Play this in the background, AW friends – a 93-minute rollercoaster of musical superbity from mid-90s Belfast. Read the story below if you wish, but don’t feel obliged…
‘Alive in Belfast: The Warehouse Sessions’ (2CD) was recorded on a wing and a prayer over four nights in April 1995, and released locally in a run of 1,000 a couple of months later. CDs were new and the ability to self-release them was just catching on. It was, at that time, a much more expensive prospect than it is even now. I recall using a pressing place in Dublin, Trend, that seemed very swanky. It required hard cash (or a banker’s draft) up front. These days, you phone a broker up and they outsource it to somewhere in Eastern Europe and you’ll still get change out of a grand, which you’ll have paid by credit card, probably 30 days later.
The whole project cost over £8,000 – 16-track recording and mixing, photography, design, pressing. I wrote extensive booklet notes and had fun with Mark Case designing the booklet. I crossed my fingers that enough people might want to buy a double CD of unsigned local artists – ‘unsigned’ being a meaningful word in those days, when there was still a record industry, and the dream of someone at EMI giving you a platform to play to the world (with a fat cheque attached). These days, I don’t think anyone is really chasing the ‘signed’ thing because it means so much less – you can just get on and do it all yourself: recording, promotion and distribution have become so much easier and accessible and geography is less of a barrier to being heard. Then again, nobody really makes any money out of music any more. It’s a funny old world.
Back in 1995, my plan was to help some of the great acts I was hearing every week at the Warehouse – a kind of ‘continuity Rotterdam Bar’ run by said bar’s characterful proprietors Chris Roddy and Ernie Magennis while the Rott was supposedly getting a makeover – be heard more widely. Maybe the Chairman of EMI would open his door once he heard the results… Well, he didn’t. The ‘Irish News’, for whom I was writing about local music at the time, gave 10%, the artists involved all made a contribution – except Henry McCullough, who was so ‘old school’ he simply didn’t understand the new world where artists had to do it for themselves (so I let him away with it) – amounting to 25% and Jo, a friend in the UK reissues business, loaned the sizeable pressing costs.
Barring promo copies and participant copies, the CD sold out. Phew… I had my instinctive ‘historian’ hat on at the time, and the CD captured a fair bit of stage chat and ambience from the recording nights as well as two tracks by each artist – or three in the case of David Ballantine and Tiberius Minnows. The reason for the latter was simply because they’d chosen two songs that didn’t include ‘Computer Game’, which I thought was madness; the reason for the former was because David had a song with ‘Belfast’ in the title and caught me in a sentimental mood. Well, there was room on the discs…
I can’t recall exactly why, save that there was a cash flow situation of some sort, probably to do with Outlet distribution, but by late 1995 the idea of releasing a small run of cassettes – cheap to produce – raised its head. Holywood-born composer Shaun Davey very kindly loaned the £500 necessary. Again, with that historian mindset as part of my thinking, if we were going to do a quick cassette ‘best of’ version of the album, I might as well write some new notes and add some exclusive tracks.
We mixed an extra Disreali Gears track, ‘Wanna Be’, from the April live sessions as the cassette version’s opening number and I recall there being a plan to mix another Oige vocal track – 19-year-old Cara Dillon’s voice being one of the sensations of the original release. In the event, probably to do with the flow of the cassette, I opted to feature again Oige’s CD vocal item ‘My Donald’ as well an edit of their instrumental CD item ‘The Maids of Mitchelstown’, which closed side one of the cassette nicely. Actually, ‘My Donald’ was an instance of two worlds intersecting, as I knew Owen Hand, an Edinburgh contemporary of Bert Jansch in the early 60s, who had written the song – which many, including Oige, by that point assumed to be traditional. My interest in British folk history would result in ‘Dazzling Stranger’, a book about Jansch and his 60s milieu, in 2000 – but to most mid-90s Belfast musicians I was just a fellow who wrote about local music for a local paper.
I had hoped that Tamalin and the Bedhangers would have been available for the April gigs/recording nights, but the former had just signed with Grapevine for their (sole) album and weren’t allowed while the latter wanted to do their own thing. At the time of recording, I don’t think I knew Asterix, Strawman, the Mandelbrot Set, Peacefrog or Watercress. All five were happy to contribute tracks of their own to the cassette, snappily titled ‘(Still) Alive in Belfast: The Warehouse Sessions’, as was James Devlin in the guise of his new band North – the fabulous Devlin Law being in the throes of amicably splitting by December 1995 (playing a final show in hometown Magherafelt on New Year’s Eve). All of the new tracks were recent studio recordings advertising recent or forthcoming albums by the artists concerned, save for Watercress’ track, which was, happily, a live number recorded at the Warehouse in late 1994, a few months before our grand endeavour.
While the 2CD original had a quasi-documentary feel, the focus on the cassette version was almost totally music. There was the odd intro or outro retained but, in some cases, we cut applause in order to create a sharp transition into the next song – the abrupt ending of Brian Houston’s live ‘Alright’ into the explosive beginning of Peacefrog’s studio ‘No Songs’ being a good example. Naturally, there was a bit of whimsy at the end of the 90+ minutes of seamless musical superbity, in the form of lugubrious Good Things frontman Paul Jackson expressing a pithy view about the quality of his band’s set (which I recall as enduring a number of distractions and malfunctions, but still being legendary, of course) and Disreali Gears guru Paul Archer laughing heartily in passing. After that, an uncredited and barnstorming 30 seconds of set-closing music and ‘goodnight and God bless’ from Henry McCullough… followed by a Cool FM radio ad for the CD version. No prizes for guessing who scripted it.
The audio in this montage was sourced from the master DAT copy of the cassette edition, transferred to WAV and with a bit of extra work on each track in terms of relative volumes and EQ using Roxio software – nothing complicated.
For the simple montage itself, I’ve just used the photos and text on each band that was recorded at the Warehouse from the booklet to CD version followed by the text from the cassette version (usually updating their story). For the half-dozen acts exclusive to the cassette, I’ve used their text from the cassette and a period photo from somewhere else (mostly from the ‘Live at the Belfast Empire’ CD, which I was asked to curate on the back of ‘AIB’ over live sessions in May 1996). The one exception is the mysterious Mandelbrot Set – not the same as an Australian act of that name operating at the same time. All I could find was an online image of their sole CD. As I recall, they’d managed to get Arts Council money to start a record label – which was a cunning ploy to record and release a record by themselves. Following the 93 minutes of music, in the montage, I’ve added my general notes from the cassette along with the acknowledgements. It’s history.
Did anyone on the album go on to do anything in music? Well, yes. Cara Dillon (Oige) and Foy Vance (soul Truth) have international solo careers, Linley Hamilton (Soul Truth) is one of Ireland’s leading jazz performance, education and media personalities, Iain Archer is a successful backroom music business person, a co-writer for hire for various household names. Johnny Quinn (drummer with the New Brontes and Disreali Gears) did okay in Snow Patrol, while both Feargal and Cormac O’Kane from the Brontes have carved ongoing backroom careers in music-related media and recording/producing, respectively.
At a cottage industry level, Brian Houston has remained a professional international troubadour ever since. On a part-time/labour of love level, Dave McLarnon (Peacefrog), James Devlin and Keith Law (Devlin Law), Ali MacKenzie (Bush Turkeys), Bruce McClements (Strawman), Brendan Monaghan (Cattle Company), and Mickey Rafferty (Tiberius Minnows) remain active in creating and performing original music in NI. And long may they do so!
The Warehouses lasted about 18 months (1994-96). After that, Chris and Ern reopened the Rotterdam Bar as it was. They never did get around to those refurbishments. As for CD/cassette designer Mark Case, well, he’s since designed numerous further CD and book projects for me – but in spite of all that, he became an award-winning design guru.
And me… well, I was never heard of again.
1. Wanna Be – Disreali Gears**
2. Sailing On – Tiberius Minnows
3. Live the Life – Asterix*
4. Mu – Disreali Gears
5. Take my Time – Iain Archer
6. River of Love – Devlin Law
7. Wait for a While – The Mandelbrot Set*
8. My Donald – Oige
9. Creatively Constipated – New Brontes
10. Rainbows – David Ballantine
11. The Maids of Mitchelstown [edit] – Oige
12. My Bloody Head – Strawman*
13. Alright – Brian Houston
14. No Songs – Peacefrog*
15. Darkest Hour – Cattle Company
16. The Letter – Soul Truth
17. Think Too Much – Oliver’s Army
18. Uncomplicate It – The Good Things
19. Everybody’s Getting Older – North*
20. Failed Christian – Henry McCullough
21. I Feel Like – Bush Turkeys
22. Photograph – Watercress***
23. Alive in Belfast radio ad*
24. Coda
* Bonus studio track
** Bonus live track from the April 1995 Warehouse sessions
*** Bonus live track from the Warehouse, late 1994
Lovely stuff, Colin.