It's Again
Publicity shots with Susan Raven
By 85 I had grown tired of the inevitable jumping through hoops associated with sessions and was getting more involved in activities on the other side of the studio desk. Experimenting with early guitar synthesizers, which were all disappointing to say the least had given me a yearning for the sonic possibilities of synths and I was moving steadily into being keyboard based. Forays into the realm of tv composition only served to reinforce this and I was keen to get back into a single project mindset. As a result I teamed up with vocalist Susan Raven and we began writing and recording in earnest, soon amassing a mountain of material.
Finding other members for a band proved problematic. Once you join the thirtysomethings, musicians with free time become scarce. I was fortunate in having a menial job at Marcus studios which kept my days free to write and gave me down time in the studio to record but we were constrained to being a duo.
Not such a problem as our material like most at the time was heavily sequenced. it did however make gigs a nightmare
We attempted it once but after manhandling a stack of synths and samplers into a club to spend forty minutes swapping sequencer and sampler disks between songs, resetting a mixing desk and trying to play the guitar i vowed never to do it again
An enthusiastic label put us in the studio with producer Hans Zimmer, now a major movie composer. It didn't work out, we were very uncomfortable with Hans mechanical production and the record company refused to accept our alternative versions which featured some live players. We finally gave up after producing some particularly trouser flapping, hair parting tracks which were deemed inappropriate by the a&r fraternity as they sounded too much like a band and there were after all only two of us......
Susan is now a solo artist ( album available from her website ).
