The Eejit

Chapter 14 Blood Sweat and Tears

If I finished The Alarm tour on a high, I was in an altogether different place following the end of the Medicine Show. Firstly I needed actual medicine, having succumbed to a really shitty chest infection on the road and I was deflated at having only limped through the latter stages. I had hoped the finale of this tour would resemble the triumphant return of one of Caesar's Generals into Rome riding serenely upon a chariot with a slave holding my laurel wreath, whilst the crowds cheered. Instead my return to London resembled one of our early family holidays in Cornwall, sitting by the side of the road staring at another clapped out car that had given someone else it's all, before coming to our family to die.

My absolute love of my father should, by now, be of no doubt to any of you. The only people who could possibly have loved him more, were car dealers.

I had forged massive friendships with those with whom I was touring. For six weeks we had been living together in the most extreme circumstances, without any of us really falling out; we had all become an important part of each others daily routine. And just like that, it was all over and everyone was gone. Everyone, that is except Joey. Joey had stayed at mine for a few nights and we had gone out for a few drinks the night before he was due to head back Stateside. Joey woke me up the next morning and hour and a half before his flight was due to leave Heathrow and the fastest ever recorded journey from Tulse Hill to Heathrow was undertaken. The pressure had really taken it's toll on Chuck, Ma and Dave too. I understand that it took Dave a while to get his head back in the game after this tour and I totally get why.

The tour may have left us all pretty drained of energy, but I still had all my usual gigs to do and the numbers coming to watch my gigs at The Swan were increasing all the time.

One of those Swanistas who had been kind enough to catch the Dublin shoes was John Carroll. Although he lived in London, Dublin was John's home and he was an early master of the Ryanair process, booking loads of flights home, all well in advance, to ensure that he spent most weekends at home. John worked for RG Jones, a sound company that supplied top of the range PA and sound systems to major public events and TV shows. They also had one of the oldest and largest independent recording studios in the UK, based in Wimbledon.

Following our getting to know each other, John had been taking DAT recordings of the Swan shows for some time. It always surprised me, what great quality these recording were although it has to be said that what you hear on a recording from the sound desk tends to be a negative of what you hear live. There is a reason for this. The loudest things in a medium to large sized pub venue tend to be the guitar amps and drums so the desk tends to focus on things like vocals and keys, skewing the reality of the sound balance that has been created live from the point of view of the punter.

What did come across was that we weren't sounding like a poorly rehearsed covers band anymore. We were poorly rehearsed but such was the levels of respect and understanding amongst this group of musicians that we reacted in the instant to each others nuance and, to my utter delight, particularly to new songs I would bring along to gigs. We would rehearse these at the soundcheck briefly and they would end up in the set list that night. I may only have written them that morning. OK, afternoon then.

John had suggested a proper recording of one of the shows some time earlier, probably between the tours. At this stage, we had envisaged a modification of the normal set to accommodate this, but watching Dave's band on tour and listening to his album again and again, all recorded in single takes, I began, as we say in Ireland, to get notions.

I had been writing loads of songs and I felt that I had undoubtedly had the quality of musicians in my band to achieve a similar level of result to that which Dave had managed with his band. I had the songs, I had a great band and I had a large following. Now I wanted to record an album.