Yes, I know what you are thinking, and you ARE right. The Wonder Stuff HAVE released more than five albums. To my ears though, a long time Stuffies fan, some of their best work is contained within the five new studio albums they have released since Miles Hunt resurrected the name as a recording entity around twelve years ago. Luckily, the self confessed “gobshite” himself has agreed to talk God Is In The TV, each day this week, through the making and circumstances of these albums in detail..
PART ONE – ESCAPE FROM RUBBISH ISLAND (2004)
I initially started writing songs for this album in a home studio that I had set up in London with bass player Mark McCarthy in 2003. The two of us were sharing a flat with our good friend Laney and I had invested in a new computer and some recording software. At this point I hadn’t heard Mark play bass and had no real intention at all of making an album with him. We were just mates sharing a place to live occasionally making a bit of a noise when we had nothing better to do with ourselves.
By way of getting my head around the new software I would loop drum beats and ask Mark to just jam some bass lines over them. Immediately I was impressed at how tight he played with the loops and before really giving an actual project much thought I found myself recording guitar parts to the bass lines he had laid down.
During the same period I was flying out to Los Angeles quite regularly to work with my old friend Clint Mansell on a couple of film scores. It didn’t take me long to figure out that the world of movie composing wasn’t for me but it was interesting being in the States so much at that time. I know Californians can often appear to be a bunch of nitwits but their ‘can do’ attitude started rubbing off on me and I began to see certain British characteristics in a new light. Compared to the people I was spending time with in the States the people back home seemed like a bunch of whiners with scant intention of ever actually doing anything about the causes of their grievances. Blair’s Britain was not the place we thought it would be after we put him in the big chair in 1997 and I had never felt more like leaving in my whole life.
Over a period of a couple of months I started to see what Mark and I were working on as an album taking shape. I was aware that whatever the record might turn out to be it wasn’t going to have much in common with my two previous solo releases Hairy On The Inside and The Miles Hunt Club.
Sometime in early 2003 The Wonder Stuff’s original manager, Les Johnson, introduced me to a young producer friend of his that owned a studio in Stratford Upon Avon, Matt Terry. Matt was great friends with Les’ son, Luke, who I had known since he was six or seven years old. By 2003 Luke was 22 years old, the same age I was when we formed The Wonder Stuff, and it was pretty obvious that he had grown into a world class drummer. He kindly offered to replace the loops and drum programming that Mark and I had been working to with some live drum performances.
Around the same time that Mark & I were making regular trips up to Stratford my managers started their own record label, IRL. I played them some of the embryonic recordings of the songs that we were working on in Stratford and they were both very keen to see it all turn into a full album and release it for me.
Of course it’s worth remembering that right up until December 2003 there was a line up, featuring two of the original members of The Wonder Stuff, still touring. It wasn’t a very happy camp and after one brief conversation with the drummer, Martin Gilks, sometime in 2002 it was pretty obvious to me that this line up would never make another record together again. So we were just out doing occasional gigs and picking up easy money. It was horribly cynical and I was always happy to return to my project with Mark McCarthy after being away gigging with The Wonder Stuff.
By December 2003 The Wonder Stuff was over. Martin Gilks had been trying his best to manage the band and after a heated conversation between the two of us in the dressing room of our final show together in Birmingham he informed my manager, David Jaymes, that he was no longer prepared to work with me.
I tried several times to contact Martin to have the matter explained to me in greater detail but he refused to speak to me directly. So, naturally, I took it that Martin Gilks had left The Wonder Stuff. Soon after I was informed that the fiddle player also had problems with working with me and would be joining Gilks in leaving the band.
This was not the first time the two of them had threatened to leave the band so I took little notice of this new threat. Until Gilks informed my manager that I was to clear out my equipment from the band’s lock up facility and expect a final payment in April 2004 when he was to close the band’s bank account. Having done as I was asked I honestly gave little thought to my band no longer having a full line up, I was far more interested in getting the album that I had been making with Mark McCarthy finished.
As I was doing exactly that one of the financial backers of my manager’s fledgling label, IRL, suggested to me that if I was to release a new album then I should release it under The Wonder Stuff moniker. Him being a finance guy all he was really interested in was a return on his investment and arguably there was more commercial cache to a new Wonder Stuff album than there was another Miles Hunt solo album. I had several conversations with my managers and eventually talked myself into releasing Escape From Rubbish Island as the fifth studio album by The Wonder Stuff. The drummer and fiddle player had resigned and the work that I had put in on this new album was exactly the same work that I had put in on every other Wonder Stuff album; songwriter, guitarist, singer. So why not?
The album was mixed in Stratford Upon Avon with Matt Terry and when we first came away with the finished product I was happy with what we had got. So much so, that we decided to tour the record as a live band.
My first call was to Malc Treece, the original guitarist in The Wonder Stuff, I told him my intention was to tour as The Wonder Stuff, with a new drummer and bass player, and that I would very much like him to be part of the band. He agreed, a UK tour was booked and Escape From Rubbish Island was released on IRL in the UK in September 2004.
I have very fond memories of that tour in 2004. I invited Andres Karu, the drummer that I had worked with on my Miles Hunt Club project in 2001/2002, over from New York to join us. And what an asset he was. Not only a fabulous drummer but an extraordinarily talented musician and beautiful man to boot. Malc seemed to slip into the new line well enough, happily learning a few of the new songs to play on tour and as keen as ever to play the old favourites. It had been seven years or more since Mark McCarthy had played live and as he had a hand in writing some of the new material he was as happy as a pig in shit to be out on the road again.
The Wonder Stuff was finally a happy camp again with everyone excited and keen to be getting on with what a band should be getting on with. It had been well over a decade since this could be said about us. The ex members tried to cause us trouble by hi-jacking the band’s website, claiming that this new touring version of The Wonder Stuff was nothing but Miles Hunt and a bunch of his mates going out playing Wonder Stuff songs. To which I could only ask ‘isn’t that what it always had been?’ But some straight talking from a good lawyer soon sent them on their way.
Once we’d toured the UK in 2004 we were invited to go and tour the USA by my old friend and Wonder Stuff US agent, Marc Geiger. Geiger had also set up a record label in the US and was happy to release ‘Escape From Rubbish Island’ in order to promote the tour.
By now I had become slightly dissatisfied with some of the mixes that we had settled upon releasing in the UK and I saw the opportunity to release the album in the US as a chance to readdress them. Add to which, Malc Treece had added some extra guitar parts to a few of the songs while we had toured the album in the UK and I very much wanted to add those to the recordings. This explains why there are two different versions of the album, one released in the UK, the other in the US later in March 2005.
Listening to the record these days I would still maintain that there are some great songs on it. However, I was smoking an awful lot of pot back in the early 2000’s and I can still hear my self-induced narcosis all over the record. The vocal performances are lazy and when I try for the higher notes my voice sound strained. Indeed the overall sound of the record is muted, which is exactly the effect that pot has on me. I should’ve had a clearer head to make the record but hey… what can I say? Lesson learned, I’ll get it right next time.
Photo credit: featured image – Nick Sayers
Tomorrow: Suspended By Stars.
