The new album is almost ready... PRE-ORDER IT NOW :)
Over the last few months, Ben has been beavering away making sure that everything is ready for our new album release. We started making this album in 2019 after a fortuitous meeting. I was asked to do a recording session with songwriter and folk musician Reg Meuross who was working with Pete Townshend on some songs about Woody Guthrie. It was an enjoyable session in a great studio. We went to the local pub for some grub and Pete was very generous and accommodating with us and Molly. We were mid-tour ourselves and also in the middle of writing some songs for our event about censored literature at The V&A a few days later. We were already staying overnight at Pete’s studio so asked if we could stay an extra night to finish writing these songs.
As we left the studio, we also left a box set of our CDs for Pete as a thank you for letting us stay. A couple of months later, we had a lovely email from Pete saying he’d listened to our music and loved the concept of the band and the songs. This led to a conversation about recording some songs at his studio, namely the ones we had written for the V&A event. We felt like this would be relevant because some of the songs were inspired by the archived Oz Magazines, some of which featured Pete Townshend! He willingly agreed but when it got closer to the time of recording, he said ‘Why don’t we just make an album together!’
Over a few studio sessions, pre and post pandemic, we recorded 12 songs with Pete producing and playing on them. It was a wonderful experience being in his studio surrounded by amazing microphones, organs and synths, guitars, percussion and harmonicas. We recorded the songs as they existed with just the two of us playing and then Pete would create sounds around them to make them into something unique and quirky. If he had an idea, he would make it happen.
He told us many stories about the people he’d worked with, his adventures with The Who, and shared his knowledge about the studio and music. Molly always came with us so we often had one of our parents looking after her while we were in the studio. We had access to an outdoor pool in the summer, and there were quiet tracks for learning to walk and ride bikes, space to fly kites and deer to follow around!
We then went back down for some listening sessions and to see if there was anything else to add. When we were happy that it was finished, Pete recommended John Wood as a mixing engineer. John has worked with Nick Drake, Fairport Convention, Sandy Denny, Squeeze and the Incredible String Band among others. All of whom had probably influenced our work in some way or another (I had learned to play ukulele via the Squeeze songbook and had grown up going to Cropredy Festival).
We were over the moon when Stanley Donwood gave us permission to use one of his creations for our album cover artwork. Being a huge Radiohead fan, Ben was delighted! Ben has done the design and layout for the vinyl, CD and tea-towel (!) as well as a forthcoming book edition. He’s been doing a lot of things. We are so excited to release this album into the world and we hope you’ll love the collection of authors we have worked with, too…
Beth Porter
The Bookshop Band
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