"Retrospective"

OK, I see, some of the recent gig press releases have mentioned a forthcoming "retrospective" (I'm really not sure about that word). Is "Greatest Hits" a better phrase?

We shall see...surely that would only apply if it was full of old stuff....how interesting!

[currently mastering a "retro"...no..."greatest"....no...well something....]

Posted By Simon Thornton @ 1:09:45 AM  trackback []  comment(s) []  

Sorry for the recent silence...

I've been a very very busy boy the last 8 weeks or so. Like properly busy. A bit of a shock to the system, I have to admit.

I've been finding, putting in an offer, getting it accepted, sorting out the money, and finally today exchanging on a flat (or "apartment" for any US readers) I've been after for ages. Hence I am currently surrounded by a flat full of boxes, most of which are still empty as I'm still trying to work out how to get my whole life (including a whole studio, let's not forget) into them, after which there'll be slight challenge of how to get them from A to B (luckily B is only about quarter of a mile away from A, but distance is never the problem anyway!) without it costing a small...not make that large...fortune. Moving is so expensive!

It's taken 3 months to get to this point from the inital offer (and another month before that when I first saw it, Christmas got in the way) so you'd think I'd be a little more ready than this. Well, no, not as such. I mean I thought there was no real point getting too involved in the packing thing until I was sure I was going somewhere. That's my excuse and I'm sticking to it (for now). Thing is, it's been 7 years since I last moved, almost exactly in fact, and I have accidently-on-purpose purchased a few more possessions since then. About 3 rooms worth, in fact. The place I'm moving to is actually a little smaller than the flat I'm in now, just one of those things, but it is lovely and nice - my current home has the space I always wanted, but lacked many of the other things that would have been good to have!

As for a certain FBS 'thing' people have spotted around recently (or some details of it anyway) - see the comments in the post before this one to see what I'm refering to - well, as you can probably guess by now, I can't really confirm or deny any of that until TPTB have made a proper announcement about it (if 'it' exists at all of course). If there were such a 'thing', and again I'm not saying there is/will be, I might suggest some of the details people have read about might not be quite right. This vague thing is fun, no?

Oh, I suppose I can say that 'it' (if indeed there is an 'it' blah blah blah) is not connected in any way with that picture of a box with smiley face on I posted a while back. That, if anyone still cares, was a CD and T-shirt package put together by Universal Music, containing a bunch of FBS tracks for promotional purposes only. I think it had 10 I tracks on it, to be honest I can't remember and now it's all packed up so I can't check - see how self-referential I can be! There's only a handful around, I have one, Norman has one and I've only seen 3 others. I took the picture on the front of the box - it's actually one of Norman's smiley toys sitting on the pebbles outside his house, and I thought it all rather cute and liked it being used like that. So there you go.

David Byrne is back over at the end of April, hopefully, to continue work on the "Here Lies Love" album project. It's been very hard to schedule things recently, with all Norman's gigs in various parts of the planet, my impending move (which puts my studio out of action for a while, making things even trickier), Tom Cagedbaby's touring commitments (he's helping us out big time on many of the tracks, we just needed more hands!) and of course David's movements and plans....there has been mucho diary filling and reshuffling. So, early next week Norman, Tom and myself will be doing some more work on the 23 tracks, copying all the Pro Tools sessions on to an external Firewire disk, getting that sent over to NYC were David is, where he can do some more work on them, after which he'll turn up in Brighton again for us to do another 4 or 5 days of very hard work! This many tracks really is hard to get our heads around at times, but we're getting there, and we think the end result will well be worth all the effort and organising.

I will try and be better at writing stuff up here after the moving is all sorted - I mean I do have a Myspace thing now, but only because everyone seems to have one (and I couldn't let the missus run round on there unchecked could I? Hahaha)... but I'm not sure I prefer the idea of blogging over there to my little corner of the Internet here.

It's looking like I'm gonna have a nice little bit of spare time come mid-May, so I want to give poor old mm.com a proper overhaul (I don't think I ever actually finished fixing some of the CSS in this version, oops) and try and get back on the blogging wagon, so to speak.

Posted By Simon Thornton @ 8:10:09 PM  trackback []  comment(s) []