I
had been playing for a good while and recording abysmal cover
versions for the delight of the few for quite some time and I thought
I needed to do something different.
Maybe I could write my own songs?
Well
maybe, but the sum of my songwriting efforts up to that point had
been writing what I thought to be Iron Maidenesque crap about Satan
when I was about 15 and when playing bad guitar in a garage metal
band in my late teens when I'd penned the lines in a drink and drug
anthem: “I'm drunk and I'm stoned, I'm ripped to the tits”.
That
wasn't going to cut it. Or was it? Maybe taking myself too seriously
wasn't a good idea? I was sure I could write some vaguely funny songs
and so I gave it a go. Or rather I thought about it intermittently
for about two months before finally putting pen to paper, or finger
to keyboard as it was.
I'd
seen a Ramones covers band in Blackpool and I remembered someone once
joking about the Ramones having sold more t-shirts than albums. This
formed the basis for a song called Shirts which along
with one about pornography and another about what a bastard David
Cameron was became my EP The First Four Minutes.
The
roaring success of The First Four Minutes (six people
told me it was alright and a seventh mystery person actually paid to
download it) inspired me to record a few more songs. Before I knew it
I had a few EPs under my belt. Bad Idea, I've
Made a Huge Mistake and the seasonal Fuck Christmas
all followed.
These
are all on Bandcamp and you can listen to them here.
You can even download them for a small fee if you want, but I
wouldn't really waste my money if I were you. There are a few covers
offerings on there too, some of which aren't that bad (Bond-themed
I've
Been Expecting You
is my own personal favourite).
As
for my own material, I sort of stopped doing it for a long time. If
I'd been in a cool band I would have claimed something about “going
on hiatus”, but no, I simply couldn't be arsed.
And
then one day I read something about a band, I think it was Metallica,
spending about 3 years in the studio recording an album and another
year mixing the bloody thing.
“I
could do it faster than that,” I claimed to nobody but myself and
so the gauntlet was thrown. By myself and to myself.
I
set about writing and had 14 songs ready to go in a matter of hours.
Important themes such as going to the toilet and eating cheese
(although not necessarily at the same time) were covered and I
thought I was on to something.
I
would be using Mrs Tim's computer to record everything and the
GarageBand app is quite amazing for multitrack recording. I was sure
it could assist me in recording a full length album.
There
would be no recording studio for me, just a ukulele, a microphone and
a computer in the spare bedroom, sat among the boxes of assorted bits
and pieces stacked high all around me.
I
soon realised my full length album wasn't going to be as full length
as I thought as due to my injection of no-nonsense DIY punk ethos,
most of the songs were clocking in at under a minute. Oh well.
I
recorded a couple of songs each day and rather than striving for
perfection I just ended up going with the least shit version of each
song I'd managed to perform.
Including
mixing (which wasn't really mixing and was just chopping the endings
off when I'd forgotten to stop recording soon enough and slightly
tweaking the volume levels here and there) the whole process from
starting to write to having a workable(ish) product took just under
48 hours all told. Watch and learn, Metallica.
I
decided I would distribute the album as far as possible and chose to
use RouteNote for this. They don't charge a fee to distribute your
music, but they do take 15% of all earnings. Good luck with that!
I thought, knowing that 15% of
fuck all is still fuck all.
It
turned out I was wrong.
There
is money in streaming music. It's not a fortune, but it makes me
enough to buy a pint every once in a while.
I
suppose once I'd recorded the album, released it and made a small sum
of money from it, I was able to call myself a recording artist and
producer. Nah, I'm still just some bloke with a ukulele, fannying
about and singing daft songs.
Anyway,
the album is called Uke
Hunts Is a Fictional Character
and
there's a link at the bottom of this page to download it from Amazon
if you want. I wouldn't bother with that though as you can stream it
on Spotify,
Google
Play and Deezer.
Go
and have a listen. I earn about 1p for every full play of the album
so please play it at least 340 times so I can buy a pint down my
local.
Ta.
Stay
tuned, uke hunters.
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