Pretty, Pretty, Pretty Good.

Last night's practice was our best for a long time. Instead of worrying about recording 'Mirrorball', we decided to see how far we could take the 4 new songs...

‘Mirrorball’ is now 100% finished and it was nice to play it as a whole band with Nicky on drums on Coz on backing vocals (Coz always seems to leave practice before we jam it and Nicky hasn't hadn't heard it since we added vocals) It’s sounds great! Nicky's drumming on top of the drum machine is so tight. He also manages to do some terrific fill-ins. Very LCD Soundsystem-esque...

We then worked on a new song that Coz had written on the Korg using the arpeggiator. She sang and played Korg whilst Sauce played guitar and Mark and Nicky played bass and drums respectively. Technically, it's the most advanced thing we've done biut it sounded really cheesy in a Coldplay/U2/M.O.R way (something I could imagine being played on MOTD2) We managed to de-cheese with me doing my Iggy Pop impression over the top and to work on the dynamics of the song. Lovely piece of guitar work by Sauce too.

Then we worked on ‘Stardust’ (it's about the David Essex film of the same name) but the trouble is I use exactly the same melody as Coz’s song. Looks like I’ll have to go back to the drawing board with that. We're happy with the music (it's just 2 chords) but we run the risk of sounding like Interpol or, worse still, The Editors (that'll be the Korg strings!) I'd like to meet up with Coz this week to see if we can't salvage it somehow.

We ended the night with the song with the first song we developed as a 5-piece. Mark takes on vocal duties this time. The verse reminds me of the verse to‘Scary Monsters’ and the chorus sounds like 'Peaches' by The Stranglers. Then it mutates into a Samba groove. Very different do anything we've done before.

Overall we’re really pleased with the way things are going. We've definitely developed a new sound now we have Coz and Sauce on board. We recorded each song on mini-disc and it was really interesting hearing them back. I think we're onto a winner!