I was looking for a Scott Walker or Engelbert Humperdinck type singer for “I’m Coming Home”, a tripped-out, slowed-down backing track with an orchestral build that I’d written in 2008 and worked-on while driving countless times to and from Germany. I remembered Dominic Grant from 70’s boy-girl boy-girl pop group Guys ‘n’ Dolls. When Dominic arrived at my studio he said, “I was listening to it in the car on the way up from Ramsgate and, er, it’s not a standard type of song, right?” “Er, no” I replied. “OK let’s give it a go.” 3 hours later it was there.

“No Man’s Land” started with a Snoop Dog meets Kraftwerk type drum beat blended with string quartet. I was trying to recreate the feeling I got listening to 78 rpm records of sobbing Italian Tenors like Benjamin Gigli in my Grandad’s Living Room in Leicester back in the 1970s. In short I needed a great tenor. Kim Criswell pimped her American tenor friend William Burden, in the UK last summer to do Don Giovanni at Glyndebourne. William is famous in opera circles for stepping in at a minute’s notice to sing the Pearl Singers at the English National Opera when the contracted tenor was indisposed. We were recording his bit one morning and he said, “you know, I may regret this but, if you really want that oversung Italian sound, I could try it up an octave…although that top D will be very difficult, particularly before lunch.” He went straight for it and nailed it.

“Touching The Face Of God” – I wanted to weave action and drama samples into this track and trawled youtube for recordings of control towers, SWAT comms and fighter cockpits. I stumbled across an amazing passage of three US Air Force fighters coming back from a mission over Iraq. One was in trouble and it’s the unfolding drama of the stricken plane trying to get back to the border. I wanted to contact the pilot central to the episode, Lt Col Scott “Spike” Thomas to ask for permission to use the sample. More online research brought me to the Air Force Base where he is currently based and it took just three phone calls to talk with him personally. Thanks for letting me use it Scott.

“You Couldn’t” - one of the hardest tracks to finish was the first I started, back in October 2007, before a hard drive failure nipped it in the bud. “You did back up, right?” asked the guy in the Apple Store. “Er, not recently”. I didn’t really mind losing anything else on my MacBook apart from that one track. So I sent it to Data Recovery specialists who took it apart layer by layer in the Cleanroom. “Sorry, the heads crashed in such a way that we were unable to save a single bit of data.” Damn. I was stuck. I didn’t feel I could move on with the album until I had reconstructed that track. At my parents’ house between Christmas and New Year I got out some blank sheet music, sat at the piano and wrote out every part I could remember before sequencing it again in the studio in January. Vera very kindly told me it was better than it was before. Not sure, but at least I had it back. It was now called “The Lost Song”. The years passed and it was the last track to be finished. I was struggling to find the right voice for it and finally had the idea to try a falsetto countertenor in the verses and a lounge singer in the choruses. Enter Matthew Ford who I saw doing “Singing In The Rain” with our friend Kim Criswell and Michael Chance who we saw doing an opera in the church of St Martin-in-the-Fields Trafalgar Square.

We played “Witnesses” at our Wedding during the signing part of the ceremony. Vera and I had recorded us saying every guest’s name over the piece. On the album it is instrumental.

“Just Keep Going” started as a systems-type piece. I wanted it to sound like multiple pianos. Then strings, then electro elements. Where to now? After a while I thought it needed a choirboy and a rapper. I approached St Paul’s Cathedral school and Andrew Carwood, Director of Music, said “I don’t have a boy who can get up quite that high – yet. But I can recommend a top notch treble-sounding soprano.” That was Amy Haworth. It’s much harder to find rappers than you might think and I was asking everyone I knew. My favourite viola player Mike Pagulatos told me, “I know one. She’s called Killa and she’s the daughter of a friend of my girlfriend. She’s fresh” (which I took to mean really good). Killa (aka Lana-Hayley Penkert) used to live in London - “I was a bad girl, always in trouble, so I moved to sort myself out and now I commute.” A rumour she worked for Ann Summers in Milton Keynes turned out to be untrue. A rumour that she has a tattoo of “Killa” in letters and bullets on her lower back turned out to be true. Energetically working three mobile phones simultaneously, she says, “why is it always me that has to sort out all my friends’ lives?”

Torben Johansen, one of my Danish friends, ex-Gangway, now working at Sony in Copenhagen suggested a startling running order and recommended Bjorn Engelmann at the Cutting Room, Stockholm to master it. Jonathan, Dan and Jon at Barnbrook designed the sleeve, drawing a little inspiration from a Japanese box of chocolates that I had been obsessed with.

Although I say it myself, I love everything about the album and I wouldn’t want to change a thing.

http://www.davidmotion.com/