Slashed Seat Affair - Back In The Studio

I love being in the studio, love the whole experience. It can be long, it can be tedious and at times you feel you’ve hit brick walls, but overall, the whole kaboodle combined creates a rewarding vibe. It’s where the magic happens, where something quite unexpected can appear and create something brilliant. But it also involves lots of hanging around, lots of tea and lots of chocolate.

Last week we found ourselves back in east London’s Strongroom studios to record some b-sides to accompany the release of No More Lies on May 4th. We decided to do something quite different in the way we approached the recording. Normally we overdub all the parts – that is we record in layers to build the whole sound of the tracks. This time we just had the four of us in the live room and thrashed out some tracks live with Ellie holding a handheld microphone. Obviously this causes it’s own problems from a technical point of view but also creates a different dynamic to the songs, an energy and symbiosis that can be missed when building on a track-by-track basis.

We chose four songs to record, and one, Burn, we had to learn on the day, such was it’s rareness even to us! It was a track Ellie had suggested, one that we had written a couple of years previously and, frankly had totally forgotten about. The fact that none of us could slip into a comfort zone with it gave the performance a real buzz and created a real excitement in the way we played it. Rob managed to maintain the breakneck tempo of 188bpm (for the DJ’s amongst you). Noel and I felt like Marty McFly skateboarding along whilst trying to hang onto Rob’s rear fender (nice pun eh?)!! Ellie, meanwhile, made a time machine out of a DeLoreon.

Taking a lunchtime sabbatical, we wandered around Old Street looking for some food (Not literally looking along on the pavement of Old street for scraps like a bunch of old tramps I might add, despite the homeless appearance we may convey). I had Afghan Chicken – tasty if a little undercooked (!), Noel went for about five dishes, Ellie had a little and often and Rob sat begging like a Labrador. I finished off any unwanted scraps like the aforementioned tramp I had just distanced myself from. Obviously Wine too.

Back in the studio and we got back to work. We normally end our live set with a track called Suffocate Me, a track we’ve never actually recorded until now. We’re really pleased with the way it’s turned out; raw, edgy and energetic – everything it was intended to be and everything it is live.

The other two tracks were Comatised (yes, we know it’s not actually a real word!), a raw, rough out and out rocker and I Don’t Care Anymore, which, probably sits well with the album tracks as it has some real pop overtones. We’re really pleased with all of them. Simple, live recordings, no tricks, no fancy gimmicks, just a four-piece band banging out some tracks just as they were intended.

We like them, we like them a lot. Hopefully you’ll like the two we’ll be releasing alongside No More Lies on May 4th.