STRANGE BROTHERHOOD
independence.
We decided to record this album without a record company in order to feel totally free,
both creatively and financially. No visits from anxious A&R men saying "but
where’s the hit single?" No cries of "you’re over budget!"
Actually we did go overbudget, but it was all our own savings. It did feel right, though,
to be working from outside the ‘business’.
songwriting.
One of our strengths is that our songs are written in a myriad of different
ways: from a band jam, from a singer/songwriter approach, from a completed piece of music
written by a member of the band awaiting lyrics, from a lyrical idea, from a guitar or
keys or bass riff, from a drum beat. There is no formula or one over-dominant idea about
how the music should be: all songs have an organic life and we try hard not to repeat the
same ideas over and over again. There was, however, on this album, a lot of tension
between the studio/purely musical approach and the fact that we were already playing quite
a number of songs live and had to make them work in a band setting. In NMA gigs and solo
shows, we have played something like thirty brand new songs in the last three years, some
of which may never be heard again. If there was a problem and an overall reason for taking
so long with this album, it was that we had too many songs and ideas.
recording.
As with the writing, we
have no set way of recording. Some tracks are built up layer by layer and some recorded
simply as a live band in a studio. Strangely, it’s often difficult to tell which was
which. Most music (and almost all rock music) that is done to a metronome has a
superficially attractive quality that soon wears off the more you listen. Ultimately it
feels dead. So we very rarely use click tracks. We all have ideas, often contradictory,
always too many... and we all play guitar in completely different ways. To begin with, we
believed, in the spirit of independence, that we could produce the album ourselves. If
we’d continued down that path, we’d still be in the studio. In the end we used
some material from that period and brought in Simon Dawson to "stay on our case"
and get the thing done. Additional recording towards the end of the project was done by
our mad Montenegran friend, Mike Gregovic. We kept moving from studio to studio, from the
poshness of Jacobs, to the tranquility of Monnow Valley, to primitive Foel, on top of the
plateau of mid-Wales with Hale Bopp bright in the sky above us and finally back to the
Motorhouse, a strange artists’ retreat near Middlesborough, where we built a basic
studio set up and mowed the sculpture field to play football. This, and getting different
people to mix, means that there’s lots of different sounds on the album, which, to
us, makes it more interesting. However, we did find ourselves rewriting songs to fit
different moods as our surroundings and the seasons changed.
tensions.
It would be an
understatement to say that there are tensions within NMA. We are all fairly tense people
desperately trying to express something and we are all very different - hence the album
title. This is not unusual in creatively interesting bands. What is probably more unusual
was the night we sat and tried to think of an album (any album in the history of music)
that we all unreservedly loved, and we couldn’t think of one that we all have in
common.... a Strange Brotherhood indeed. To some of us, music is a constant companion, a
backdrop to our lives; to others it is the centre-piece, but guarded and not visited very
often. Perhaps that is why NMA makes music which is not quite like anything else. This
album doesn’t FEEL like any other music that is around at the moment and that, in
itself, is a good reason for having made it.
licensing.
After we finished the album, we had to decide what to do with it. Obviously, it is on our
own (Attack Attack) label. Rather than sign a worldwide deal, we’ve decided to
licence it for distribution to companies that show a definite understanding of what we
are. In mainland Europe, it will be distributed by EMI Germany - partly because out of all
the deals we’ve had in the past, they have been the most supportive. Also it keeps
our back catalogue together for future projects (live albums etc). In Britain, the
Americas and the rest of the world, no final decision has yet been made....
selections.
From the 25-or-so
tracks we recorded, we had to make a basic selection. Our original intention was to make a
double album, selling for the price of a single album. However it is completely impossible
to dictate pricing to record shops and we were presented with the fact that they’d
charge £19 - £22, which we really didn’t want. Also, none of us could think of a
double album that wouldn’t have been musically better as a single (with the possible
exception of Quadrophenia). The final selection for an hour of music was obviously a
compromise between what we all wanted. Of course we didn’t agree on what are the best
tracks... many of the tracks not selected will come out on EPs this year and may be
collected together in the future. Many people think that our B-sides are always better
than the A-sides. Perhaps we’ll keep that tradition.
and.
And what does it all
add up to? When an album leaves our hands and arrives in people’s homes and cars and
walkmans, we loose all control over what they hear... what they love, what they hate, what
they understand in certain lyrics, what they feel.... maybe just that a lot of passion and
belief went into the record and we hope that reaches out.
STRANGE BROTHERHOOD
©1998 New Model Army. All rights reserved.
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