When our old band Donovan’s Brain (aka First Cab) decided to call it a day in 1992, immediately on the agenda was to make an album with David “Herbie” Parkin, who had played bass in Donovan’s for a couple of years. I had my Korg M1 programmable synthesizer, which I’d already used on an album of Herbie songs (Herbie Parkin & the Quiet Life), programming everything apart from guitars and vocals. The only option at that time was for us to use my Fostex 4-track cassette deck, my constant companion for several years.
Herbie suggested Padded Room as a name and we settled on that. The first album was recorded entirely in my bedroom on Mossvägen in Sandviken, using the M1 synthesizer for drums, bass, and other digital instruments. I had no technology to sync the synthesizer, that came later. Instead, I had to mix each backing track as it was programmed on the M1 and record the audio mix to a cassette on the Fostex, in real-time, in stereo. Thereafter I could add guitars on the remaining two tracks, mix all four tracks to stereo on another cassette deck, then put the cassette with the stereo mix back in the Fostex, freeing up two new tracks for vocals.
Doing that for 12 tracks took 18 months. Göran Nyström, my Men On The Border partner 20 years later, contributed a new song to the album (Dreams), and we covered the South African Radio Rats hit ZX-Dan. Apart from that, all were written by Herbie, myself, or both of us together. Just like the current album. Guitarists Ulf Andersson and Niclas Carron and drummer Björn Hammarberg (all from Donovan’s) also guested on that album. This was our very lo-fi debut, our “Sgt. Peppers”, but without the white lab coats the engineers at Abbey Road were forced to use in the 60s. One of these days I’ll get it out on Spotify.