Showing posts with label Sheffield Album. Show all posts
Showing posts with label Sheffield Album. Show all posts

2018-08-22

Am 19.08.2014 um 10:15 schrieb Ian Badcoe

Am 19.08.2014 um 10:15 schrieb Ian Badcoe

So runs the text near the top of the first reply I ever got from Hallam London.  Mail clients set to different languages were to become a standard part of our communication.

He'd left a message, asking for a poet collaborator, on a UK poetry forum.  As little as six months later somebody noticed, and I realised he wouldn't still be around.  So, being a heavyweight cybernetician, I googled him, found him, found his music, listened, found a contact email...

...and that was how it all began. He'd recorded electronic interpretations of Shakespearean sonnets, I'd just written a dystopian ten sonnet sequence and we started communicating and attempting to work out what could be done.

Our first conversation was about working practices, forms, and subjects.  For the former I created our secret little blog "Indwellers" (boring, don't ask).  For the second he said he really wanted to explore the classic pop song format: verse, chorus, verse, chorus and somewhere a break.  For the last we didn't really set any hard rules.  We knew that gender would come up (Hallam being gay) and me being me I knew that some subversion of genres would come into it.  We didn't then know we both liked SciFi, and at the time David Bowie was still alive and we hadn't realised how much he meant to both of us.

Other topics were discussed and others just developed.  Hallam has a great love of cities and always wants to visit and explore a new one.  I (don't ask why, I have no idea) am always writing about people transforming into various things.  Mental health is a strong topic in our work.  And, of course, from the very beginning we always intended to have a few love songs.

And that was that, over 2 - 3 years I wrote 40 or 50 lyrics, Hallam turned about 20 of them into songs, then earlier this year Hallam and Dave Sanderson narrowed that down to 10 (PLUS To the Sky which we had already had mixed and mastered by The EmU) and started serious work on an album.

The running order will go roughly (links are to older or demo versions where those exist...)

  1. Walking to Alpha Centauri
  2. Identity
  3. Anger Bob
  4. Underpass
  5. Methodology of Love
  6. Hey Changeling
  7. The Rain in Certain Car Parks
  8. On End Times Boulevard
  9. To the Sky
  10. End of Days
  11. Empty Streets

When will this be in the shops?  I hear you ask...  well we don't know.  The next thing Hallam needs is a manager (labels don't do much beyond putting stuff up for download these days, but a manager arranges gigs, publicity etc etc...) so we need this unreleased album for bait in that search...

...but what thee hell?  It's been four years already.  We can be patient.  Can you?  Well you'll have to be.  We may put some of the other, unused songs out as demos now and then.  Wish us well, it's long road...




2016-05-02

Releasing a single!

Or rather Hallam London, my musical collaborator, is releasing our song To the Sky, which we dedicate to David Bowie because, as often the case, we didn't realise quite what we had until it was gone.

As usual Hallam wrote the music and I provided the lyrics.  He also got other friends and professionals to contribute, see the bandcamp page for full credits...

This is the song I wrote about last week, explaining its creation story (no radioactive animals were involved, somebody may have fallen to Earth) and also see here for the lyrics.

Anyway, please enjoy the song and if you feel inspired to contribute a small sum to this enterprise, please buy it (for as little as 1€; for American friends 1€ is roughly $1.15 at today's prices...)

Please also share this song promiscuously.  You remember how Andy Warhol promised everybody 15 minutes of fame in the future?  Well it's been the future for over 15 years now and my fame still hasn't arrived...









2016-04-29

To the sky - artwork update

I have to start with a small version of the image, because that is what Facebook and other semantic content scrapers will pick up.  So that's the one on the left...  but I'll include a full sized version as well.

This is the cover which Julia Eichhorn has drawn to accompany Hallam's forthcoming single: To the sky

We now have a firm release date of "next week, as early as we can manage."

While I have your attention, let me leak a preview of the lyrics (below.)






To the sky

(Lyrics by Ian Badcoe, Music by Hallam London)


Those were our days
we would space-walk in the park
I made you laugh
we kicked the grass
I didn't float home until the dark.

And you never grew cold
but you grew distant, never told me why.
I was a clown
said I'd be around
I was a fool to let you fly.

Got my space suit on...
I've got dotted arrows drawn upon the night
as the countdown runs
all the systems hum
I can follow arrows to the sky.

When the engines run...
I've got green lights right across the board
I locked everyone out,
but I do not doubt
and now it really seems
as if a man can touch the sky.

I lost those days
and how the vacuum's more complete
you are not there
not anywhere
that I can reach on aching feet.

I will not let it end
I've watched the wall clock since you're gone.
My head tilts back
to view the black
and you're a pale star in the dawn.

Got my space suit on...
I've got dotted arrows drawn upon the night
as the countdown runs
all the systems hum
I can follow arrows to the sky.

When the engines run...
I've got green lights right across the board
I locked everyone out,
but I do not doubt
but now...

Houston, I have a problem
it has to be there's love in outer space
but there is too much junk beyond the place
where all the blue turns black
and how can one man in his tiny can
have ever hoped....


I had a space suit on...



(This is "Rock Music Description Language" again, verses on the left, choruses in the middle, break on the right...)






2016-04-26

To the Sky...

You haven't heard much from me about my on-going collaboration with German Rock Musician Hallam London.  Partly this has been because we had a bit of a slow period (as documented here) and partly it has been because I've been busy changing my job, delivering the kid to/from University, saving the World from killer rhubarb (don't ask) etc etc.

Also another reason is I've been busy with the songs themselves.  Hallam and I just had an amazing six week burst of creativity during which we finished five songs.  (For a given value of finished, music production goes through many, many stages such as arrangement, performance, production, mixing etc etc...)

However, it is not of these songs that I wish to speak.

In January this year, David Bowie died.  Hallam and I were just starting a new song when we heard the news.  We had some cause for introspection.  We'd never discussed Bowie, but as you can imagine he was a formative influence for us both.  We thought about doing some sort of song as a tribute, and then we had to wrestle with the question of how hubristic that was.  After some soul searching, we realised that all of our music comes from a very Bowie place anyway: it's all about gender and sanity and slices of everyday or unusual lives; we're also frequently a bit SciFi; often trying to push some envelope or other; and as every song is very different, I think we're reinventing ourselves even faster than he did!

So anyway, we got on with the song.  Unusually we reversed of our usual way of working.  Hallam recorded the musical idea first, and I analysed the metrical structure of his "na naaa nah" place-holder lyrics.  Then I wrote a prototype chorus.

So far so good, but we had to decide what the song was about, and we kept cycling back to Bowie-like (Bowiesque?  Bowiesian?) ideas.  In the end we were drawn strongly to the ideas in Major Tom and Space Oddity—and who doesn't want a space launch in the middle their song?and a love story, obviously...

And now it's finished.  It's partly a Bowie tribute, but obviously also has to stand as a song on its own.  Hallam has gone beyond the mere "teaser" quality of our previous releases with this one.  He's hired a great drummer, and an engineer to do the mixing and production.  He's currently finalising the artwork.

It's called To the Sky, and next week Hallam will release it as a single!

Yes, you do have to wait until then...  but in the meantime here's the play-list with our previous two teasers Anger Bob and Identity...







And BONUS! a recording of The rain in certain car parks (yes I did call a song that).  This live recording isn't polished as Hallam's studio recordings, but it does have a live band and audience...

 

2015-07-02

The Rain in Certain Car Parks (live performance video)

Here's a video of yet another song from my collaboration with Hallam London and one that's going into the pot for consideration for the album we're steadily grinding our way towards.

This was one of the earliest lyrics I wrote for Hallam.  It was the 4th that I completed, but the 3rd that Hallam completed the composition for—we have asynchronous parallel processing.  I am including the lyrics below, so you may be able to detect our style evolving (I can't, I'm too close to it...)

So, anyway, let me transport you to a secluded corner of an inner-city car park, where it is a dark and stormy night...





The Rain in Certain Car-Parks 


I'm standing in some car-park with a case
that I can't open.  I've no plan, it's dark,
and raining and my shoes are leaking slowly
and I know the man I'm meeting: he's a shark.
The clever fish keep clear.  I'll do the deal,
but watch the larger shadows as they flow
between the BMWs.  I'm numb
but there is so much that I owe.

If I can just survive...
if I can just survive...
if I can only live...
through these next moments,
I swear it all will change...

Car-parks, darkness, rain and cases,
silent men with folded faces,
eyes that swivel in their sockets,
metal objects clutched in pockets,
I do this for the wad of green,
the wish that I can fall out clean.

What was it years ago, decisions made,
that brought me to this day without a choice?
But I at least can try a better deal,
a wilder card, a last throw of the dice;
and surely it's my life to gamble with?
I shouldn't meet this man without a soul
around to witness what goes down.  He's here
and nothing now seems under my control...

If I can just survive...
if I can just survive...
if I can only live...
through these next moments,
I swear it all will change...

It's always dark and always raining,
it helps me hide, I'm not complaining.
It's heartbreaking, but it's my trade:
the way my little money's made,
so do the deal and walk away;
I'll live to deal another day.