Wasted (redux)
Waste has been on my mind a little today. I had to do a lot of driving and so I’ve been having pontification about the Irish bail out thrown at me via the radio. Perhaps it’s my lack of expertise in international finance but I don’t see how lending more money to people who are so far in debt that they can’t pay off the interest is a help. Apparently , we need to restore confidence in the banking system . I’m pretty confident that they can’t possibly get much more greedy and incompetent so if it’s ok, I’ll just keep whatever proportion of my taxation that would be used to help fund that bailout, thanks Dave.
Into the mix has waded footballer, philosopher and part-time kung-fu ponderer Eric Cantona with a suggestion to the good people of his natural and temporarily adopted homelands that we rebel by withdrawing our savings, precipitating a banking crisis. I don’t know if Eric has been checking his statistics – a little research reveals:
“Average household debt in the UK is ~ £8,562 (excluding mortgages). This figure increases to £17,838 if the average is based on the number of households who actually have some form of unsecured loan.” (Nov 2010, Credit Action)
So if we consider savings as negative debt then everyone taking everything that they have from the banks would appear to make them better off. Hmm…
Against this bleak spectre was some wazzock from John Lewis explaining that consumer confidence is still high and that the public (yes, the people with the ever increasing debt) are intending to spend more than ever this Christmas. Well whoopee.
So I know that, presented with a bag of humbug in the weeks leading up to Christmas I’m likely to identify it with a ‘bah’-based prefix but let’s be reasonable here. How much of the stuff that turns up in your Christmas swag bag is needed? It’s not the one-off expenditure that is the problem here, it’s the idea that happiness can be bought. Particularly that it can be ordered on line.
Please, by all means, do some Christmas shopping. If you know that Jeff will really, really like that book, that Christina will wear that scarf every day, that little Polenta really will stick out the saxophone lessons then go for it. A well-intentioned gift, given in love is a wonderful thing. If, on the other hand, you’re trailing round the shops thinking ‘what the hell can I get for Auntie Phyllis?” then don’t. Give her a voucher that tells her you’ll come round and valet her car or clean out her guttering (no, that’s not a euphemism. For heaven’s sake, what’s wrong with you?) or cook her Sunday lunch or take her to Dignitas (delete as appropriate*)
Don’t buy a whimsical piece of kitsch tat that will gather dust on a shelf for months before finding its way to a car boot sale and bring no more pleasure than the unanaesthetised removal of a nasal polyp. Because believe me, the people spending money on twinkling seasonal adverts with snow and smiling children and dogs in faux fleece reindeer antlers aren’t trying to coax you to the shops for the cardio workout and the joy on your families’ faces. They’re doing it to bolster a system for making a few rich men richer by taking a little money from a lot of people who have little enough as it is. You want to get your kids something for Christmas that will stay with them? Start a college fund. If your kids turn out to be thick as shit they can always spend it on six months’ car insurance and a tank of petrol when they’re seventeen. I imagine that the cost will be roughly the same by about 2020.
And the same argument is being used to bail out another set of bankers. What would happen if we wrote off all of that debt? Well, who has invested in debt? People with enough money to buy financial bonds in large numbers. Debt is a commodity to be bought and sold. Essentially, it’s an immaterial crop of pure evil grown in the dark hearts of bankers. A sort of death cap toadstool of the soul. If we wrote it off the rich would get poorer and the poor… well, they’d have their £17,838 debts written off, presumably.
Approaching the point with all the foresight and alacrity of a summer-torpid wasp failing to escape from a partly open window, the reason that I write this is that we’re thinking about getting a recording and perhaps even a video together for ‘Wasted’, one of our favourite songs of late and it’s never been as pointed or topical as it is now.
There’s so much in the world that needs to change. That change can only be brought about by people. People can only start to change things if they can change themselves and that can start by not forcing yourself further into penury by buying pointless seasonal tat because the man in the magic glowing box in the corner of the living room tell you to.
Christmas can be fab. But you can’t buy it. You can make it. Cook, share, sing, play… love.
33 shopping days until Christmas. Find something better to do with them.
Neil out.
*That’s their motto.
There’ll be fireworks…
Another day, another dollar. Serves me right for getting a part time job in a sweatshop, I suppose…
There are days, of course, when we all feel like that. For The Layers, the evidence would be that the last few weeks have been a bit of a slog: you can see the weight of responsibility (Caleb, Paul and Roo) and relentlessly burning one’s candle at both ends (Neil) taking its toll on the band members. Energy levels are dangerously low and there may well be a small, unconvincingly Scottish gentleman running around somewhere in Rupert’s innards worrying aloud about the state of the dilithium crystals.
They say that every cloud has a silver lining – possibly as a result of serious industrial pollution. In this particular case the reflective precipitate in question has been a relatively fecund period in terms of our song writing. It raises the question about hardship and art. Personally, I’ve often found it difficult to write happy songs – as Fish once remarked, you’ve got better things to be doing than writing songs when you’re happy. Maybe so. There always used to be a cathartic element to the song writing process for me. I’ve heard the theory ventured recently that the same is true of society, that we are more artistically motivated in times of hardship. Perhaps we need a little suffering to wake us up, make us think. Maybe we’re not using our full capacity until we’re threatened somehow.
If that’s the case, then maybe this new ‘age of austerity*’ will trigger an artistic revival. Good grief, perhaps people will even start to remember how to make their own fun? I hope so. I’d like to think that a bit of blitz spirit will be the upshot of some potentially bleak times and that we’ll deal with the bad days by having some great nights: gathered together in one house to save a bit of fuel, singing, laughing, sharing food and songs and good times.
Which reminds me, The Layers are available for acoustic house gigs…
Of course, hard times only last so long. Eventually, discontent leads to revolution. Remember, remember the 5th of November. It’s an expression – there’ll be fireworks – for a reason.
*The value of austerity may vary depending on social class and prior Bullingdon club membership. If you fail to notice a drop in your standard of living, please consult a member of the underprivileged classes who will be happy to help you out with a richly deserved kicking.
A song for anus-day*
Sometimes it pays to take stock. I’ve been stealing Oxo cubes from my local supermarket for four years now and I just e-Bayed the lot for sixty quid.
By a strange coincidence, it’s also four years or thereabouts since The Layers started writing songs together which, tonight, is my other prompt for stocktaking.
Tonight was one of those rehearsals that reminds you why you do it. We were all pretty tired when we turned up tonight; all having that <sigh> feeling as we loaded the gear into our cars. I still have burned milk powder in my hair, Paul had to leave promptly to go back to work… it’s nights like this that can really test the resolve of a band members that are doing it purely for friendship and love of music. Sometimes, your resolve is rewarded. Tonight was one of those nights. A couple of warm up numbers and then we prepared ourselves to get down to some work on new songs – often the hardest part of an evening: stops and starts, repetition of tricky sections, misunderstandings.
‘Red Roses’ – a song we’ve toyed with on and off for over a year – finally has structure and sense and we made it all the way through it for the first time tonight.
Better still, an entirely new song: ‘Mercy Kill’ went from a half-idea cooked up at a jam last week in Roo’s illness-enforced absence to more or less a complete song.
Sometimes, through the grind of delayed rehearsals, head-colds, distractions, lack of energy and all of the other things that can dog you through a lean period, you can lose sight of where you’re going. It helps when an evening like tonight makes you think back to where you’ve come from. Thinking back four years to those evenings in the back room of the Ormond’s Head, it took so long for some of the ideas that we bounced around to even start to look like a song.
Tonight, we could see even after a few tentative stabs at ‘Mercy Kill’ how it was going to work out. We’ve come such a long way and grown closer as musicians and friends.
By an odd coincidence (yes, another) today happens to be my birthday. I’ve been showered with best wishes and some really thoughtful gifts. I’m very lucky to have the friends that I do.
By far the best present that I’ve had today, though, is to be able to create a couple of new songs with Caleb, Paul and Roo. There really are some things that money can’t buy.
Now, does anybody want to buy six hundred jars of Bovril?
Neil out.
X
*It’s like this: I received “feliz cumpleanos” by way of birthday greetings from Chile via Facebook. Unfortunately, without being able to add a vital squiggle above the ‘n’, it translates as “happy anus-day” – by far the funniest birthday greeting I’ve had in a long time…
What’s in a name?
I’ve been asked a couple of times in the last two weeks: “Why are you called The Layers?” I’ve taken this as an enquiry about the name of the band, rather than confusion about my own identity and entered into a brief account of how you go about picking a name when you start out as a band.
For some reason, though, it’s got me thinking about names in general, partly as I’ve been noticing the names of some of the friends that Facebook suggests for me and something that used to confuse me a little has become clear.
When I was younger, I used to find it odd that there were ‘old people’ names, like Mabel and Humphrey, that nobody was called any more. I imagined that there was some government agency that pulled up outside your door when you retired, stuck a moustache on your wife, gave you a pair of trousers that came up to your armpits and said: “Congratulations, you’re officially old folk. Your new names are Sidney and Edna and you may now start driving brown cars.”
Of course, all that happens is that names fall out of fashion and often don’t come back unless they’re immortalised by canonisation or biblical significance. My own name, for instance, was briefly in vogue after the moon landing in 1969 but will soon be associated with high waistbands and nonsensical anecdotes (although, in my own case, the latter is already somewhat true).
Where modern inspiration for names comes from is becoming a new mystery -celebrity choices are common, of course, but I wonder where the inspiration to call your kid Chardonnay, Champagne or Zinfandel come from? If it’s following Jack (son of Ernest) Hemmingway’s example of naming children after the wines that were drunk on the nights of their conception then surely there would be a lot more kids around called Kronenbourg and Rohypnol?
Don’t get me wrong, I’m all for creativity and there are names taken from mythology and other languages that are quite beautiful, but the ones named after foods; Cherry, Cinnamon and so on just strike me as weird. “Hi, I’m Pork Featherstone and these are my kids, Kumquat and Oregano. My wife, Chlamydia, is just parking the car.”
I guess when you’re picking a child’s name, that you want them to be unique and special. Hopefully you give a little thought to them not spending every other day at school having the living crap kicked out of them too.
When you pick a band name, you’ve got a similar issue. You want to be unique (we failed on that front) and you try to tread a fine line between pretentious (Clouds of the Everything) and having a ‘joke’ name (Doc Sausage and the Cheesy Helmets) without picking a name that you can only get away with if you’re a student band (Nematode, Cynthia, Garth Vader). Avoiding those pitfalls, you then have to find a name that doesn’t misrepresent your music – a folk duo called Killspike or a thrash-punk outfit called The Buttercups are just going to confuse the hell out of audiences.
So the general procedure is to throw names in a hat, give each member of the band one or two vetoes and then pull them out until you end up as, in our case, The Layers.
A few years on, though, I’d at least like to think that there was some sense to the selection. It wasn’t what we were thinking about at the time but I think that some of our songs do merit some peeling back of layers. I’d like to think that there’s depth there and something worth digging deeper to find.
Beneath the way that we portray ourselves through media like this, too, there’s a little more going on. The Layers isn’t just a band; we’ve shared ideas and experiences that have changed us and there are depths and layers to our friendships that run far beneath the surface.
So, there may not have been much reason other than chance that we were called The Layers originally but there are plenty of reasons now why it was a pretty good choice.
Warm days and smiling friends.
On the face of it, the lyrics to surf trip couldn’t have been less appropriate than when we sang them at Green Man last week. A song about sun-kissed, carefree days at the beach… well, look a little closer, pilgrim. Surf trip is about surf trips with friends, not about surfing. It’s about being surrounded by people that you love and trust so that even if you fall off a surf board or set out across pointy rocks, you know they’ll catch you if you fall.
So as we trudged through the mud to get our gear to the stage, I was smiling because that is where I want to be, warm days and smiling friends. Laughter and new experiences shared.
Confronted, earlier in the week, with flood warnings for the festival, it would have been easy to be disappointed. The mood at our Thursday night run through was great, though. We’ve come this far and we’re getting used to… I was about to type ‘marching into the unknown’ – I think ‘shambling off, half-arsed, with no plan’ is a little closer to the truth. This was certainly much less daunting than driving towards the channel tunnel in our ubercampenbussen a few years ago.
Having a gig the next day, I was equally prepared to camp or not to camp. That was the question. The huge swathe of tents crammed together in the mud like a slightly festive refugee camp was enough to make up my mind. I was, however, looking forward to seeing Roo put up his tent. Roo was clad in wellies, shorts and a long waxed jacket – making him look like a really posh flasher. I imagined the imminent construction of his tent was going to resemble a Tourettes-afflicted country gent raping a hang-glider. I was denied this joyful spectacle when it took us so long to find Roo that he’d befriended a couple of families nearby and they’d helped him to set up. Roo and Jen had already charmed their new neighbours sufficiently to drag them along to the gig, so with the prospect of friendly faces in the crowd we squelched off in search of food and a stage to play.
This gig had come courtesy of the wonderful people at Geek Pop – do check them out when you‘ve a chance. We were greeted by the ever-smiling face of Hayley and introduced to the crew of Einstein’s Garden. It was a rather fetching little section of the festival and I imagine than in the sun, it would have been a little grotto of paradise. The other great benefit of the sun would have been that it would have taken a little stress off the Solar Stage, where we were about to play. A solar powered stage in the foothills of the Brecons, in August. Yeah, we know. Surely hydro-electricity would have been the way to go? We could have had a lightshow that would have been visible from space…
We’ve played more competently, we’ve played more fluently but it was still a decent performance, I felt. What mistakes there were seemed to go largely unnoticed by our small but perfectly formed audience and even though the quieter parts of the set were accompanied in a somewhat avant-garde fashion from the next stage along, there seemed to be nodding, foot tapping (well, splashing) and general signs from the onlookers that traditional festival gift for the unappreciated artist – the plastic bottle of piss – would not be winging our way any time soon.
There were some memorable moments: Caleb’s first solo, straining our sustainable power source to its limits, actually made me jump. Not as much, however, as the litre of cold water down Roo’s back in mid song made him leap sideways. What sticks out for me personally, though, was that for most of the gig, we seemed to be ‘in the moment’. It’s so easy, sometimes, to walk on stage, tune up and then disappear into a furious world of concentration and self-consciousness and then before you know it, it’s all over and all that’s there to tell you that you played a gig is a damp shirt and ears ringing from standing too close (within a kilometre) of Caleb’s amp. Last week, though, we seemed to be chatting, communicating and laughing together. I don’t know what the audience made of it but I had a whale of a time. I’m also fairly sure that I saw a whale swim past me one time.
The ‘above and beyond’ awards definitely go to Rob, for trekking out to see us; to Harry, for joining the band for ‘Kiss the Girls’ and most of all to Jen for managing to be president of our fan club, the drummer’s hot groupie and watchful mother simultaneously in a noisy swamp without her smile slipping the once. Kudos to you all.
Big shouts also to Hayley for the gig, to Ellen for organising us, to the technical and hosting crew of the Solar Stage and to the other artists that shared it with us. You’re all fab.
Another burst of kit-lugging, then a pleasant little interlude as we were permitted beyond the velvet rope for artiste’s catering, a hugely welcome, cosy meal in a warm marquee filled with laughter and chat.
Then home and my single sombre note of a wonderful day.
On the way home, being tailed by Rob, we were mere seconds behind an accident. The carriageway blocked by a serious collision, as we waited, more and more police, ambulances and fire trucks turned up. I’m happy to report that nobody was killed: I’ve learned since that a man was hospitalised with an abdominal puncture but no fatalities – although that was what we were gradually beginning to suspect as the wait continued. In an oddly complementary musing, as we waited, Rob and I struck up a conversation with a sergeant in the Welsh Guard, back from tours in Iraq and Afghanistan, I was struck by the abrupt and unnecessary tragedies that can snatch us from each others’ lives. Moments like that can leave me feeling transient, ephemeral – I was glad that I was standing with a friend. I felt anchored.
I suppose that pretty much brings me full circle. It was very much a Layers experience. Next year – more festivals, bigger stages and perhaps just a little sun…?
Layers out.
Let’s start as we mean to go on…
…note the ‘mean to’. In no way are we making bold promises concerning the frequency of blog posts from now on.
Here, though, for those of you who take an interest in our creative output, are the approximate lyrics for ‘Wasted’. I say approximate because like many of our lyrics, they are in a constant state of flux that can be partially explained by creativity but mostly by my inability to remember them…
Cast around for heaven’s scent, spurn the chances to relent
Gag the voices of dissent with every dollar that you spent –
With what you stole.
You have no recourse or excuse for the power that you’ve abused
Science might beguile and words confuse but now you know you can’t elude
The rising tide
Another wasted day, I see you fading away, it’s just a game you play
As you throw it away
Treat the future as a game, win the prize and shift the blame
And if gold is all you crave, ignore the wisdom of the age
Too late to save
You have no recourse…
Another wasted day…
Filling up the void inside, selling short and buying time
Trying to find a place to hide the evidence of all your crimes
But we are not blind
Mercury climbing, shadows rising, tides growing higher – I see you clinging to your raft of lies you hide your eyes but still deny the plight of Gaia as she cries
Another wasted day..
___
Let me point out, for the record, that I’m not a Gaia theorist (strong, weak or otherwise) but I do think that it makes a nice, poetic way to refer to the intersection of Venn bubbles of planet, flora, fauna and ideology. I don’t see a problem in stretching a goddess metaphor to a planet that does, in fact, nourish us both physically and mentally. It’s the incredible waste of those resources, physical and mental, that I’m trying to get across here: while time, money and expertise are so desperately needed in creating a better, sustainable life for all, the effort all seems to go on making more profit for a tiny subsection of society that doesn’t need it and can’t even use it except as a way of keeping score. What a waste – especially when, if you want my opinion (and if you don’t then why the hell are you reading our blog) there would be no bigger score in no finer game than saving the planet and its people from the rising tides of greed, lack of fulfilment, starvation, privation and, oh, yes… seawater.
Discuss.
Emerging, blinking from the shade…
…of an indecently long interval between blog posts.
Ten thousand much deserved apologies, gentle readers; here at Layers HQ we do realise how difficult life can be made when your ransom notes are shriven of the sesquipedalian flourishes that so few other band blogs provide. As much as we would like to believe that death itself would not stop us from reaching out to touch our friends (not in an overly familiar way, you understand…) the reality is that mere preoccupation is enough to gum up the works for months.
But we’d like to think that this very preoccupation has been worthwhile because we’ve not been idle. No siree – those observant members of our fan base (at least, the subsection of such still allowed access to a live Internet connection rather than having printed bulletins slipped under the cell door) will have noticed a glorious new website. New content is still arriving on a week-to-week basis, subject to gaps in Caleb’s sandwich schedule, and should continue to do so on a basis commensurate with our blog updating (which now that Neil’s remembered the password, may be more frequent than recent, tumbleweed-strewn months would suggest).
What only diehard fans (ie, stalkers) will know is that some of the creative activity holding up bulletins has been of the biological variety (and no, we’re not talking about the contents of Neil’s fridge). Both Caleb and Rupert are proud, second-time fathers. Being men, none of the band (fathers included) know any of the important details like weight, sex, name or species of the offspring in question but we’ll try to get one of the mothers to get back to you all on that…
And what are we emerging into, as we slink shamefully from beneath the dank shelter of relative obscurity? Well, we’re two-thirds of the way into our summer festival programme; the best, we’re hoping, very much saved until last as we play the Green Man festival in two weeks’ time. Not that the gigs leading up to it haven’t been great: the Tetbury Fiesta was true to form – a laid-back gig in the sun. Thanks especially to everyone that turned up to the acoustic spot and for all of the kind words that were offered. Then last week we turned up at the SOLAM festival, near Chippenham. Usually when someone describes a gig as ‘intimate’ it means that there wasn’t room on stage for the drum kit and there was no bastard there and, we’re forced to admit, it was beginning to look like one of those nights. No sooner had we got ourselves squeezed in, though, than a friendly, appreciative group filtered in and reclined on the cushions, joined in a little bit of banter and made us feel right at home.
There were some cracking bands at SOLAM and if you missed the whole thing, shame on you – check it out next year.
So, what’s in the future? Well, we’ve got some new material coming on line: ‘My Father’ has been gigged and seems to be garnering some praise, ‘Wasted’ had it’s début outing at SOLAM and already looks like it could become an audience favourite. More songs are in the pipeline, including what looks like a viable version of the long-awaited ‘Red Roses’ and we’re hoping to have a whole ‘post-belly’ set together by the end of the year. Stranger things have happened.
More updates from Layers HQ soon (honest) including ‘Wasted’ lyrics (if nothing else, it will help me to remember them…) and hopefully pics on the site soon.
Stay in touch! (I know, that’s rich, coming from me…)
Layers out.
(Fanfare, please…)
Yes, with many a hooray, pa-pa-pa-pa-pa-pa-pa-paaaahs and airborne millinery, we are delighted to fulfil the promise that we made in our last post and announce the lavish gala that is the album launch.
All over the UK, renters of Armani tuxedos, stretch limos and ear defenders are greasing the mechanisms of their tills in anticipation of the fevered rush of glitterati, glamour army and grandes fromages as they batter down doors in the rush to be seen at Cirencester’s renowned music venue, the Vaults on the 4th of December.
It’s been a long, strange road, filled with signs that we don’t recognise and needlessly self-referential lyrical allusions but it’s brought us to a place that we’re happy to be. The title ‘Belly Full of Sunshine’ is a fine title for an album that’s been built on a foundation of good times and shared laughter. For all the anger and despair evident here and there (ahem) in the lyrics, it’s not a work of bile and vituperation. If anything, the railing and gnashing of teeth is levelled at the ignorance and injustice that is all that keeps so many people from being able to have what we do.
Here’s a perfect vignette: just towards the beginning of the recording process, as we were rehearsing songs and thinking about arrangements, Roo threw a barbecue. It’s an annual family bash and by family, that meant including a circle of friends, neighbours and disreputable musicians. There was fine food, smiles and sunshine enough to justify being barefoot in the grass. A friendly, semi-competent game of softball was punctuated with laughter and good-natured humour. If the Layers stand for anything, it’s for the good-natured throwing around of a frisbee in the sunshine and those who would prevent that through denying people parks, freedom of choice, health, the money to afford a frisbee or by subtly forcing on them a life of sedentary vegetation… well, they’re going to have to get used to our staunch opposition and shouty lyrics. So there. It’s actually a grass-roots social justice and mobility movement but done with such craft and subtlety that it could easily be mistaken for four middle aged men dossing around. Don’t be fooled.
So there it is. We’ve worked hard on this. Our last recording was a demo – purely to showcase what we could achieve live. We’d like to think that we’ve progressed from there, as songwriters, musicians and as people and we hope that our listeners will hear that in these tracks.
We had to take the hard decision not to record some old favourites on this project; in particular ‘Surf Trip’ and ‘Eriphany’ are songs that we would have liked to give the lavish studio treatment. Instead, we’ve opted for a dozen previously unrecorded tracks, including one that’s only been gigged as a trial run. This time there are extra tracks added, we’ve done more than we could manage live without recruiting a little help. We’ve tried to provide depth and texture to the songs and we’ve been delighted with the job that Andy’s done of translating our intentions into music.
So we look forward to the 4th and hope that as many of you will join us as you can. If you aren’t able to come and partake of a belly full of sunshine with us, fear not. We’ll be posting CDs to anyone who would like one and making tracks available through the miracle of the Internet soon.
Peace.
Layers out.
The myriad joys of recording (redux)
Long time fans and regular readers who’ve managed to slip out of their straight jackets, padded cells, thorazine-induced coma etc. for long enough to get to a computer may well be wondering what’s become of The Layers’ much-vaunted, long-awaited album.
Well, we wouldn’t want to keep you in suspense for too long, so I’ll tell you in the next paragraph.
Progress has been remarkably swift and we’re now starting to listen to some preliminary mixes; the initial signs are really quite encouraging.
As ever, this has been a learning process for us. Our last recording was intended to be an impression of how we could perform the songs live, simply a demo. This is a very different animal and we’ve been examining our own songs in a different light. This time recording has been more of a creative process and we’ve been genuinely surprised at the shifts in character of some of the songs.
Rest assured, gentle reader, that the essentially ‘Layersy’ qualities are very much there. As you would expect, the songs bear no resemblance to one another – the record will be the ragtag, multiple-personality-disorder tumble of disparate styles and genres that you’ve come to expect, the lyrics will be angry and bleak and there will be the usual mix of hard rock and cheese that you only normally get with Fanny Craddock’s infamous Granite Quiche. Amongst the usual ‘…sound and fury, signifying nothing…’ though, we hope that listeners will detect a richer, more considered sound.
We feel that we’re growing as a band from recording this album (largely due to a two-for-one pizza offer near to the studio). Hopefully you will too.
With luck the next bulletin should be announcing a release date for the album and news of a launch party/gig/violation of noise protection laws and, fingers crossed, they’ll soon come up with a cure for arthritis.
For now,
Layers out.
Patience, patience…
Greetings, gentle fans.
We realise that by now, many of you will have chewed down your fingernails, torn out your hair and ground your teeth to nubs wondering: “When, oh when will the Layers relase an album.”
Or you may not give a toss, who can say?
Wherever you may happen to be on that continuum of care, I feel glad that I can simultaneously ease your tension, whilst increasing your anticipation, with news that we’re in the process of recording that album right now.
Yes, undeterred by the economic climate, we’ve managed to pry enough loose change from the backs of coffee shop sofas to fund a series of trips to DB studios where Andy is, once again, digitally dismantling our caterwaulings and reassembling them into something like music.
Even a brief outbreak of swine flu in the band isn’t going to stop us and we hope that by the end of the summer, eleven lavishly-tooled tracks (and some bonus material if we find the time) will be yours to own, cherish and use as a coaster.
Clear your social calendar (or start thinking of convincing excuses, as appropriate) for an imminent launch party and bring your bitches and hoes (we know that many of your are keen dog breeders and gardeners…) for what will surely be the musical and social event of the year.
News as it happens. Watch this space.
Layers out.
x