Philip J Etheridge

It took a while for Herbie and me to start writing again after we’d finished Padded Room, but we weren’t in any direct hurry to make another album. It was more than a year later that we even talked about it and thought about writing new songs.

When we got started I bought an Elka disc recorder so that I could work with the M1 and save the programmed tracks. It was a bit clumsy and slow – a million miles from today’s systems – but worked OK. As songs appeared I programmed the M1 with drums and other instruments during the winter, spring and early summer of 1995. When we finally decided to record and set a date, we agreed on a rented 8-track reel-to-reel. The drawback was that we had only one week to record and mix the whole thing. Hugely different to the leisurely pace of the first album.

Again, there was not a compressor in sight. For those who don’t know, the compressor is one of the main tools in a recording studio and used on basically everything, but we didn’t own one and had to do without. I wouldn’t have known how to use it even we had had one. The studio monitors were speakers from a living room stereo. Not ideal for listening either.

“Clockwork Heaven” was recorded the last week in July 1995, so it was a major rush to get everything done. Herbie was around for three days before leaving for a holiday with his family, so we did as much as we could while he was there: bass and as many guitar overdubs as possible. Later that week I had help from Brit mate Mark Newman and Mark and I did a lot of backing vocals together, on most tracks in fact, both of us singing into the same mic. Mark still complains that I hassled him for not always keeping time and yes, I did, but he didn’t cry – not once. So that was alright. Another week recording that album would have been wonderful but it was not to be and today I don’t even know where the original tapes are. I still have both the Elka and the M1, but the discs with the programmed music for the M1? No idea. So, a remix is in other words impossible. Herbie’s take on these two albums is that they are what they are: that’s what we could do at that time with our very limited resources. But I can remaster? Perhaps. I’ve already done it once, but that was back when I didn’t know anything about mastering and could perhaps do a better job today. b6vB

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.