Continued from blog 14 - Phoenix from the Flames......Flat Records' "Bargain" turned out to be quite a lot of money at the time, we just hoped it was going to be good value for money. To be fair, giving our geographic situation we didn't get a chance to practice together and Tayo stuck at work in Sweden only managed to get some quick holidays to go record in England with us at the last minute and couldn't practice anything either. We were taking ages to perfect our own creation during recordings and Richard Coppen didn't receive us with the most enthusiasm either. Our lack of chemistry or more like explosive junior lab kit relationship with Richard and his assistant meant the demo we recorded was in no way better than the one we recorded in Brazil at KKO studio, the production was very poor, pardon the pum, flat really, and we were treated quite badly by Richard's sarcastic assistant at an old studio at the back of Richard's own house in Reigate. The Photo session turned out to be a "squeeze the three of you there in front of that rubbish bin in my backyard" business, ignoring any aperture or speed, and the marketing plan turned out to be an outdated brochure typed out with general tips on how to be a successful band, which was not personalized or specific to our band, but clearly a template they used for all suckers who parted with their money like we did. To be honest we couldn't really tell if that was the norm or if they hated us so much that they couldn't be bothered to make an effort. The results, a demo in the inaccessible format of a break-your-back-trying-to-carry-it 2 inch roll tape we still have today, but never bothered passing on to any other format, because the price to do it wouldn't be worth the horrible results they achieved, so different from the demo from KKO Studio, whose recordings we are still proud to show today. We never really saw much of the photos or kept any copies of them, and finally the marketing brochure has become recycling paper at some stage or another in one of my house moves. The only memories we have from that time are the letters between us and Flat Records and some pictures of the recording sessions we took ourselves.
Even though we first contacted Flat Records as Redskin, even before we managed to start our Programme, in 1996, Tayo found out searching the Internet that there was not only another but several bands called Redskin around the World. You see many bands around with quite common names, like Oasis or The Monkeys, but in our case it seemed that whatever we thought of, there would be another band with the same name. Perhaps we were just not aware of that before but now with the advent of computers we would find that out very easily just searching through the main search engine at the time, Alta Vista, still around these days but not so used anymore. It seems that in the unlikely event of us deciding to name our band Burnt Pizza at the Edge of the Cliff of Sorrows, we would certainly find another, perhaps even two bands with the same name, and obviously with more hits on Myspace than us.
The boys then quite selfishly decided to change name again to Zen Arcade, one of the albums of their adored Husker Du, for which I never really shared such a passion, although I did enjoy some of the more acoustic inclined tracks. I thought the name was a bit biased, it didn't say much about me at all and there was the number 7 story after all...To be continued...
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