Given that the Bluebottle Kiss site is a bit of a graveyard now ( a nice one but we cant access it) I thought it high time to get over my social media backwardness and attempt to entertain those who look at this page. As I have jet lag I thought why not go Farcebook crazy and post stuff now. Therefore - Im going to post some background history on each of our major releases. Randomly. Just for the Bluebottle tragics and the curious. Ill start with our first album - Higher Up the Firetrails. This was recorded in late 1994 and released in early 1995. The music industry was a weird place at the time. Nirvana had gone massive and even some of the fuzz-pop bands from Sydney like Ratcat and The Hummingbirds had crossed over a little, so major labels were starting to hunt around a bit. Wed messed around since 1993 and had a bit of interest. Honestly we had no idea how things worked, I personally was just getting tired of people calling my parents place to talk to me without anything really happening. I just wanted us to record our current batch of songs and move on. We were naive, and in hindsight - lucky I guess. Around half of these songs wed recorded on my four - track and released as a cassette called Sonic Elevator Music for the Masses. We were pretty sick of them so we figured wed just put out the cassette and start working on a new set list. When we signed to Murmur records they really liked all the songs on the cassette and asked us to re-record them as an E.P. In the interim our guitarist John James left and we started playing as a three piece. About a month later we recorded this. I thought this would possibly be the only recording we got to make so asked I if we could do it somewhere exotic. Murmur hired Wayne Connolly and Wayne and I scoped a few spots out. We discovered that the Bondi Pavilion theatre were renovating, but on enquiring they offered its use to us whilst it was sitting there dormant for about $100 a day. Wayne got hold of a 16 half-inch tape machine and we set up. Besides using Waynes SG on a couple of songs, and Peter hiring a Brady snare drum we just used what we had. Fletcher was using a really tiny bass amp as it was all he could afford so Wayne fed all his bass tracks back through my Marshall stack, re-micd it and re-recorded. Smart guy. Wayne was so much fun and so relaxed. I would go swimming, then turn up at the theatre, I dont think I remember being happier. It was exciting! After recording the main songs Wayne said that John ODonnell from the label wanted me to track a few acoustic songs so we just set up with one microphone out on the balcony. One of the songs Beautifully Tragic was a spare Id written ages before when I was 19 or so and it ended up being on the album. We also jammed for awhile with me sitting out there, Peter bashing stuff and Wayne playing drums in the theatre until the caretaker came and told us to shut up. That made it on the album at the end. It ended becoming an album rather than a E.P. By the time it was mixed it all seemed a bit grunge and uninteresting to me which is why the next release was so different. The lyrics are young etc but we were pretty young as well so there you go. The cavernous drum sounds were courtesy of the room mics up the back of the theatre. One Way Ticket to Antarctica is a good summation of where we were at at the time. Its loose and sprawling. When Peter, Fletcher and I played that sort of stuff it always worked pretty well. Requiem For the Holden was always a favourite too, though it gets pretty dense on the recording, I think we had a demo with the first line-up that was a bit cleaner. Heres an ancient live version of One Way Ticket to Antarctica thanks to Chris Hogan for posting it https://youtube/watch?v=r4oTCisfBfY A grunger with a Crow shirt(Fletch) a Porter by day (me, complete with bow tie) and mongrel supermodel (Peter, shirtless). This album is long out of print but if you want to download it Itunes has it at https://itunes.apple/au/album/higher-up-the-firetrails/id522969092 Ill post another chapter soonish. JH
Posted on: Mon, 25 Aug 2014 13:18:06 +0000
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