Having already recorded six of the songs to go on our album before, recording them again with Lol Tolhurst and David Motion in Southern Studios was easy enough and some were given new life by Lol and his new, state of the art E-mu Emulator sampler which seemed to give them another dimension. However, we were two songs short of a full album. Adding the singles ’Shantell’ and ‘The Secret Sea’ and their B sides would seem the obvious solution now but in those days putting singles on an album was so out of the question we didn’t even consider it. Singles were another thing and B sides another thing again. And this was an album.
We had two other partly written songs though - the one which we called ‘Twilights pool’ we were able to finish there in the studio with the help of our producers and studio technology. It’s a peculiar piece and listening to it now it’s clear that we really didn’t know who we were or where we wanted to go, but it was good fun.
The final song was written around a strong 12 string acoustic guitar melody which Justin was calling ’Shrine’. I couldn’t find a vocal part that complimented it and I still think it might have been better to have left it as an instrumental but the general feeling was that it needed a voice. So when the recording session ended, I had a couple of days to write something before we went back down to London again for the final mix.
It’s a bit odd to highlight the song I am least happy with, but I clearly remember the pressure of having to write something in a very short space of time. When I got home I installed myself in a room we called The Flat. It was a large room in the oldest part of the house which the Georgian farm house had been built onto. It had very uneven, beamed walls, a sagging ceiling, central heating pipes that had burst in a cold spell and had generally fallen into a mouse infested state of disrepair. I felt quite at home in this room.
Before it’s decline my elder brother had briefly inhabited it with his wife after getting married and they’d built a bookcase running down its centre as a partition, with a kitchen area on the other side. He’d left a number of books there when they moved out which I’d just started to take an interest in; D. H Lawrence, Andre Gide, Evelyn Waugh… and I was at that moment reading one by the Italian writer Alberto Moravia.
So I sat in this cold, dark room at a table with two candles burning in twisted wooden sticks smoking Chesterfield cigarettes and wrote a text based on a Moravia story about a peasant girl who was in love with a man she knew was a murderer. It seemed to suit the music well, so I decided to just narrate it and let the guitar melody carry the song.
I recorded this vocal before we started the mix-down in Livingston Studio, a converted church hall in North London. David and Lol worked very quickly and efficiently together so we took a back seat and after a few very wintery December days the session was over and we thought it all sounded great.
We insisted on doing all the artwork ourselves, deciding on a photograph Nick had taken in Devon at Start Point (appropriate but not deliberate) for the front cover and for the inner sleeve we went down the eroded stone steps into the cellar beneath our house, with it’s dried out damp smell and flaking brick walls and took photos of each other. And that was it, the album was finished and ready to go to the vinyl pressing plant.
And so we’re finally getting to the end of 1983 - it had been a long and important year for ‘And Also The Trees’. Looking to see if anything else of note had happened I noticed on a list of gigs I’ve kept that we co-headlined a London show in December with ‘Blitz’, our label mates. In a corresponding diary I’d written “Played ‘100 club’ with ‘Blitz’. Blew them off stage. Robert came”. So not very informative, probably unjust and it reminded me of the slightly mean spirited, over competitive attitude we, and most bands at our level we came into contact with, had towards each other.
The Cure were operating or competing at a different level where they no doubt had their own rivalries, but they continued being very good to us and after the ’100 club’ gig Robert asked if we’d like to go with them when they toured their new album ‘The Top’ in the spring.
Flicking through a notebook of that time I came across a summery of the entire year I’d written over a few days at the beginning of 1984 whilst sitting at my bedroom window looking out over the pond and the corrugated iron Dutch barn to the wet, snow bordered fields beyond.
As opposed to some embarrassingly bad unused lyric ideas that came before it, this account was surprisingly well written and revealing. As a band we were all on a musical discovery trip - we listened to what came out on ‘Mute’, ‘4AD’ and ‘Factory Records’ but were just as interested in searching back in time into psychedelia, soul, Rockabilly… and had started scratching the surface of the worlds of Jazz, film soundtrack and classical music.
We all had our favourites of course; for Nick it was ‘A Certain Ratio’, Justin was very impressed by Marc Almond’s work and although Steven was the best informed and keenest follower of all that was new, his passion was always for Bowie. I had just discovered the music of The Doors.
I often wondered what was the point of writing all the stuff I wrote in those notebooks, so I’m glad some of it has turned out to be useful for me now, as I try to remember how things were and how I was at that time. I was vain, self-centred and increasingly hedonistic but I’d left the yobbish, misguided teenager I had become at school far behind.
The summer had been hot and long, I went out walking in the fields alone at sunset and it felt like my whole life was stretched in front of me.