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Ghost Dance Discography : Recording Diaries
 A Word To The Wise
Released on Karbon 10th August 1987
Catalogue no. KAR 608T
Track listing:
- When I Call
- Fools Gold
- Cruel Light
- Holding On
After the opening flurry of releases it seemed like forever waiting for this 12" to come out. A lot of contributing factors - the ongoing 'will we/won't we sign to a major?', the addition of drummer John Grant to the line-up and a period of time for him and Richard to bed in fully, the beginnings of our tensions with Karbon (which weren’t so much to do with our relationship with Nick, just a growing frustration watching bands like All About Eve leap-frog over us and looking for someone to carry the can). The period was obviously frustrating for the band and the following. If you were into us you could only buy six original songs on vinyl – we had hardly ever played Yesterday Again live and few of the other 5 songs sounded close to the full band versions.
We had regularly introduced new songs to the set, but you couldn’t get to hear I Will Wait, Take My Hand, Dr Love, Turn To Me, Born To Be Your Slave, A Town Called Sympathy, When I Call or countless others without buying a crappy cassette recording of a gig from Camden Market. We had actually been in the studio any number of times recording in ’87 before the sessions which led to A Word To The Wise.
We tried Dr Love a couple of times, once on our own at F.O.N in Sheffield and once at the Slaughterhouse in Driffield with David Batchelor producing. The recording sessions were hampered by the clouding of whether we were recording our next single to release on Karbon or if we were making demos to convince a Major to meet our asking price for the band.
The Amazon sessions to record When I Call and Fools Gold were a financial gamble for us at the time – by far the most expensive recording studio we had used and we knew we would probably have to go back to Woodlands to record 'the b-sides' as well. David Batchelor didn't come cheap either, given that his main gig then was working live with Big Country who were near the height of their appeal. All the band, the crew and David lived together in a small house on the outskirts of Liverpool for the period of recording. Amazon was ‘very Liverpool’, with McCulloch trying new material in the smaller studio while we were there.
In terms of chronology, three of the tracks were among the first I’d written and date back to that period in ’85 when it wasn’t clear if I was going to carry on in the Sisters or go my own way. The exception was Fools Gold which was further proof of Etch’s ability to turn out a good tune when he felt like it – the same formula was adopted as with Grip, he simply gave me the backing track to finish off. I really like the song although the actual title as been the source of some mild regret.
When I Call was there from day one of Ghost Dance – we played it in the first gig when we were still a three piece, we demoed it in the Slaughterhouse in late ’85, and although it assumed epic proportions in the final recording, the core ingredients were much the same.
I lifted the key up from the first drafts based on the penny dropping about Anne Marie’s vocal range, in fact some bits moved up and some bits stayed were they were leaving the ‘and let time reach out…’ section as a distinct part whereas it was originally just the same riff as the chorus. Cruel Light and Holding On were older tunes and not really favourites of ours which leads me to suspect we might have already been lining up which songs we wanted to save for the first album (assuming everything went to plan and we were signed and secured a decent budget).
Again there are fragments of lyric which had surfaced on Sisters demos – the original version of Marianne (First And last And Always) had contained the line ‘only you can say the words I need to hear’ which forms part of the chorus to When I Call. The lines ‘I see them cut and die, see the flowers bleed..’ from Cruel Light was actually first used as part of a draft of another Sisters’ song I’d written called Temple Of Love (not the song we now know and love by that name).
Recording was much more demanding with the bigger line-up and David’s attention to detail. We’d chosen him because of his connection with the Sensational Alex Harvey Band – a band he had produced and arranged, and one I had grown up listening to and adored. They had the distinction of being a band we all liked – they were prog enough for Etch, Scottish enough for John and crazy enough for Anne Marie and Steely. David was a producer in the fullest sense of the word, really taking care to get the best sounds and performances and layering the whole thing up methodically. The version of When I Call included multiple guitar tracks, Hammond Organ and guest vocals from Daniel Mass of Salvation. Richard and John both proved to have decent voices so they feature on backing vocals as well (David Batchelor is also part of the choir for Fools Gold). The producer allowed Anne Marie to sing in the control room without headphones, something she’d been keen to try for a while and he got some good performances out of her – why we didn’t consider him as producer for the Chrysalis stuff I will never know.
We went back to Woodlands to do the other two tunes in a fairly workman-like way. I think we spent some of our time there editing two versions of Fools Gold together. David had actually suggested a shortening of the first chorus in the song which I just couldn't see working – later live versions of the song included his idea of just using three lines ( I came round to his way of thinking, it just took a little time).
The highlight of the Woodlands session would have to be the Etch inspired singalong outro to Holding On which along with Steely’s guitar break helped a song which had never really quite clicked for us live.
The cover was pieced together by me, Dave Ashmoore (singer with the Hollow Men) and the soon to be legendary Muckle. To be honest it looks a bit of a mess now with the Oriental and Celtic motifs and the Irish Pub font, but the motivation seems clear – to let you see all the members of the band and present a glossy, more straight-forward version of what we did. All the photos were taken by Rosie Stills one mad afternoon at her house in South London. Safe to say the two people on the front were not mad keen on the photo but I thought it made Etch in particular look cool and represented a sort of thank you from me for their loyalty – it was two years pretty hard slog from when we’d first started to the release of that record. I cannot think why we called the collection of songs A Word To The Wise when the other 12” singles had all had a title track (although it’s true that it probably sounds better than naming it When I Call).
Other diaries:
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