Am 19.08.2014 um 10:15 schrieb Ian Badcoe
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...)
- Walking to Alpha Centauri
- Identity
- Anger Bob
- Underpass
- Methodology of Love
- Hey Changeling
- The Rain in Certain Car Parks
- On End Times Boulevard
- To the Sky
- End of Days
- 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...
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