New, Old Music
Celebrating 20 years since the release of "Everyone's A Photographer", with all the versions you were never meant to hear from "The London CD".
This month marks 20 years since the third record by my old music project Horse Stories, Everyone’s A Photographer, was released. So today I’m celebrating that (somewhat horrifying) anniversary by releasing my original demos for most of the songs, on all the streaming platforms.
It’s called The London CD, a literal description of the item I sent to the band before recording was set to begin.
The songs were written while I was living in London. Sharing a comically small flat with my future wife. The band members I was set to play with on the album were in Los Angeles and Long Beach. We were booked to record in San Diego, at the home studio of Pall Jenkins from Black Heart Procession (one of my favorite indie bands of the era). Then, by the time of the album’s release, I was living back in Melbourne for a spell.
In short; we were all over the place. Or at least I was, in more ways than one.
The CD of demos has hopped around homes with me ever since. In a box full of old self-recordings and other music ephemera, largely of interest to an audience of just one; me.
I recorded the London demos one cold afternoon, in the basement of my acquaintance John Rose’s house. He helped me finish a solo record there, too. The building was once a pub, The Sussex Arms. I took one guitar and laid down all the new songs in one or two takes. No overdubs. Ate hot chips wrapped in paper for lunch, with a small wooden fork so I could leave my gloves on. Then burned four CDs of the tracks, to listen back if needed, and for the band and Pall to know what to expect once we convened in San Diego.
These recordings were meant just for us. You can hear me improvising unfinished vocals, flubbing notes and ignoring the occasional string buzz. It didn’t matter. The eventual album sounded quite different. Colored by my growing appreciation for West London’s reggae history, and new indie rock records like Aha Shake Heartbreak by The Kings of Leon. But in the past few years I’ve come back to these demo recordings and always found something pure and honest about them. A feeling that might have been lost sometimes on the eventual album.
When Everyone’s A Photographer was released in December of 2005, my wife and I were weeks away from being married. I wasn’t doing a lot of songwriting, and that felt okay for once. Composing these songs over long, lonely days in our London flat had taken something out of me. Shortly after the demos were done, I decided I was done with London, too.
Our twelve months leading up to the album’s eventual release had been devoted to moving hemispheres, arranging a wedding, and settling into a home we would leave within two years.
My London-based label had largely given up on me as their next-big-thing, yet there in Australia the album was met with surprising acclaim. The AGE newspaper featured it in the weekly Entertainment Guide lift-out I’d been reading since I was a kid; it was nominated for the inaugural Australian Music Prize; and the songs soon became background staples on the long-running soap Home and Away (Chris Hemsworth made out to one of the tunes at least once, I’m certain), the resulting publishing fees keeping my bills paid for a year or two. Yet the local press seemed confused as to where I was actually located by then. So was I.
Maybe that’s why I think the demos are worth sharing, 20 years since the album’s release. Twenty-one since I walked into the basement of the Old Sussex Arms with my guitar to record them. These solo versions say something about my state of mind at the time a band album never could. Something personal and isolated, that my ambitions to finally “break through” — with the power of a full band behind me — wouldn’t allow.
The album’s title — Everyone’s A Photographer — came to me well before the ubiquity of cell phone cameras and Instagram, near the corner of Cahuenga and Sunset in Hollywood. Stopped at a light, midday, I saw a young man with a large 35mm camera attempting to artfully compose a photograph of someone sleeping in a doorway. It felt so insensitive and craven. Exploitative “art” of the cheapest kind. Right on the brink of seemingly every man and his dog being insensitive and craven, a worldwide army of exploitative “artists”, hiding behind the cover of a tiny smartphone lens.
Before that moment on Sunset, the album had a much different working title. One that belonged only in a notebook and my mind, to help guide my writing and song selection. Twenty years later, I think it was guiding my movements, too. Or at least my motivations at that restless time. Back then I was alone in the flat, picking up gigs and ad-writing jobs, waiting for my future wife to return from the office. All while quietly working on a new album. Something called, A Simple Home.
Thanks to… John Rose for recording me, Kevin Bosley for brushing up the demos to release and Danny Ford for the cover photograph.
Absolutely Brilliant!