You Buried Me

Explosive, sad, panoramic and reaching for the stars. Michael and Jon Cullen are joined by Tim Powles on drums who delivers one of his most compelling recorded performances. The antithesis of all the grunge hair bands making pay dirt at the time.

Michael's Production Notes

"We started You Buried me at Damien Gerards and all the tracking was done in Studio B. Studio B was bigger than A and with lots of concrete was great for drum sounds and big guitar. We tracked to two Fostex 16 track, half inch machines synched together, through a Soundcraft desk. Michael Woodcock was the lead engineer through the project. He was a keyboard player and had a good musical sense as well as a nice grasp of obscenity. His turn of phrase kept us laughing throughout those sessions.

Tim Powles played drums. He used a Sonor kit which belonged to Barton Price and had been left set up in the studio over the weekend as well as his own collection of snares. Powles was at his brutal gun for hire best. We did one 2 hour rehearsal prior to the recording and he murdered it. He made it possible for us to reach high.

Jon had his usual Maton JB4/Kruger bass set up and I used mostly my Maton 303 semi and occasionally a Gibson Trini Lopez for a variation in colour. I had had the 303 since the early 80s but it had kind of been a second guitar as I went through infatuations with other marques. But the Maton had and still does have a beautiful tone and I have not used other guitars much since I re-adopted it. The same JCM 100 head and a quad were used for all the guitars. Often the guitars were tracked at ear splitting volumes, even for quiet parts and the purity of sound captured is quite exhilarating. I worked hard and did my first 'proper' singing in these sessions. We didn't get everything right but you can hear on the record that we had really grown.

We tried mixing at DGs but we convinced ourselves that the monitoring was not accurate enough so we moved to Eclipse in Kent St. This was a strange choice but because we had exceeded 24 tracks there were limited options. We transferred to 32 track digital and mixed off a Mitsubishi recorder through an SSL E desk. Now it seems strange, going back to 16 bit digital, but the combination of the Mitsubishi and the SSL in addition to the original highly analogue tracking results in an unearthly synthesis which is, to my ears, quite exhilarating. We hired in a couple of Pultecs for better EQ and a Fairchild 670, a 60s valve based compressor, which we ran over the stereo bus to give the mix a kind of sparkle.

We worked in the down time between 10pm and 8am to get a cheaper rate. I remember several times falling exhausted but exhilarated into my car on a Saturday or Sunday morning after a session and driving with my ears ringing through the soft empty streets."