Outside Out (1996) – Remastered (2020)
It's a Saturday night sometime in the summer or 1996 and I'm doing a gig with my band 'Second Sight' at The Crane Pub in Hayes, Middlesex. A popular biker's venue at the time, great for live rock & blues.
My brother Anthony, a lifelong biker, who bought me my Fender Stratocaster when I was 16 and still play as my main guitar today, was at there to support us as he often did, we played his kind of music. He wanted to introduce me to his mate John, who was a singer songwriter and happened to live just a few streets away from the venue.
Turns out that John, was Guitarist/Vocalist John Simms from Clear Blue Sky, creators of the Space Rock genre! I'm kinda glad I found that out later, cos I'd have probably died of nerves if I'd known beforehand!
We had a good chat after the gig and John asked if I had any original material and invited me to his studio to record them and see what I had. So, I got a couple of tracks down, John & his wife Max sent them to their Manager Tony Hamlin, who signed me to the Headline record label and with John's help, I made the album Outside Out in his studio over the winter and it was released in January 1997.
The internet was still a fairly new thing then, so everything was done the old fashioned way. It did ok, I still see the CD for sale on collector sites, ebay & amazon today!
One weekend in 2010, John brought his Akai tape machine over to my place. By then I had my own home studio in my shed which, like most, was run on a computer.
He wanted to transfer a load of his recordings from multi-track tape onto multi-track digital, so whilst he we were at it, I took the opportunity to do the same with the tapes of my Album, which was 14 years old by then.
Fast forward a few years, I bought BFD2, a drum software that uses real samples of live drums, played by a real drummer, produced in top studios. I could program what I wanted it to play and it would use the sounds of these real live drums, amazing! I really wanted to experiment with my then 20-odd year old album and see how it would sound with these live drum sounds. Also with the new digital technology, hopefully I could improve the over all sound of all the tracks!
I didn't really get the time to really get stuck into it until the Covid-19 national lockdown in April 2020. Listening to the drum machine Vs the new drums, I could hear a huge difference! Also, since I had all the separate tracks from the tapes, I could use my digital tools to clean up and process all the other instruments & vocals using modern dynamics & FX processors. It was quite time consuming, but a really fun project.
Working on the isolated vocal tracks was quite an experience. I'm 47 years old at the time of writing this. Listening to my own voice from when I was 23, over half my lifetime ago! It's one thing lisening to it as part of the song, but when it's isolated, it's almost as if your younger self is in the room with you. If only I could reach over and slap some sense into the little plonker!
Anyway, you can hear the final result on Spotify, Amazon, iTunes & all the other download & streaming services, or download it from this site, see links below.
I guess it's high time I started work on a follow up!
