Blog

Recording, live shows and things

So there is a plan.

We're starting the recording of the new album on August 19th.
While we're not completely sure of what will come from this,
there are more than twenty songs to work on and so many different ideas to explore.

We're also going to be playing some gigs, playing new material and trying out new ideas on old songs.

There are a lot of ideas to get you all more involved in Oppenheimer, the last few months have been very quiet for us, but all that is about to change!

I played in a local music football tournament called Roccer today.
We went out in the quarter finals to some tough lads, but we had our fun.

I think we're starting to get close to having an album's worth of songs together, and I'm getting excited!

We're also going to be announcing a Belfast Show in mid October details within the next week!

Belfast City Streets...

I've witnessed some exceptional intolerance on the streets of Belfast in the past couple of weeks.

Loudmouth teens to middle aged business men, staring, mocking and openly insulting and abusing people because of their appearance, be they long-hairs, foreign nationals, homosexuals or transvestites.

It stinks, it's so outrageously backwards and small minded, I really didn't think it was still an issue in my hometown, but it sure is.

People really function like this, people raise their kids like this.
They drag them to churches every weekend, teach them the importance of the Pope and their traditions and send them to religiously divided school systems,
but they bring them up to believe that this hatred is not only acceptable, but correct.

It's sickening, it's not the part of Belfast that I love, that I feel I represent or even want to know about.
When friends from other places come here to visit and are subjected to such treatment, it's embarrassing beyond anything that "my people" think like this.

Down with this sort of thing...

in search of new music!

I've been looking for new music for a while now,

I got an album by The Submarines today, which I'm really enjoying
and I'm also looking forward to The Rural Alberta Advantage and UUVVWWZ albums from Saddle Creek
soon.

If anyone has any other great suggestions about new music, please let me know!

This week....

I've spent the past couple of weeks out doing live sound for the first time in about three and a half years. It was mostly fun.

The shows were all with In Case Of Fire, who I've been working with for a really long time now.

They have such an interesting and inspirational story and we've had such an unusual working relationship and friendship that i never thought would have been possible on first meeting.

I must have met them around 2002 or so, in their former band, who happened to be playing at one of the local gigs I did sound at.
My first real words about their band were "I'm not too sure what you're trying to do, but I don't think you're doing it..."

I then proceeded to insult their poor quality guitar amps and tried to persuade them to switch out to Marshalls.

As time went by we often bumped into each other. They were nice guys with a couple of good bits of songs. I remember mixing them supporting Feeder in Belfast's Art College and almost enjoying it.

One day out of nowhere I got a call to mix them supporting Muse in Belfast, in a nice venue,
so I said yes. I did the same at Jimmy Eat World soon after.

When I had set up new equipment at an old studio I worked at, I invited the guys' old band to record, as a dummy run for the new set up (which it turned out to be completely not working!)
The results are something we now laugh at almost weekly, but we had a lot of fun recording
and it paved the way for everything after it.

A couple of months later, the guys were coming back to record more ideas, that were different and moving in a different direction. They hadn't really told me that it would be a new band, a new sound and a new everything until one day before the recording.

We recording four songs - Violence & Pictures, Call To Arms, The Cleansing & And Sorrow.

They sent the demos out, without telling anyone who they were in relation to their old band.
People liked it, it got radio play and interest, even Demo Of The Year in Kerrang Magazine.

Looking back on it now, it sounds like cardboard boxes and plastic guitars, but at the time, we all thought it was the future!

After that they returned to roughly record three new songs live, but on getting great drum sounds, we spent a lot more time on it.
These tracks became 2nd Revelation and A Pale New Costume -

All the beats and synths and half the chopped up guitars are still there, coming from these sessions.

Over the summer the guys came back, telling me they'd been signed by a small indie label from Washington DC, who were going to pay for an album to be made, by re mixing the demo tracks and adding some more.

When I returned from 7 weeks of touring with Oppenheimer, I filled a lorry with Pro Tools, synths, amps, baffles and microphones and headed to the Northern Irish countryside.
This was November 2006, I left that house sometime around March 2007.

During that time we recorded new tracks, reworked them, played with layers, manipulated everything and added to the old tracks. I learned more in that time than anywhere else ever.

All this was happening while the indie-label still hadn't sent out any money.
The album was due for release in Feb, with huge tours planned for march, with talk of tour buses and all sorts of promises.
As time trickled on, it was apparent the money wasn't coming, dates pushed back.
Something didn't add up, he was littering their world with excuses and far-fetched stories and in the end the guys trusted their instincts. They were "terminated" without any payment for all the work started and times were bleak, which is something frequently laughed about now.

We continued on without the label, completing the album mixes by the summer -
by now at Start Together, the new studio I'd set up in Belfast.

The guys were keen to get these recordings out to people who would like it,
managers, booking agents, magazines, labels just to see if anyone could hear the promise in what we'd attempted.

They gave themselves three months, or they were going to call it a day.

I remember leaving to go on tour with They Might Be Giants in September 2007 and thinking to myself
"boy, no one will even open the cd within three months" and thinking all this hard work would slip by.

I think I'd been on tour for a week when I got a message saying that some people were really into it.
By the time I returned in December, everyone in London was talking about In Case Of Fire and it was pretty obvious that everything was going to be ok!

Months went on. The album was re-worked, with songs dropped, new songs added and some incredibly higher value production by Gil Norton, recorded mostly at Rockfield in Wales and Miloco in London. Strangely, so much of what we experimented with was kept.
Amongst all these layers of huge drums and guitars are the chopped up snare drums from my early days of recording, mixed with backwards glockenspiels recorded in a bathroom and Moogs & drumloops
and vocals where I can hear the "pops" that drove me crazy!
It was mixed and mastered and released and has since been receiving loads of radio and tv play,
the guys have been out on tour with Queens Of The Stoneage, 30 Seconds To Mars, The Kerrang Tour, Biffy Clyro, Manic Street Preachers and are all over all the festivals this year.

It's been incredible to witness their hard work and dedication to doing what they love all day every day.

This past weekend's headline shows were on another level from anything I've seen of them. They are now a real "touring" band. People come to their shows because they own the album and love the songs, not to hang out and be seen as part of a local music scene.

It's been exciting, uplifting and has made me want to work a million times harder on my own life.
This has all been every bit as important for me and vital to Oppenheimer as anything we've done ourselves, because it has given me interaction, inspiration and spirit to keep on keeping on.

You can check them out here:

www.myspace.com/incaseoffire

http://www.youtube.com/incaseoffiremusic