I’m not usually one for looking back. Primarily because i’m too fucking busy, and there’s more exciting stuff frontwards. Similarly, Everyone Into Position did not set the world alight; far from it. But it was a very important record to me when we were making it, and to this day i respect it’s ambition, it’s scope and it’s fucking fearlessness. I can say that because i didn’t make it alone. It was a mammoth piece constructed by five very different men.
To be honest, the History Of Oceansize is not a book you’ll ever read. We rehearsed, recorded, toured and fought the fuck out of each other. For the most part, nothing of note happened. But in this period, it was do or die. In 2005, we cared a lot.
When we were making what became Everyone Into Position (actually i think i had the title pretty early on) we were pretty much all living together. We liked to tell people we were like the Monkees, in reality we were like The Young Ones but with a more threatening mistrust. Late-20s desperation got us through.
I remember the natural and predictable feeling of fear for making this, our ‘difficult’ second album. As is often said, the debut is like a Greatest Hits, and you make the sophomore to order. We were both nervous and excited.
A year before this record was released, Jon Ellis (the original bass player) had actually quit the band. Things came to a head with the drummer and he couldn’t take it anymore. It was a big deal because he had great ideas and handled the whole electronic side of the band. As well as being a hugely talented bass player, he was my oldest friend. We persuaded him to stay and went off to tour America with Mclusky. We were all pretty much on our best behaviour in a valiant attempt to save the band. It worked, for a little while. Jon stayed long enough to make the record. Took a couple of months out to become a dad. That kind of stuff was highly frowned upon; y’know, growing up, spending time with a family. Even taking a holiday. Not cool. You were perfectly within your rights to skip a couple of days practice cos you took a bunch of bad drugs though.
The writing process itself was interesting, we’d bought a computer and some mics and were making decent demos on our own, much to the delight of our record company. We started writing ‘onscreen’ for the first time ever. Songs like ‘Heaven Alive’ and ‘Meredith’ were pieced together. Steve worked up a 4-track demo for what became ‘Dirty Sweet Smell Of The Summer’. I brought in the chords for parts of ‘Charm Offensive’ and we designed it from scratch as the opening song. The whole album was, from my point of view, designed as the ideal festival headline set. We all went to Glastonbury every year and had some super-drugged up experience watching Radiohead or The Flaming Lips or Mogwai or Cardiacs or whoever. We, or rather i, wanted something that would work on that level. Yeah i know; i was smoking a lot of weed back then.
One day we came in to find all our work from the computer was gone. Like, 6 months, maybe a year’s worth of recordings and sketches. The drummer showed up and told us he’d stayed late working on something, and had saved it to the trash on the laptop. The TRASH. Which, of course, our bass player had just emptied. He emptied it as a matter of course each day to make sure the computer ran as well as it could. Pretty standard. So we lost everything. Jon Ellis briefly quit the band that day too. We coaxed him back. For a while.
So in pre-production we got a lot done. Mark Heron was a great drummer and had recorded a bunch of weird drum loops and was insistent we write something using them. I couldn’t get anything going, which pissed him off, which pissed me off etc. Finally, he told me where he wanted the chord changes - the ride cymbal accents, rather than the kick or snare. Then the chords happened immediately. He worked up some more stuff with Steve and Gambler. So we had a bunch of sections we filed away for a rainy day.
‘Music For A Nurse’ was something Gambler had been playing in his bedroom for at least 2 years. I loved it, but it never got off the ground until one day, in the middle of working on something else, Gambler played it and the drummer joined in, playing in a different time signature to the chords. Fucking BAM. Total lightning moment. I made the call to get the mics set up and record this right now because it was so amazing. We jammed it through. It was perfect. Immediately it was perfectly formed. Come the recording, i changed the key to match ‘Plainsong’ by The Cure. I was going through a real Cure phase back then.
We got together what we thought was gonna be the whole record, and realised we needed another bside. In a single day we threw together the sections derived from the drummer’s loops. We didn’t even rehearse it a whole lot. It was just a cool little instrumental.
We went out and did 5 shows playing nothing but new material, and drove straight to the studio with the songs under our skin. We were on fire.
We did the drums at Monnow Valley. Out in the middle of nowhere. I don’t remember very much about it. Again, I was smoking a lot of weed in those days. I remember i kind of had to, to combat the tension. ‘Mine Host’ came to life from Jon Ellis’ demo. The real drums sounded huge. So that was totally Jon’s thing. Actually i remember i wrote the words for that song the day after a load of ecstacy at a Trail Of Dead gig…
With this new b-side idea from the drummer’s loops coming together, i started hearing a melody for the outro. Started scribbling stuff down. It came really fast. I recorded the lead vocals for the end section - the song had the working title of ‘Sad Jam’. Everyone was onside. It should be promoted from instrumental b-side to hymnal album closer. I was delighted. Durose got stuck into making the incredible choir happen, composing, arranging and layering stacks of vocals. The lyrics were the maybe the quickest i’d ever written. Classic late-20s questioning of everything.
After we did the drums for maybe a week, we moved to Rob Bradshaw’s house in Bredbury. It was called The Works studio. We’d recorded our first 3 EPs there, and he was justifiably bummed out that we never recorded our first album there. His first son, Nathan was born a week before we landed, so there were were intruding on this special time like the oblivious twats we were. Dan Austin was producing, and worked brutally long days. Like, 18 hours at a time. He lived exclusively on Red Bull, sausage sarnies and Amber Leaf. We’d come in on a morning and find him asleep hunched over the faders. We all usually slept on the floor in the pool room, listening to each other shuffle and snore all night. We stayed there for 4 weeks. The last 2 days no-one slept as we frantically tied together the loose ends.
We drove to London to mix. As always we slept at the flat owned by Beggar’s Banquet in Wandsworth. All slept in the same room, except Durose who had a tendency to wake up at 3am craving a smoke. That flat is actually the one in the Biffy ‘Questions And Answers’ video. It was a great novelty at first. Then when you’ve been there a month…
Danton Supple was mixing. He’d just finished the Coldplay record. God knows how they’d persuaded him to do our album…. Anyway, he was super cool and was enthused as i was about the record. He knew what i wanted from ‘…Nurse’ and made the vocal delays really work. I sort of regret insisting the vocals be mixed so low. I wasn’t so confident of my voice in those days, and i allowed myself to be convinced of my shortcomings.
Danton was amazed to learn we’d recorded the whole album in 5 weeks. There was so much work. I suppose, in fairness, we’d recorded a lot of stuff in our rehearsal room that we kept. The electronic stuff, and some guitar textures.
We mastered it at Abbey Road then rehearsed a couple of days in a basement under the Beggar’s place. We then drove straight up to Leeds to play a festival.
Before the gig i met a couple of lads who’d come from Newcastle. The show was running late, so they were gonna have to leave before we played. I told them they were welcome to come home to Manchester in our van, crash over, and go home the next day. They were delighted with that idea.
We got in the van and played them the whole album, which was only 2 days old.
They filmed the whole trip, under the table. Ripped the soundtrack, and distributed the album on our internet message board.
In that year, we lost our bass player, our manager, our tour manager and our record deal. Our next record, ‘Frames’, was truly the sound of a band absolutely refusing to care what anyone thinks anymore. It’s a beautiful sound.
Nevertheless, Everyone Into Position is my favourite Oceansize record. It wasn’t easy, but we were compelled to make the band work. Sometimes, it felt like it really could; that the resulting success could make us believe in each other once and for all, and we could overcome anything. It’s easy to say that it’s the tension that made the records so special, that without the bad vibes we wouldn’t have sounded like that. I really don’t know. I suppose in that respect, i should be thankful, because Everyone Into Position is the barometer by which i’ve measured every record i’ve made since.
Happy birthday, old friend. x
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