Holidays in Eden : December 1997
My memories of writing and recording Holidays In Eden are mixed and rather blurred... the reasons why will become apparent if you read on...
Holidays was the first album that the band wrote and recorded from start to finish with Steve H, so in that sense it was a testing time. When we got together over Seasons End, Steve Rothery, Ian, Pete and myself had been working on material for almost a year and so we had a lot of the component parts which just needed sticking together. H also brought along Easter which was pretty much written. We were probably on our best behaviour and H being the new boy was eager to please. This made for a very positive attitude where nobody questioned what we were writing. With Holidays we had to get used to his creative processes and he ours. H is someone who comes up with an idea for a song and will work on it night and day until he beats it into submission. It is only then that he will step back and look at his handiwork to ask the question, is it any good?
The rest of the band are more into navel gazing until we come up with what we think is a gem of an idea, discarding everything else. We'll work on it to polish it up and then stick it in a box for a while, afraid to play with it in case we ruin it and keen to see if we still like it when we get it out again later. Two completely different approaches which initially clashed to the point where Steve had to go home for 10 days to recuperate! Watching us write was like watching paint dry for him and whilst he'd built gothic castles and blown them up again, we'd sorted out the plumbing and drilled a few holes.
The months in Stanbridge were full of such navel gazing interspersed with jamming and shooting lots of pool. We shot so much, we could have taken on Jimmy White or Stephen Hendry no prob.
My most outstanding memory was the night we decided to dress up as Mexican amigos. We were totally out of our heads on tequila and magic mushrooms. H had never savoured the delights of the fairy fungi before and just had this bizarre face on the whole evening. As well as wearing sombreros, ponchos and not shaving for a week, we'd bought some of those joke Quentin Tarantino action movie style scars. You know, the sort that make you look like Mr Blonde's found you with his cheating girlfriend. We were pretending we'd been in the wars with Butch Cassidy and The Sundance Kid or Bruce Willis or whoever and so had plastered them all over our faces and bods. I remember H looking over at me with eyes like psychedelic saucers and saying “You know, I think it's really great that we've dressed up as Mexicans, drunk all this tequila and eaten all these magic mushrooms... but I'm not sure we should have done it all at the same time. For God's sake take those rubber scars off... they're really freaking me out!” No wonder it took about 8 months to write it!
By the time we got to Hook End to record Holidays with Chris Neil I was a bit nervous. Any guy who had produced artists as bizarre as Celine Dion, Leo Sayer and Sheena Easton was, in my view, a questionable choice. Working with him turned out to be fun but it was a bit like being in the studio with a Blue Peter presenter who'd always had one he'd prepared earlier. I got pissed off at the speed of the recording - we recorded and mixed it in 10 weeks - which might be a long time for The Spice Girls but is certainly nowhere near long enough for us! I wasn't allowed to experiment with my bits (oo er missus!) and felt dissatisfied with the resulting keyboard parts. When we play This Town and 100 Nights now live we add a lot of extra embellishments to the middle section which have developed since and it goes down a treat with the audience. I felt there was no art in it ... just lean and mean commerciality. In hindsight I reckon that was fine for songs like No One Can which is a classic pop song but it was less appropriate for the more dark and moody stuff.
Anyway, Chris was a good laugh to work with. There was one time when were in the studio together working on something and the door had locked itself again. Someone was banging away to come in so I went to let them in. Behind me, Chris had pulled his trousers down and was pulling them up with a guilty look on his face as the rest of the band piled in. I wondered why they were all looking at me funny until I turned round and saw Chris!
