Every Brilliant Eye - The Demos

We did a lot of things differently when we came to record Every Brilliant Eye in 1989. For a start we had two new members - John Hoey on Keyboards and Steve Clarke on Bass. We were also thinking of recording with a different producer and engineer. Alan Thorne and Rob Younger had produced all of our stuff to that date, and apart from the very first single everything had been recorded at Trafalgar studios in Annandale . It’s not that we were unhappy with what we had achieved - I think we just wanted a change and wanted to stretch ourselves by trying to work with someone new.  An L.A. producer, Jeff Erycih, had expressed interest in working with us. He had done a number of things we'd liked - The Gun Club, The Plimsouls, etc - and we had new record company (Beggars Banquet) who were willing to fund us recording Overseas so we went for it.

However they insisted on us making some 'demos' of the upcoming record - something we'd never really done before - so they and the new producer could hear what they were going to be working with. So we hired a place called 'Rich Studios' in the Sydney for a day. We set up at lunchtime and basically played the album from start to finish recording everything in one take with minimal overdubs. I think the recording took about 6 hours and the mixing about 4. We went home with the whole thing finished about 11pm the same evening. I kept thinking this is how they made albums in the sixties!

The recording of this Album in L.A. is another story but let’s just a say a lot
of thing got changed from the original demos. Some were just natural differences as
the songs evolved, some were complete restructures. Anyway the original demo -
which I though was lost long ago (thanks Steve!) - recently turned up and I
thought it was worth posting a couple of the tracks. I guess it sounds a lot
more like it would have if we had continued with the Younger/Trafalgar set-up - not necessarily a bad thing!