Left to right: Evan, Paul 'PK' Kendall, Xav.

Roundhouse Studios, London Bridge, mid 1996.

Paul McCartney's studios back then, "yaknow".

Recording G's guitars / backing vocals / harmonies.

Amidst our travels from Chipping Norton residential studios, to Protocol studios, to TownHouse studios, to Blackwing studios, through London Bridge studios, to Mute records studios.

..What an easy going band lol.

Picture by Gage S.

Gage's bassline on this one ain't human either.

I'd gladly say these are possibly G's best ever *recorded* guitars out of the final Mute sessions, or maybe ever. As in, up there with any guitarwork ever executed down-to-tape, by anyone, cause that's how good the guitars here are - subtly assertive, choppily pungent, self-dialogant, sophisticatedly aggressive, and imprinting as much rhythm as the percussive elements, in ways only Graham Coxon or Billy Duffy can, afaik.

Not only are they amongst the v best guitars ever, they're for free. And all of these other tracks are for free now too, and there's a lot of gossipy info also narrated for free, in here, so how about just shutting the f*** up with *stardom narratives* and being thankful for it all - we sweated these tracks out like milking a feckin stone.

Had Xav stopped telling G how to play his own choppy interventions, there'd have been an even better and more thorough guitar orchestration thing going on.

..If that's even possible.

My hands look Frankenstein massive as I was spending rather a lot of time drumming, at all of these studios, because my drumming to a click was at best awful / creative / tight but loose / rattle and hum-ish, so there were a lot of repeats during the (last) days of 2" tape, and cause one of our favorite studio pastime hobbies was complicating song structures to the point of changing studios til we finally thought only the Star Trek Enterprise would be fully suitable and sufficiently equipped to properly register our sound musings.

So we ended up at Mute's fabulous old studios, where I no longer recorded drums, and my fingers finally went back down to their original size, about a decade later.

Not kidding.

I had no real drumming technique, other than 'don't die and keep the tempo, while trying to do all / some of the crazy syncopated stuff you seem to get away with live', and taping my fingers all over with protective cushioned strips, all the way up to my chin or so - I have keyboard player fingers, I'm a delicate beast... Colin Thurston was once, at Chippin Norton studios, v impressed with my speed dialing, while calling the US from Oxfordshire, skipping through British Telecom's ability to pick -and charge for- the analogue call. As in, actual speed dialing, using fingers. Cause these fingers ain't made for drumming lol.

Evan : drum programming, keyboards, sequencers

Gage : bass, backing vocals

G : guitars, backing vocals

Xav : vocals, backing vocals