MOJO Bar - Music for the people

Hello One and All,

It’s Lawrence Diamond here. I worked at Mojo Leeds for 3 years back in my heady student days before leaving a couple of years ago to go to the big bad smoke with my band Official Secrets Act. After a summer living above Mojo Manchester writing songs and drinking to much mount gay we signed to One Little Indian Records (Home to Bjork, Jesse Malin and Alabama 3 among others) and are preparing to release our debut album with them. My blog will be all about our travels and adventures, as well as any comments on the music we’re listening to and any recollections from my time dancing on top of the bar at Mojo (and occasionally serving some drinks)

We’ve just spent a month in Konk Studios in North London. It’s owned by Ray Davies from the Kinks and has received plenty of coverage recently as the place where the Kooks did their latest album “Konk”. (See what they did there?!). I kept a diary of what we got up to and i’ll post it in stages up here. We’re also preparing for our first full supported British Tour, and that starts in December and comes through Manchester on the 2nd and Leeds on the 6th, so I’ll try and find a spare minute on the endless drives to put some words together.

If you’ve got a spare minute while reading this blog you can go and hear our stuff over at www.myspace.com/officialsecretsact.

ALBUM BLOG 1 Konk Studio, Mid Ocotber

We’re now nearly half way through recording our debut album here at Konk studios. It’s been rather good fun so far. We’ve been chasing the ghosts of Terry and Julie round the live room (the studio is owned by Ray Davies from the Kinks), reading old interviews that our producer Liam Howe did when he was in the Sneaker Pimps, and turning frequency filters on vintage synths till it felt like we might actually recreate the BBC’s polyphonic workshops entire output before we’d got to the B-sides. (We dream of being that amazing!)

We’re here for a month which is brilliant. We’ve always caught sessions on the fly and tried to throw everything down in a day or two, normally out of our own pocket and without a clear idea of where we were going. 3 months touring earlier this year, 2 months writing songs in a house in deepest darkest south London through summer, and hours upon hours of listening to David Bowie, Grandaddy, Weezer and Bjork and we now feel ready to stick it all down. We’ve always loved playing live and just throwing everything, our songs, souls, and bodies all over the stage, but in terms of recording we’ve never quite achieved exactly what we wanted so this month we’re determined to get it right.

Mr Howe and our Engineer Richard “THE SWORD” Wilkinson have totally helped us with getting the sounds we could here to only dream about as we passed summers slumbers under the weeping willow. At different times we’ve

*Shoved spoons under piano strings to recreate early 70s New York avant garde sounds (?),

*Used space and the entire Universe as our very own Reverb chamber by sending the recording signal out into the internet, around a couple of satellites and back to the desk

* Tried to summon the power of Detroit Soul City by extensive use of motown piano sounds and Diana Ross bass licks

*Put bass sounds through guitar pedals, guitar riffs through organ amplifiers, vocals through drum skins and synthiser sounds through Marshall stacks

In the run up to coming in we were listening to a lot of what I always called “THE BIG MUSIC”, a kind of reverb drenched celtic soul rock- Waterboys, good U2 and maybe even a bit of Deacon Blue and Aztec Camera, (though I should probably state here it is only me who has been listening to Deacon Blue). We’ve also been listening to The Passions, New Order and Low era David Bowie for little signposts. Though it’s strange what you end up referencing to get an idea across, a cheeky bit of Billy Joel or more pertinently Jacques Breil and Glen Campbell have also been pressed into service. Whether anything we’ve done will sound like any of this I don’t know, but it’s been really fun exploring everyone’s different loves and hates. (Alex and Tom both really like Sound and Vision, Lawrence really likes Motown, Mike really like John Martyn)

We’re 6 or 7 songs in and the feeling in the studio is really summery and light, even though we’re aware that winter is really closing in around us here in North East London. We spent an evening doing a photoshoot on top of the studio and London was crystalline below us in the snap of early winter. Very romantic it looked too.

We’ll keep you up to date on any more stuff that’s happening as we go.

This entry was posted on Thursday, November 6th, 2008 at 10:31 pm and is filed under News & press. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.