Hi, I am practicing. We turn up at the BBC studios, Maida Vale, London. We are indulging yet more of Alex Pattersons wish to be the singer of killing Joke using a johnny Rotten impression. I think we rehearsed a bit, i had no idea what I was doing, but you can hear that each guitar note I play is telling you to fuckoff. Every time it switches sections i completely fuck it up, because I was not familiar with the track and punk was always a bit soft to me being into slayer / metallica etc.
Nick Burton was on drums, he is Welsh and he complains a lot. Simon Phillips was on bass. Simon was not really a musician, he was more of The Orb drug dealer and general matey mate. Me, Nick and Simon would hang out a lot and the group of friends was all Alexs friends who I became I guess drafted into. In the end I was more matey with Nick and Simon than Alex was because Alex doesnt say much. The group was an odd cliquey bunch but seriously decadent and hilarious. There was coercion within the group.
We setup did a take and they said yeh thats it and i was like no way i fucked up the guitar bit and they said ah never mind. i mean, fuck them. I dont know why i didnt insist, after all alex did accidentally talk about bestiality at the end.
I think it might have been the BBC, basically when you do these sessions you go in early and you gotta be out at 6 like clockwork. I was used to working till 7am in pretty much all studios sometimes longer. Mike Fucking Robinson was the engineer, there is absolutely no reason to call him ‘fucking’ Robinson really at all, apart from the fact that when Greg reminded me of the session I said oh yeah Mike Fucking Robinson and just continued it cos I liked the sound of it. Autistic people repeat things cos they like the sound a lot. This has gotten me misunderstood and in trouble before.
“no fun” was an excellent way to end the orb, given its historical implications. It was the last sex pistol track ever made. “ever feel like youve been cheated?” Greg asked me what put me off being in a band with alex and I guess it was this record and the festival where he punched Lisa which started it. Greg was shocked when i said this and said there was no way, but it was common knowledge, i mean everyone on the tour knew it happened. The american trip where we were locked in a room with a loudspeaker with people asking the same questions over and over again put me off doing interviews forever and then i insisted alex do them all or i was leaving. (later context of autism – you could have predicted that from 15 miles away). Then the lying about and stealing of my publishing money finished it. I didnt find out the full extent of what they did till recently., thats another story.
So Mr Mike Fucking Robinson the “producer” on these records, er what did he do? well, nothing that is traditionally called being a producer unless you think the definition of it is “leaving and going to the pub”. We convinced him to do one more hour than 6 and he still whinged about that. His way of dealing with it was to go to the pub. We did another mix of OOBE which is embarrassing plagiarism, I dont know why but I thought to put even more Steve Reich. It was me that was into the album the most I think out of those guys. They were ready to put another sample on fluffy clouds to the one i kind of steered em to, the one in the demo. But isnt this one nicer to use? As we now know the idea of fluffy clouds was by some dude in some city up north and Youth and Alex had no idea what time signature it was in. derp.
So anyway, we finish this pedestrian OOBE mix and Mike comes back. I remembered being immediately stunned by how red his face was. I thought he might be ill or something “you aight Mike?”.
“Yes ive just been to the pub. Had a drink called armageddon.”
“Whats in that?”
“Every spirit in the pub in a pint glass”
on the way out to the pub, Mike disconnected the SSL tape transports just to be a cunt. he thought we wouldnt know how to turn them back on and we would have to walk out to press play on the tape machine. When he came back he spent ten minutes looking at a 1k tone on the dat player with a tiny screwdriver in the record level setting. I thought it was a practical joke at first, and then he just carried on…
In practice moving this an entire 3db would have virtually no fucking difference whatsoever to anything, unless he distorted it to fuck or recorded it at -96db his screwdriver made no fucking difference to anything Mike Fucking Robinson was doing. He was in fact, recording it to a higher level than people use these days but thats another story.
Mike wrote his name on the DAT and went home, hopefully in a cab. Hopefully without too much vomit on his wife/pets/children/bed/trousers.
now this bit is important. in the music business. Mike being a total twat, trying to sabotage the session, leaving to get langered drunk on BBC time is a legitimate producer role, and the fact he drunkenly wrote his name on the DAT is itself proof that he did in fact “produce” that record. I am sure he did produce something that night but im pretty sure it had more chunks in it than the mix.
hows that for a stream of consciousness first draft.