes from him with very detailed notes and impressions on the songs. We’d never had anyone do that before. His notes were often brutally honest. The first song on the demo tape I’d sent him was called ‘Sleepy Execution’. It was a ridiculous song, I’d recorded it on piano and distorted bass and its a complete mire. He asked if it was a joke or a test. It wasn’t, but his reaction really makes me laugh now, as I’m glad he hated it and we didn’t put it on the record! The stuff he liked seemed to be the more immediate stuff – Rust and the Time, You’re Going to be on Your Own Soon etc. I remember him calling Outside are the Dogs ‘ponderous’. He liked Dragee Fauna and Stained Mouth as they were, as raw four track recordings (which is how they stayed), which I appreciated. He also said ‘I think we have a substantial record here’. And he was right, it is a substantial record. After being in Australia for a few days I picked him up at the place he was staying in Bondi and he came over to the flat I was living in not far away. It was a dingy two room flat at the back of Bondi that backed onto a scout hall. I had a housemate and the total rent was $225 a week. In Bondi! I guess it’s a long time ago. I was very poor at the time and lived on capsicum pasta – which I made for Jack that night. I remember playing some Crow for him and I also remember when we were mixing in Seattle playing him some Midget. I played him their E.P The Toggle Switch and he really loved it. I remember telling Chris from the band this when I came home and he was pretty stoked. I remember taking Jack out to Newtown and walking into the Sandringham and Evan Dando was hanging out there, a band called Headache were playing and it turned out that Jack had mixed one of their singles. Jack wanted to meet them but they seemed pretty nonplussed. Anyway, we recorded it in Megaphon studios in St Peters. It’s in a big warehouse and is still there. I drank a lot of coffee and ate a lot of cheese and olive sandwiches. It was the first time we had a lot of gear. Fletcher borrowed Jim Woff from Crow’s bass rig because we loved Woffy’s sound. I borrowed Tim Rogers Tone master (despite You Am I’s manager at the time going nuts at me over the phone over it) and Greg and Caroline from Big Heavy Stuff lent me a Vox amp. Then we hired some other amps! I even brought my brothers crappy Scorpion transistor amp. It ended up being used on You’re Going to be on Your Own Soon. In the end there was too much choice, I’d get confused going from amp to amp trying to find the best tone. I’ve always believed since making this record that too much choice is the enemy of recording. A lot of Jack’s opinions I didn’t take to. In hindsight though, most of them were on the money. We had a tendency to find an intense two-part riff and play it over and over and he questioned that (though repetition is something I’m once again embracing with Infinity Broke). I learnt to edit my arrangements better after this album. There was so much material to get through. We took four days to lay the basic drum and bass tracks down, an eternity for us. The drum tracks aren’t perfect takes, the scrutiny made for a loss of confidence to a degree but things weren’t up to scratch and Jack was good at making us work until they were, or at least were better. When I hear it now, I kind of like Peter’s rushed drumming, it sort of matches the anxiety of the album. I remember around this time a kid going crazy in America and killing his family to the sounds of Silverchair’s Pure Massacre, Daniel from the band was just a cherubic little Novocastrian teenager and was obviously incredibly upset, so his manager took him in to visit us at the studio whilst we were recording. Other memories are organising the horn section on Ice on the Road. My Dad’s main job was playing woodwinds in The Ray Martin Show lunchtime band, so I asked him if he could put a horn section together. He brought the shows’ horn section to the session. I think he’d apologised in advanced to them about my music but I remember one of them saying to me ‘hey your Dad’s wrong! This isn’t bad!’ That was the first time my Dad recorded with me, which was cool. Jack was incredibly absorbed in the studio, he had complete focus and would pretty much only communicate with us. We had a few arguments, but I really respected him and totally related to the myopic studio trance he would get in. He would have been in his late thirties then. He told me lots of stories, like having to pull the two massive guitarists from The Screaming Trees apart because they were rolling around the studio floor fighting. About feeling almost guilty about bringing Nirvana to the attention of his friends at Sub Pop records because of the eventual effect fame had on the happiness of Kurt Cobain. After tracking the record I was lucky enough to be flown to Seattle to mix it with Jack at his studio. We’d start late in the afternoon and work most of the night. I stayed in a small room across the road from a supermarket. I’d go for long walks and lived on spaghetti. When I left I made a huge pot of it to take on the train to L.A, but my hands were full and I had to leave it sitting on my bed. I didn’t like reverb on drums and Jack still reckons it’s one of the driest records he’s ever recorded, it’s incredibly clear. It’s also way too long. There are too many different types of songs on it. When I hear it now I’m always surprised at how well it starts, but the end exhausts me. I think it’d work over four vinyl sides really well, but it’s tiring getting through it in one sitting. Since then I’ve never let an album I’ve been involved with go much over 45 minutes. CD’s and digital recording in general have largely stopped artists from being forced to edit themselves. The thing I do like about Fear of Girls is it’s very strong sense of time and place. It immediately transports me back, and in many ways is an incredibly feverish, personal recording. It makes me remember who we were, and certainly who I was at the time. The dry density of it gives it a claustrophobic tint. In many ways my favourite songs are the exhausted late night ruminations, stuff like Loaded to the Gills or Dragee Fauna. I also really like Won’t Forget. It’s the kind of dramatic serious young insect song a twenty something makes, it’s panicked and intense, and in hindsight there weren’t many bands playing those particular styled songs at that time. It also spawned what would become two of our most loved live songs – Outside are the Dogs a dissonant piece of self-absorbed white - boy sludge and Ice on the Road, an intense, spooky, soul - tinged power ballad which, (as far as I know) converted Nick Carr to the band, and eventually to forming a record label in our honour later. But we’ll get into that down the track. Songs like those ended up staying with people longer than the singles, which was often the case with our albums. My sister Sophie contributed some beautiful piano to this album too. It was her second time in the studio with us, and her playing adds a mellow, woody tone to a lot of the stuff. Also, my good friend at the time - Liz Payne sung all the female backing vocals. Liz has such a beautiful, high, sweet voice and it added a really lovely bittersweet ambience to a lot of the poppier songs. Fletcher was becoming a fantastic harmony singer, and by the time we got to the next album Ben and I began to sing together in a way that informed and extended the whole sound of Bluebottle Kiss. Without us really even thinking about it. As I’ve mentioned previously it received mostly perplexed and sometimes hostile sarcastic reviews. To strip things down, we were a loud, melodic rock band with an experimental bent. I guy at the label said ‘you’re too arty for the pop crowd and too poppy for the art crowd’. He was right. People couldn’t see the point of listening to an all over the place band like Bluebottle Kiss when they could hear a more concise, more immediate take on that kind of music with a band like You Am I. So it got missed. I still think it’s worth a listen though, it’s flawed but it’s its own world. Here’s a version of Claim from some sort of pay TV show we were on at the time youtube/watch?v=boe6vd7b-cY Fear of Girls is long out of print but you can download it on ITunes https://itunes.apple/au/album/fear-of-girls/id441054776 Oh, and by way of spruiking I cant avoid putting the link to Infinity Brokes crowd funding campaign. Have a look why dontcha pozible/project/186005
Posted on: Mon, 06 Oct 2014 00:39:30 +0000
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