Production Notes: Tom Glendining of the band Headswim on recording their debut album
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Your support makes all the difference.PRECIPITY FLOOD was recorded at Rockfield's in Wales and took three weeks to complete. We work pretty quickly - we can have five or six songs written inside of a month. My brother Dan is the singer and he usually comes up with an idea; we knock it around in rehearsal, jam a bit and end up with the finished song. Dan's the eclectic one, the one who's into Captain Beefheart, but we've got a stack of influences - the Who, Fishbone, Santana, the Beastie Boys.
We didn't get any hassle from Epic (Headswim's record label) while we were recording. We hardly saw anyone from the company - they pretty much left us to get on with it. And we had Dave Eringa producing: he's worked with the Manic Street Preachers, a young guy, wicked to work with, but again, he didn't interfere too much, we just bounced ideas off of him.
We've got an eight-album deal with Epic. We already had a stash of songs but we didn't want to put those out as an album, so we spread those over two EPs and got to work writing a load of new stuff which became Precipity Flood. I'm glad we did. We wrote the new songs in one big bulk. They feel more, I dunno, compact.
It's good to get our mates in to help on a track. On the album, there's cello by a friend of ours called Cheryl, and there's a song called 'Stinkhorn' where we got this guy, a trumpet player, in to work on it. We stuck him in the studio and he went mad, totally berserk, everything he contributed is improvised.
When you start touring those songs, they change completely. Songs that might have felt too long are truncated, and most of them become harder in sound as we start to feel more comfortable and less tentative about playing them. We sometimes change the arrangements for doing stuff live too, so what you're left with is often a long way from the original song.
Headswim release their debut album, 'Precipity Flood', on 24 Oct. They will support Ice T's BodyCount on a tour which begins in Newcastle on 27 Sept.
(Photograph omitted)
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