We Dance Even When Nobody's Watching (And Other Secrets Of The Studio Revealed)

I've decided I love recording studios.

We've just spent the weekend at Alchemea Studio in Islington, recording three tracks for our demo. It was the first time we've all been into the studio together, and we weren't sure how it was going to go, especially since we'd boldly (some might say foolishly) decided to record all the tracks live. But we're pretty chuffed with the results. Here they are, on the myspace page:

http://www.myspace.com/tricityvogue

All the studio cliches about hanging around for hours before anything happens are true of course. Bobby Fresh's drums took about 2 hours to mic up, as per, and then there was Mr Mysterio's Fender amp to sort out in its own little room, so he could play with all his effects pedals properly (what, if anything, do they all actually do???).

Me and Honey had a little studio to ourselves which lulled us into a false sense of privacy, until Honey struck up a whispered conversation about the sexual proclivities of one of our paramours - which was, of course, broadcast to the entire band and the sound engineers through their headphones. I ended up swapping microphones with Honey because I liked the sound of myself better through hers, which was an AKG instead of a Neumann, for those among you of a technical bent. All right, it was gold instead of silver, but that really didn't influence my decision. Honest. And yes, we wound up doing little dance routines to all our numbers while we were singing, which got us some funny looks from the sound engineers on the other side of the glass, who weren't wearing headphones and couldn't hear what we were dancing to.

Connie confessed she got a kick out of being in a small, sweaty room with 'the boys'. They didn't have any vocal mics in there so it was harder to make out exactly what was going on, but the drum mics picked up enough ambient sound to establish they were having a good time.

And Sir Fitzroy was in a soundproof room by himself, which was a far cry from his usual recording experience of being jammed in a room with 20 sweaty brass players. This VIP treatment put him in a sunny mood all day, despite all the waiting around which usually drives him mad at rehearsals.

We came up with some inventive ways of passing the time while the mixing was being done:

Earl Mysterio acted out everyone's Horoscopes.

Honey covered everybody in the band with sticky gold stars.

Connie ate kebabs.

Magic J slept. (In fact, there was a lot of sleeping going on. Honey managed to fall asleep lying on the vocal studio floor with her headphones on, while I yorped out the vocals to St Tropez in her ear).

And we told jokes. But I can only remember two.

Why did the chicken cross the playground? To get to the other slide.

A woman walked into a shop and asked the man for a Double Entendre. So he gave her one.

There were loads of knock knock jokes as well, but I've blanked them from my memory, possibly because they were too painful to record for posterity. If any of you other guys can remember any more, can you post them up as a comment?

Loved every minute of it. Even the knock knock jokes.

Big thank you to Ian and Alchemea

and lots of love from us all

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