Day Fifteen: Convergence

Flyers HQ will be ringing with the sound of five indivduals feverishly engaging in some collectively rewarding tasks tonight. Mainly, that is, eating pizza while some guitars and keyboards sit around waiting to be played. Once our stomachs are full to bursting, the plan is to pick up said instruments and work our way towards getting the music part of the songs into coherent shape. We've got 13 songs or parts of songs that need attention, and at least five of them haven't been rehearsed.

What's more, we're due to start recording as a band in six days' time (after my solo turn on Friday). So, we need to concentrate pretty hard to work out what exactly we'll be doing once we're in the studio. This means planning the songs tonight, and rehearsing the fuck out of them tomorrow - even the ones we have recorded we've not set structure or parts worked out. It may mean dropping a segment or two, or modifying them slightly.

John (and to a lesser extent Martin) seems to thrive working like this; John's finished all the backing tracks for his Chandler LP already. I'm slightly more neurotic when it comes to recording, as is Sharon. I can live with imperfection, but messy imperfection- which is the usual result when there's five people playing instead of one - is not something I relish. Discipline will be required - even at our quickest, we've only ever managed six backing tracks in one day at the studio and they were well-rehearsed.

Tonight is the acid test. If we can coalesce everything tonight and get it prepped tomorrow, we stand a chance of doing this justice. Fingers crossed.

Thom