Heres a second ramble in my attempt at blogging, or blabbing my way through Bluebottle Kiss discography. This time about release number two - Double Yellow Tarred which also came out in 1995. Higher Up the Firetrails got plenty of good reviews, it was...you know a three and a half star type affair. Given we were on a pretty big label we were able to get a booking agent in Melbourne and head down there. I remember it being so crisp and foreign. We stayed in St Kilda and I saw Rowland S Howard walking down the main drag in his suit. Our first ever show was at the Public Bar and we supported Hugo Race, we felt very little. We also got to head up to Queensland and support Died Pretty which I was chuffed about as I listened to Lost a lot in my mid teens. In the end though HUTFT didnt do that much biz or get much radio play. We had a meeting with the label where we could eat or drink whatever we wanted at a really nice restaurant somewhere near the harbour (which made me nervous), they said they thought we should go straight back into the studio to release something else. They were hoping to get us on a big tour with an international artist they were affiliated with and needed something new from us to go with the whole deal. In the end it didnt work out but going into the studio suited us fine. Personally I wanted to try and have a go at something way more ambitious than our debut. The songs were all kind of orphans. Id started to save up a lot of more folky poppy songs but didnt really want to do anything with them yet so we concentrated on some of the cloudier ones. I remember we had a big fight in St Kilda about a new arrangement Id come up with for Raymond, which would end up being the opening track. We used to speed up in the middle part until it collapsed but for mine that seemed kind of predictable. Id done a demo where we cut straight to the collapse which was an assortment of free noise interspersed with heavy fader action on radio samples etc. Id also written a song called Elmers Gone which was really simple, loose and hazy. None of us really knew how to play it properly and Peter didnt want to play it at all but in the end all of those negatives made it an amazing take in the end. We also hired a bunch of percussion for Patricias Tree and got into a heavy hypnotic groove in the end. In a way some of the stuff reminds me of what Im doing now with Infinity Broke. In all, in terms of Bluebottle stuff, and despite not hearing this for years Ive always thought of DYT with affection, its got personality. In spite of a fair bit of in-fighting going on at the time, we had some fun. Fletcher really started shine in the backing vocal department. He also parked his car in a public car park and got locked in overnight. Being penniless he had to tailgate a car out through the boom gates the next morning. My sister Sophie made her debut on this too. In fact the secret track was her first original recording and itd be over a decade before she would grace the world with her fine fine instrumental music. I think she was only around 17 on this, she did the talking part in Patricias Tree too. It was also our first collaboration with Tim Whitten. Tim had a way of fading into the shadows whilst you worked, it meant you could be as unhinged as you liked in your performances without feeling self conscious. The two of us had an amazing time mixing the middle section of Raymond, the mix was an improvisational performance in itself and I have fond memories of it. Our booking agency went bankrupt in time for our tour, and at both the Brisbane and Sydney launch my amp blew up. But the records pretty good. Heres a filmclip from Double Yellow Tarred. It was our first film clip and its quite silly. The only reason we chose thing song was because it was under four minutes. https://youtube/watch?v=RD4BaCH0ur8 the CD is long out of print but you can download it on i-tunes https://itunes.apple/au/album/double-yellow-tarred/id441043035
Posted on: Tue, 09 Sep 2014 11:26:08 +0000
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