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Ghost Dance Discography : Recording Diaries
 Stop The World
Released on Chrysalis 25th September 1989
Catalogue no. CHR 1706
Track listing:
- Down to the Wire
- Celebrate
- Walk In My Shadow
- Cinder Road
- I Will Wait
- Stop The World
- Falling Again
- Heaven And Beyond
- The Love I Need
- Spin The Wheel
The album took shape over a few months in the Spring and Summer of ’89. Having suffered at the hands of Mark Dodson, the choice of the producer we worked with next was largely down to Anne Marie. She had worked with John Brand while still in the Skeletal Family and felt more secure with him at the helm. I knew and liked his work with the Waterboys and, to a lesser extent, Aztec Camera. We began pre-production with him on 17th April and were in the studio recording the following week. All the band had hated living in London for the Dodson sessions - we had rented an apartment off Baker Street for all the band and crew to live together during the initial recording period but everyone was getting on each other’s nerves, we were nearly always broke and travelling across town was a nightmare each day, not to mention Chrysalis hounding us at every turn.
 To remedy this we went rural for the next batch of recording, staying in the Manor, Richard Branson’s luxury studio in leafy Oxfordshire. It was more like a health farm that just happened to include a studio. We spent most of our time in the swimming pool or playing snooker. They had a chef on call and a general nothing is too much trouble attitude. Consequently most nights would find at least half of our 12 strong crew pissed, singing Abba at the top of their lungs, trying to harpoon Branson’s ducks or throw the entire contents of someone’s room into the swimming pool. I’m not sure if a deal was struck and we could only afford to be there for recording bass and drums or whether John Brand wanted to work at Genetic for the rest of the time, but we moved on to Goring on Thames after about a week which had chiefly been devoted to Etch and John getting the backbone down to songs.
Genetic was a similar set-up, although not quite as swish as the Manor. I’d been there before for the second period of recording First and Last And Always and was re-united with engineer Timm Baldwin who had witnessed the madness of Eldritch walking into walls between vocal takes and us generally losing the plot. He seemed to remember it fondly enough.
We set up camp in the main house and worked through about three weeks, pausing to shoot a video for Down To The Wire and complete some other promotional duties including a few scattered gigs.
I can’t remember which order we tackled the tracks, but given the pattern set by Dodson (and picked up on by John Brand) that Richard played the bulk of the guitar tracks and I was seen as ‘the finishing touch’, I made use of the time going through the songs vocally with Anne Marie in a smaller studio we had set up in the grounds. The idea was to try a few things out on the tracks before actually coming to do the vocals for real with John.
I felt there were better performances to be got out of many of the songs which had pretty much settled into being performed the same way as I’d originally shown the ideas to Anne Marie rather than develop into something she had put more of a stamp on. The first bout of recording with John finished on 30th May – I can’t remember if he had only been commissioned to work on a handful of tracks to start with (I suspect he had). We had about five weeks off from recording the album before starting with John again at the Manor. In that time we toured briefly, recorded the Nicky Campbell session for Radio 1 and went to Fairview in Hull to record ‘b’ sides ready for whatever became the next single. The pattern of the previous release was stuck to in that we selected a less expensive studio and went in without a producer to record This Way Up and Nothing Without You.
We had a period of pre-production before the second trip to the Manor where I remember trying out several songs which didn’t make it to the album. I think because the ‘search for the follow-up single’ had begun in earnest we considered Take My Hand which had never been released or even demoed seriously prior to that. Everything Worth Giving had worked quite well in the BBC session and we tried a few things with that – I wasn’t convinced it worked best as a rocker as we tended to do it live and attempted what I jokingly referred to as my ‘Avalon’ type feel on it. Needless to say that one didn’t make the cut. By this time it was becoming quite difficult to gauge people’s motives within the band when suggesting tunes for consideration – John had a hand in writing Everything…and Sea Of Faith, (his first real credits) and he could be seen to favour them, Etch started pushing for some new prog opus he’d dreamt up.. We still hadn’t signed our publishing at this point and there was a good offer on the table which I’m sure the rest of the band were more than aware was mostly going to end up in my pocket if the normal ratio of songwriting credits stayed the same.
It was starting to sound like an all too fucking familiar story – band get money, band bicker, band disintegrate...
July 3rd we were back at the Manor in the period that included the row over recording Celebrate with John Grant. The only high-point I remember in that period was coming back from Georgetown with Anne Marie and hearing the percussion track they’d put down to Falling Again, which included them shaking anything to hand, stomping on gravel and banging discarded drum skins like a demented Gypsy Kings – it had been a baking hot day and there was a storm that night, we listened to the track full blast with the sky cracking over Chipping-Norton, all tired, pissed and best mates again.
We went back to Genetic after the aborted remix of The Love I Need with Spike Stent and got stuck into finishing the album. I played acoustic guitar to Falling Again for the best part of a morning with John Brand telling me, ‘Roddy Frame could’ve done that in one take when he was 16’. Steely had a go but didn’t have as much bite in the way he played it, We even roped one of the technicians in to have a go at keeping the strum pattern constant. Nowadays you’d just loop the best bit, but back then it was drop in after drop in and John obsessed with trying to layer more than one take to get a particular stereo sound. Elsewhere it was more fun, you can even hear me and John Brand cracking up as we do the weird background talking for the extended middle section to Falling Again. Julian Stewart-Lindsay, (Brand’s business partner) recorded piano for Stop The World and arranged and programmed some simulated strings, Anthony Thistlethwaite from the Waterboys came to play Sax on The Love I Need and mandolin and harmonica on Cinder Road. One of the girls from the house (Kate Dahlstrom) played tambourine on Stop The World.
John Brand re-recorded most of I Will Wait (which was wildly out of tune in Dodson’s original). The finished material sounded together and actually ‘included’ Anne Marie but it was all fairly tame to my ears – I missed the edge and the sense of adventure, the others thought it lacked balls. Pardon me if this still didn’t seem like the end of the world when someone was waving close to £100,000 in my face for the publishing. We finished mixing the album on 27th July and went to The Townhouse in London the following week to cut the album and Celebrate as the single.
My diary goes empty for a few weeks after that – the next entries are ‘Celebrate released..’ a week later, ‘..fired Simon Parker as manager’. Anything that followed was just the tail-spin…
Other diaries:
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