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*Comments Courtesy of Jarvis*
I remember this record as though it was only yesterday. I'd
just left school and Tony Perrin, who
later went on to manage The Mission, decided to put up the money
for recording it. We did it in a
very strange studio in Sheffield that had only about three microphones,
but the man who owned the
studio told us that one of the microphones used to belong to Cliff
Richard and insisted on recording
everything with the Cliff Richard microphone. I listened to it
recently, because I got a copy of this
CD thing that was released by Cherry Red, and I think it's quite
a decent record - although I must
admit that it does embarrass me slightly. I was still a virgin
when I did it, and I think that you can
really tell because I've got a very idealized view of love and
romance which was to change rather
radically over the course of the next few years.
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*Comments Courtesy of Jarvis*
This has got to be the darkest and most depressing record we
ever made. It was recorded and
mixed in one week, in June 1986. I find the change from It
to Freaks quite sad when I listen to it,
because you can see a man who's been disillusioned. I think there
are some good songs on it, but it
also irritates me because the songs could have been done a lot
better if we'd had a bit more time to
do them. There aren't many laughs on this record - it's a trip
to the heart of darkness, a one-way
ticket. I'm just glad that I'm not such a depressive character
as I was then. At the time, I was living
on the top floor of a factory in the centre of Sheffield which
used to attract all the misfits, and I was
worried that I was going to end up being a weirdo. I thought we
were getting cut off from society,
and so it's quite a paranoid record.
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*Comments Courtesy of Jarvis*
At the time, I thought that unless we actually did a record
the band wouldn't carry on, and seeing as
we didn't have any other option, we did it with Fire. Steve and
I had been going to lots of raves at
the beginning of 1989, and so our brains were slightly scrambled.
We were trying to use lots of
technology but we didn't really know how to work it properly,
and so it ended up being quite a
strange album. It was a mixture of some old songs, rearranged
quite radically in some senses to try
and embrace modern technology, except we didn't know how to operate
it, so it all came out
sounding a bit weird. I think it's a very patchy album, but at
least it's got My Legendary Girlfriend
on it, which was a bit of a turning point for us. Separations
is kind of the halfway point, I suppose,
between what we used to be like and what we're like now.
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*Comments Courtesy of Jarvis*
This was just a great big sigh of relief really, because for the first time ever in our long tortuous history we had enough time and money to do a record as we wanted to do it. It was really good because, having waited so long for that kind of opportunity, we weren't going to mess it up. The only real trauma was that we thought we'd summoned up the devil on the synthesiser that we were using. We had one of those old late '60s synthesisers that you can only get a sound on by plugging loads of leads in, like a telephone exchange or something. I was just messing around with it one day, and I got this strange sound that just played itself without touching the keyboard. It started off as a bit of a joke, but then even Ed Buller and the engineer believed it was evil and we all agreed that we couldn't put it on the record because it would doom it to failure. It's put me off using synthesisers a bit - I think we might go acoustic from now on.
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