My Exciting Life In ROCK (part 1): 'This Is Not A Library'

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When I write about these gigs I usually look back at my old webpage blog entries to see what else was going on around then, and sometimes I notice certain ideas or CONCERNS popping up again and again, betraying my state of MIND at the time. Reading around the release of our second album 'This Is Not A Library' - and, in fact, for much of the THREE YEARS before then - I can't help but notice one specific phrase cropping up again and again. "I think the album's almost finished!"

Honestly, it's a bit embarrassing QUITE how often this pops up, starting with "This'll be finished soon!" around 2000, changing to "It's almost finished" mid-2001, and then becoming "This is it! It's finished NOW!" again and again in 2003. And by the way - 2003! Is it me, or does that seem like last year? I know it WASN'T, but whenever I hear people talk about Events Of 2003 I think "Eh? But that was the other week wasn't it?" Maybe it's because, for me, SO MUCH happened then that it's still fresh in the mind. INDEED this would explain why the years 1988 and 1995 ALSO still seem fairly recent to me, as MUCH occurred in them.

Anyway, the reasons I kept thinking "It's finished! Nearly!" are TWOFOLD. Firstly, there were a lot of MILESTONES passed during early 2003, like the end of recording, the end of mixing and the end of the big meeting in the pub to argue about the tracklisting. The second, probably more pertinent, reason I said it so often is that I REALLY wanted it to be true. The album that became "This Is Not A Library" was begun in 2000 not long after our first album, "Say It With Words" was released. One of the first songs finished was "Easily Impressed" which I got SO excited about I insisted on releasing as a single, thereby using up half the OTHER so far recorded songs as b-sides. A year or so later we'd nearly finished the NEXT batch of when I had a sudden SPLURGE and wrote a whole OTHER album's worth of material which I felt HAD to go on THIS one, even if that meant turning it into an hour long MEISTERWERK.

I'd desperately hoped that everything would be finished by the end of 2002 as I was moving to London in the New Year, and that would make it even MORE difficult to arrange SESSIONS in Leicester. Unfortunately EFFICIENCY is RARELY part of the Game plan Of ROCK, so I ended up having to come BACK to Leicester a number of times to finish it off, and when the whole thing was FINALLY recorded and mixed I said "THERE! That's it! It's DONE!"

It wasn't. A few weeks later I had to go back and put all the tracks in order and, crucially, fix THE GAPS. THE GAPS are pretty much THE most important thing about compiling an album - never mind the songs themselves, never even mind what order they go in (and surely, that's easy - Best Song / Fast Song / Slow Song to start with, end Side One [YES SIDE ONE] with Weird Song, start Side Two [YES] with Second Best Song, end with Longest Song, then fill in the rest from there), it's how much SILENCE there is in between each song that matters. The dread Automatic Two Second Gap speaks VOLUMES about how much CARE goes into some records.

Once THAT was done I proudly announced "It's FINISHED!" on the webpage... only then to get embroiled in MASTERING. Technical Terminology Explained: MASTERING is when you pay a man £100 to press a button on a machine that makes everything sound louder. Next day I was singing for all the world to hear "that's the final thing, AT LAST!" and the day after THAT I was having to sort out the ARTWORK, and THEN get on with the Multimedia Extras.

Technical Terminology Explained: CDs can hold two "sessions" of information on them, one is the actual music that plays in your CD player, the other is DATA your computer can read. "This Is Not A Library" came with a MASSIVE suite (SUITE!) of Dynamic Pages containing lyrics and sleeve notes for all the songs, demo versions, unused songs, a band history and a HUGE PILE of OTHER stuff because, well, just because I could fit it on and thought people might like it. It seemed to me - and it still DOES seem to me - that in a time when people can easily download the music to an album, one way to persuade them to buy a CD would be to put extra CONTENT onto them. It's INCREDIBLY easy to do, you can put MOUNTAINS of stuff on a CD and when people realise it's actually there they tend to be CHUFFED. And yet The Music Industry has never got behind it in any way and prefers instead to combat "piracy" by a) complaining b) trying to enforce ridiculous laws that will pay Phil Collins a tenner every time somebody LOOKS at a radio and c) CRYING. And why is this? Because they are IDIOTS.

ANYWAY, there was THAT, there was arranging distribution, writing press releases, getting mailing lists and all manner of OTHER things until finally, FINALLY, there was the real absolute LAST thing that needed to be done before it WAS finished: MANUFACTURING. Technical Terminology Explained: MANUFACTURERING is when you pay several men LOTS of money to spend several weeks avoiding your phone calls and promising delivery on days when nothing will happen before EVENTUALLY providing you with the CDs you asked for plus a random number of extra ones. Apparently CD plants are INCAPABLE of turning off The Machine at the right time, so you ALWAYS get extra copies of your album, which you have to pay for.

SO, after the traditional four or five attempts to get the CDs (including at least TWO days taken off work to sit by the door LEAPING every time someone walks past in case THAT'S the delivery van then ringing at 4.59pm to be told "Oh no, it won't come TODAY - why would you think THAT?") the day came when they FINALLY arrived. We didn't get them ALL the first time, only a hundred or so as the rest weren't ready, and I had to assemble them myself, but when I did, when I was actually HOLDING a copy of our album in my hand, I felt a massive RUSH of emotion, mixing joy, relief, DISBELIEF and FEAR all in one. Would it actually WORK, I wondered? I put it into the CD player, then a computer: ALL WAS WELL!

I went, of course, to the pub. The next week was spent sending out promo copies before myself and The Data On My Disc went on holiday to celebrate our second anniversary. Whilst we were away I WORRIED: would it all be worth it? Would people like it? Would anybody BUY it? Or would it just slip away into the ether, heard only by us and then forgotten?

I needn't have worried. ADVENTURE was ahead!

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