The Long Goodbye

Michael and Jon Cullen with Bryan Randsfield on drums. Tough but sometimes sentimental, angry but tuneful, ringing guitars that rip and tear. If you ever carried a torch for someone who forgot who you were this record is playing your song.

Michael's Production Notes

"We made a series of recordings in Damien Gerard Studio A in the old Ultimo (Sydney, Australia) site in 1992 and 1993. The best of these became The Long Goodbye. Of course it's a bit artless to pinch the title from Raymond Chandler's greatest Phillip Marlowe novel and I apologise in advance for our cheek - but we were younger then. And I loved the bittersweet nobility of that book.

We had had a lot of trouble getting a decent drummer until Bryan Randsfield responded to our add in The Drum. He was a Kiwi guy straight off the plane who I think had played played in cabaret bands or show bands. But he was hard and steady and he gave us a chance to make a decent record.

Russell Pilling, the house engineer at Damien Gerards for many years, recorded and mixed. Russell was a soldier who made what was often semi-professional equipment sound good. It was recorded on a Fostex E 16 track 1/2 inch tape machine. But the room as ok - very solid because there was lots of concrete.

Jon used a Maton bass and a Gallien Kruger head same as always through the life of the band and I used mainly an Ibanez artist semi and a Marshall JCM 100 head and quad. I could never get that guitar to sound any good again but it roars on this record.

Don Bartley mastered it at 301 which was our first introduction to Don and his wonderful ability to coral sound. We sat there like bunnies on his sofa as he worked the old mastering console that had come from Abbey Road. He told us the guitar was out of phase at the start of Burn and did we want him to fix it? No way we said, leave the rough stuff in. That was The Long Goodbye. "