lisahall

Hi. You may have noticed that we're unsigned. There are advantages and disadvantages to this. The big advantage of being signed, particularly to a major [eg. Warners' Reprise label, as we were previously] is that they give you a big wad of dosh and say "Go away and make a record" which is great but comes, understandably, with certain conditions. There are suddenly deadlines to meet, a whole load of people to please and some, who you don't know, wanting to influence what you do. For the first time you're in a position of being paid a great deal of money to do something you'd always done before for nothing because you loved it. Another advantage is that your record gets released all over the world - people in Latvia get to hear you! - and your music is put up for inclusion in big budget films. The title track of our record "Is this real?"[ apart from inspiring a number of amateur film-makers; see Youtube] was used in "Practical Magic", a Nicole Kidman/Sandra Bullock film, and also in "Baywatch"[!!!] "I know I can do it" and "Chocolate" were featured in "A Will of Their Own", an NBC mini-series about women's suffrage broadcast nationwide in the US [if there are dvds available of this would our friends in America please let us know as it wasn't shown in the UK] "I know I can do it" was also used in "To Serve and Protect" which we understand was a police drama also in the US. This is brilliant. There are also, however, good things about being unsigned. You can work at your own, natural, unforced pace and you only have yourselves to please, although with four people involved that's not always so easy! You don't have to make things that you consider might be successful. Though it's nice to earn money doing something that you love and consequently hard to give up, it's more important to record music you're happy with. This Myspace page is an outlet for that music, and we also intend to compile it into a cd. With no record company money around to enable us to work on this full-time, it inevitably takes longer; all the recording we do is at our own expense, in our own time, and we still have to earn a living, and we all have families etc etc. When it's done, and if we can afford it, we'll look at ways to make this cd available to all our friends for free; maybe if everyone sent us a stamped, addressed jiffy bag we could save the postage money? We don't know yet but it's something to think about. There are tracks to finish and artwork to sort out so it's going to be a little while yet. We'll keep you updated in our blog entries. Another thing we're looking at, for those of you who may be interested in the actual process, the nuts and bolts of music production, is to put a song on the page from it's very beginning - the first basic idea, to it's sublime, complete, utterly perfect glorious end! With snapshots of the song on each step of it's development, so you can download and chart it's progress [we have a new one called "Safety in Numbers 1-9" that may be suitable, just an idea] This could all be very embarrassing for us of course if it doesn't turn out well. It has, ahem, happened before. Some songs have a habit of developing a character of their own, and will not be deflected from it no matter how hard you try. Some songs are the devil's own work to get finished while some develop more organically, while some are shelved because you can't make them work at all. It's never easy. If you're familiar with theatrical superstition you'll know that actors will never say aloud the title of Shakespeare's "Macbeth" and refer to it as "The Scottish Play". When we were recording "The Sign" on "Is this real?" we had such difficulty getting it right we locked up the studio and fled in exasperation to the Derbyshire hills to escape it, thereafter calling it "The Scottish Song". It started out sounding like Fleetwood Mac. You'd never know that to listen to it now would you? We do, in fact, have an acoustic version of it we did for Xfm in London that may be interesting for you to hear. Let us know. We'd like to say a big thankyou to Johnny Reece and Richard Bismarck on the Album Zone radio show [broadcast on www.rti.fm and Sky Satellite Channel 0195 in Europe; see our Friends list for details] who've always championed our music. Their shows are truly eclectic, the only criterion being if they love it they'll play it. A refreshing change from tiresome "genre" based broadcasting. If you genuinely love music you can enjoy more than one category of the bloody stuff! Finally, we're hoping to upload a live video of "Is this real?" in the not-too-distant future ie when the technology's been grappled with. Please contact us if you have any comments, suggestions or requests - we'd love to hear from you. lisa, nip, paul and steve