Recording this album was nothing short of amonumental effort. Please note that the tone of the following is written with a smile and not a care in the world.
After quite a few mojitos on the Yucatan Peninsula in Mexico's Caribbean coast, in a mode of excitement I decided I would phone the label to tell them I was going to write a new album. The conversation was slurred and shady; the background music was distorted and loud, in the way Mexican PA’s are only capable of; and the mood, euphoric. In the morning, I wasn't sure if the phone call had really taken place and decided to get on with the business of continuing my adventure to Havana.
An email I received in Baracoa confirmed that the conversation had indeed taken place.
After traveling through Cuba and Panama, I got the message that a meeting in London would occur to plan the third Whitley album. Little did I know that few of the plans would survive to manifest and chaos would force itself into every facet of my life before it let me up for air. It was a
strange situation that left me assessing songs recorded on my phone, rediscovering my love of the song form and attempting to avoid recording studios at all costs. I lived in a share warehouse in London Fields at the time, where I was going to record the ideas that I had sketched nout through Latin America. Recording in the warehouse would have been an ideal situation if I had wanted to make an album infused with the sounds of five female Australian accents, or the Overland train running right next to the block of land we shared. So, it was time to come up with a more feasible plan to record the new album.
Down the road towards Shoreditch, there was a small room being rented out in what was to be an art gallery and music studio complex. After assessing the owner, I decided to rent the space and started to build in the soundproofing with my friend, Ian. Unfortunately, the art gallery downstairs was granted a permit to develop into some sort of shady club. I enjoyed shady clubs more than my bed at that stage of my life, but it wasn’t exactly favourable to record acoustic instruments, on sensitive microphones, in the
belly of the beast.
Another plan was required.
Fortunately, Ian knew of an engineer moving out of a basement studio complex near Edgware Road towards the inner city. My friends from Baltimore lived in the building. The four of them were in a band called The Dandies and they all shared the two available bedrooms in their strange dwelling. It had no windows, an abundance of Pizza Hut boxes and a strange tiled floor. Chuffed with my excellent fortune of getting a studio near such great guys, I moved in the next day.
The tube wasn't running that weekend at Edgware Road. I knew this not because of a failed attempt at using one of the finest networks of public transport in the world whilst moving, but because the microphone stands in my studio began to shake uncontrollably and inexplicably, as if dancing to demonic
underground music that I wasn’t aware of. A million things raced through my mind. An earthquake? Roadworks? I was stumped. It wasn't until further observation that the 'earthquakes' had almost precisely measured themselves at exact three-minute intervals.
I suspected that it was the tube, and after viewing a few maps, realised that the tube line ran only a few metres on the other side of my studio's wall, making recording acoustic instruments, vocals and anything other than low rumble impossible. I was a little shocked at my bad luck, but carried the studio out and into a van to come up with another plan.
Strangely, I had a friend in The Netherlands who mentioned that evening that two out of the three bedrooms in his 15th floor apartment were free. Jake is a fan of music and a former Whitley band member, so he was more than happy to graciously invite me into his home and allow me to start
recording. Melbourne band Kins were staying there at the time, so I was happy to play music with them and possibly collaborate on the new album.
After Jake drove all the way from Groningen to pick me up, we made the long drive back from London with my studio equipment piled out of the car in the cold, flat landscape and immediately set up amongst Jake's existing and impressive instrument collection.
Unfortunately, the builders of Jake's brand new apartment block had installed the only sub-par item in the entire complex in the windows that surrounded every room; a vent that made a loud and relentless whistling sound as the 15th floor was hit with strong winds from across the canals in France. I couldn’t get outside to fix the vent due to the risk posed by falling to a guaranteed death, so in my mind there was only one thing for it.
Peru.
The thought of recording in Latin America had always appealed to me, and Peru seemed like a bit of a frontier in terms of recording a pop album. I hadn’t heard of anyone doing it before and these kinds of things appeal to the child in me, which always enriches any artistic mindset.
So, after a long flight, paying off a few customs officials and dealing with the monumentally incompetent airline, Iberia, I touched down in the beautiful colonial town of Cuzco, Peru. It didn't take long to find an
apartment and get set up. It also didn't take long to get evicted from my apartment and admitted to hospital with a combination of salmonella poisoning, giardia and altitude sickness. In fact, it shocked me how things got so utterly out of hand before I had even blinked. Before I knew it, I was being advised to
head back to London to recover. I had lost 15 kg in a month and was struggling to take care of myself in the slightly more sketchy suburbs of Cuzco.
Admittedly, at this point I was fed up. On the plane ride back to London it occurred to me that I had barely recorded a thing, had wasted months and money was running low. On top of that, I have a rather low tolerance for spending time on artistic projects. Things get boring quickly, lose their taste and fail to deliver that all-important transcendental, meditative quality that music allows me to engage with in my own mind. After a few months of pubs and pies, I had regained my weight and was ready to address the album again.
The label head of Dew Process has an often uninhibited house in Tuscany that is very secluded. I spent a patch of winter there after running away from Australia, and it held a monastery-like position in my mind. Jake and I set off south for Tuscany from Groningen and arrived 18 hours later with a station wagon full of instruments and studio equipment, and were astounded by our good fortune.
The small village of Benabbio sits on the mountains cut by the River Lima near Bagni Di Lucca in Italy. Cheap wine, incredible pizza, beautiful women and spring water from the side of a mountain are always going to impress a 28 year-old young man, and they did. Some strange and wonderful old men always have time for wholehearted bilingual conversations, in which no one understands anything, and everyone gets the warm, fuzzy feeling of humanity that only absurdity can deliver. Fruit was exchanged, handshakes were mandatory and their kindnesses will always strike me as something I couldn't accept graciously enough
After getting settled, I invited Colin Leadbetter, my friend and Whitley member, to fly out to Pisa to help co-produce the new album. What followed can only be described as a purple patch of recording, inspired by the gorgeous building we were living in - a former church - and Terence McKenna-esque psychedelic walks through Tuscan forests; exploring ruins and a natural paradise on a secluded and ancient cobbled road. As the sun cracked over the mountaintop, across the winding River Lima, the thought was instilled in the middle of my heart that this might be the greatest place I've ever known.
The tracks recorded themselves once we had thrown off preconceptions and baggage and there was nothing but a reverence and respect for what we were,doing. The jokes stopped and we lost ourselves in creating a mood that reflected the contrasting dark-yet-optimistic feelings I had after being battered around in my personal life in the time leading up to the old church.
I had missed my family and friends; I couldn’t wait to see them all, and so, returning to Melbourne was fantastic. I’ve always been struck by my astounding good-fortune with those closest to me. It’s hard to feel like I deserve it, but it’s best to put those thoughts to the back of one’s mind along with when bin day is, and the date the Spanish Armada set sail to reclaim England as a Catholic nation. It’s important in one sense, but useless in most.
We finished the album by recording Esther Holt, Colin’s partner, and mixed the album sporadically over the coming months while I adjusted to life back at home.
I was glad to be back.
