Album Notes

“Excellent - 4 Stars. This is a group of highly skilled musicians making wonderful, beautiful music.”
(Lauren Phillips, Kindred Spirit Magazine, 2009)

'...it’s got that edge, that passion... it’s a musical manifesto.' Neil King - FATEA (Jun 19, 2009)

'Blistering...Hugely enjoyable...' Ian Mann - The Jazz Mann (Jun 9, 2009)

This is a live album, recorded on a hot summer night at our favourite scruffy arts cafe. 'Rootsy...Folky live and Funky...' captures for us the raw sound and excitement of a whalebone concert. We hope you have as much fun listening as we did on the night!

The idea for a live album came about when we realised that there was a growing difference between our studio recordings and the way we sounded live. Playing in front of an audience has always given us a spark and spontaneity and an extra dimension that’s not always present when we rehearse or record in a studio. We wanted to capture this energy on a CD and thus was born the concept of recording a live album.

We chose Cinnamon in Bridgnorth as the venue, as we had always considered it as our ‘home’ gig, and so on a sweltering 1st of June 2008, we set up our equipment in front of an invited audience and pressed the record button... After a hot and steamy two hour show, we had the raw material in the can. The recording included three guitars, one fiddle and several tracks of general audience noise / heckling / good natured abuse.

That was the easy bit. The following months were spent deciding which tunes to use, editing the tracks and mixing. We had decided that we wanted to keep the music as it was recorded without doing any repairs in the studio, but it took us a while to decide on how to include applause and announcements from the stage. Eventually, we left out all of the talking, as it detracted from the music, but other than that, what you hear on the CD is what we played on the night.

Next came the artwork, which includes the ‘faery’ design to go with the opening track ‘King of the Faeries.’ The deep red of the album colour theme is a reference to Cinnamon where it was recorded. The title was chosen to represent how we feel the album sounds and also as a sly nod to The Who’s ‘Meaty Beaty Big and Bouncy.’

We then handed the recording and artwork over to Torch Music in Berkshire, who mastered the album giving it the final sheen and sizzle. The end result is a CD that sounds just like it did on the night and we are immensely proud of it.

Incidentally if you have the CD you might have realised that there isn’t a two hour show on it There are several unreleased tracks that may see the light of day sometime in the future. Watch this space...

Technical notes:
Steve used a Taylor 314CE plugged into a Fishman Aura pedal and then into an AER combo. We took a line out of the amp and also out of the pedal and chose whichever sounded best on each track. Char used a Yamaha APX9 and an APX5-12 (Twelve string) on two tracks, both plugged into an AER combo - both the AER's are Compact 60's. Sarah used a Headway Band pickup on her fiddle, plugged into a Zoom A2 Acoustic Pedal. All of this was fed into a Yamaha AW1600 Digital Workstation, which we use for all our recordings and there were also a couple of room mics mixed in to capture the live feel.