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A Potted History By David Edwards
My former band Bronze Age Fox's swansong album 'Impossible!' gets a digital release via the lovely SVC Records, based in the Isle of Man. Rick Wakeman and The Bee Gees also have heavy ties to the Isle of Man, but that is merely coincidental.
I don't really know what to write, so let's start with the facts. 'Impossible!' was recorded at various points between 2004-2006. Most of the 'live' instruments (drums, bass, guitars, main vocals) were recorded at the legendary
Sawmills Studio by Tony Doogan (Mogwai, Teenage Fanclub, Belle & Sebastian).
We spent a week or so there larking about with fireworks on boats and occasionally making magic in the studio. It was brilliant. I distinctly remember walking through the woods on my own late at night listening to Venetian Snares and getting freaked out.
Anyhow, once we had the raw materials on tape (well, on a now-sadly kaput external hard drive); we returned to Bristol and set about doing all of the overdubs, mixing and building-of-new-songs-out-of-aborted-experiments.
We got some other people involved:
Emily Wakefield (Minotaur Shock): clarinet and flute on Touché, backing vocals on Carry Me
Gary Aylsbrook (Super Furry Animals): trumpets (Impossible!, Carry Me, Touché, Hidden Track)
Anna Francis: backing vocals on Carry Me
Martin from Babel: repurposed violin on Cloths
We also spent ages recording and digitally editing the piano in Dom's front room for You Wouldn't Want Me To Lie, doing field recordings and stuff in the garden (which we agonised over for hours, even though they are pretty much inaudible), and learning how to harmonise.
A bunch of synths and electronic edits were done at Minotaur Shock HQ, and we scrapped some of the Sawmills guitars and recorded them in the bathroom. I remember one particularly long session where we tracked our vocals until the computer wouldn't work any more to make a choral backdrop for Late At Night Late At Night, but it didn't really sound good. You can hear about a second of it at the very end of the song.
Carry Me was built out of scraps from other recordings and sessions, and includes a broken clavinet we found in Geoff Barrow's studio in Bristol. It's the only song on the album that I wrote all the lyrics for, so it's like a special one for me. It was a love song aimed at the boys in BAF and my then-pregnant partner. Kind of weird listening to it now my first-born is 5 years old, brings back the intense panic that impending fatherhood causes. Especially when you're in a band that spent its existence teetering on the brink of getting somewhere without ever actually falling in to that special cup of fortune.
We played a few shows (notably at the V Festival), and tried to do our bit to get the record the attention we felt it deserved. Due to a number of factors which I'll never quite understand, the album didn't get released; we had to put it back on the shelf.
There is only so long you can taxi before you run out of runway. In the end, with mortgages and kids on the way, BAF called it quits. It would be exciting to say that there was a big bust-up and we all fell out, but in reality it petered out, and the band became the proverbial elephant in the room that we didn't really talk about. We're all still involved with music in some sense, but that strange, brilliant fraternity that comes from being in a band with friends you grew up with is no more.
I hadn't listened to the album for ages until recently, and it threw up all sorts of memories. It's great that Simon at SVC Records is doing what needs to be done to get it out, and I'm glad that, even if no-one downloads it, the album is no longer languishing unheard on a dusty, clicky hard drive in my loft. Thanks Simon.
David Edwards
April 2009
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