Kaleidoscope

Martin's notes: I wrote this on my bed as well. I wanted to write something all on one note, probably because of ‘Revolution’ by Spacemen 3 which we all liked. I couldn’t keep it up of course and threw a couple of chords in. I couldn’t think of a melody so Sice came up with one and wrote the lyrics as well which only happened twice as far as I can recall. The lyrics sound vaguely religious to me; we went to a Catholic school and were quite confused about our spirituality, or lack thereof. We knew that there had to be more than the original sin and eternal damnation. Now, of course, I realise that there is far, far less. We demoed this twice, for some reason, at Station House Studios, a squalid cellar underneath New Brighton train station with our regular engineer Pete Hirst who we thought was ace because he was older than us, was ultra laid back and completely unfazed by my requests for three hundred tracks of psychotic guitar all playing the same thing but with varying levels of drunkenness. We recorded quite a few tracks down there, including our first demo. (‘Ain’t Gonna Be No Next Time’. Check out the grammar, kids!) I don’t think any of these survive and even if they did I don’t think I would have put them on here. I think we recorded it four times in all. We did the single version at Ark Studios with Rudi from A.R.Kane, who were one of my favourite bands at the time. I had visions of Ark! being a neoteric pedal palace with built in white noise but when we got to Stratford in East London I found it was a garage on an industrial estate. Rudi made up for that initial disappointment though. Patient and funny, it was he who suggested that we should give the song more of a melodic outro. He had done the noise thing before and the face he used to pull when I asked him for another cup of aural anarchy is the same one that I pull now when I’m asked to produce a young band that are in it for the long squall.