Aftermath

It has now been a good couple of seasons (think it was April) since my band "released" its début album. While all student bands around us were playing gigs and gathering followers, we were stubbornly sitting in cramped bedrooms with crackly, broken jack leads and cheap Dutch lager, hunched over guitars and laptops and microphones, banging our heads against walls and our sticks against drums because we had a vision. We didn't want to leave university with just a memory that we had once been in some sort of a band - we wanted physical proof.
After many, many months of occasional effort, we did something that deep down I'm not sure we believed we would ever get round to doing, and finished the album. It was proper album length, with proper artwork and came in a proper jewel case. To the casual observer, it was a proper album. But. It was shit.
No-one could put their finger on exactly why it was shit, but it was. Was it the fact that we just looped recordings of our drummer playing a couple of bars for most of the tracks, making recording a lot easier but sucking the soul out of each song? Was it the flat, lifeless vocals? Was it the dodgy mixing? Was it the lack of any stylistic consistency? Was it the sheer over-indulgence of a band who were so fascinated by overdubbing that any melody was drowned out by a synth-rock mush? I think it's a safe bet to say it's some combination of these factors, possibly with a few more thrown in.
A couple of months ago, my uncle played me an album his band had recorded at college in the seventies. It was pretty well-recorded but the main thing I liked about it was that it sounded like a proper band who enjoyed playing together. My band's album sounds like we've recorded it one instrument at a time, which we did. The thing is, recording a bad first album is a great thing, because unless we're complete muppets, we're not going to make the same mistakes again, and considering how many mistakes we made on the first one, surely a lot of the second will be bang on. Of course, it's perfectly possible that we are muppets who will make exactly the same mistakes again, and there's also nothing to stop us making some brand new and exciting mistakes that we never even thought of. Perhaps you should wait for album three.
P.S. Sad but true fact - I'm such a pessimist with the band that I have an outline of a plan in my notebook for our eighth album, because I'm not sure we'll be very good until then. Half-decent ideas prompt me to pick up a guitar and force out a song, but high-concept genius ideas end up on the 'album eight' page of my notebook.
P.P.S. When I say notebook, I mean like an A4 pad with pages, not a laptop. Seeing as the laptop is basically the successor to the original notebook, I find the name 'notebook' a very silly choice. It's like calling people apes or calling a whiteboard a blackboard. Then again, there's a certain elegance to this system. I like the fact that there is one Dalai Lama, one Pope, one king/queen etcetera. Perhaps this should be extended so that, for instance, Ryan Giggs would be called George Best and Thom Yorke would be called John Lennon. I wonder who I would be? Presumably most people, me included, would just be named after some unremarkable dead guy who happened to have a similar personality. Perhaps there could be some sort of renaming ceremony at, like, twenty-five? You know, some age when you're old enough for your personality to be pretty much set. Then if the system got properly established, in a couple of hundred years time it would be a sign of rebellious artistic arrogance if you kept your birth name beyond the age of twenty-five because you felt you were no-one's successor but were somebody completely original. I, for one, think that if this system had become part of the culture, I would feel those who bucked it were prats, because no-one is unique. You know your mate who you think is one of a kind? He's not. You just haven't met enough people. Even by my standards this post has lost its way, or at least forged an interesting cross-country path through nettles and brambles and cow-shit. Really, I should end this here.