I was chatting to a friend of mine, Pat, the other day (at his birthday, no less!) and he reminded me of a particularly strange studio session we had around Easter time in 1997. We were in the studio from about 1am, having (of course) had a fair number of drinks, with a massive amount of equipment and absolutely no plan about what we were going to do with it. I think the engineer was expecting a live band, but we turned up with samplers, keyboards, effects units, drum machines, an old analogue synth and pretty much anything else I had lying around my home studio. And of course Pat had his trusty Strat and juicy Tweed amp.

By 5 in the morning our heads were wrapped in masking tape and we were getting slightly hysterical. (It probably didn't help that I had arrived back from California just the previous day.) We had somehow acquired a security guard's hat (I think it just turned up in one of my equipment cases) which Pat was wearing, along with some hand-drawn facial hair. Nonetheless we did get something down to tape, managing to use pretty much every bit of equipment we had in the process. I don't think the engineer was very impressed with the result - he did a perfunctory mix-down (which, as far as I know, is the only copy still in existence) which is almost unlistenable to. The levels are all wrong, there's a massive hiss and the guitar was louder than Paisley (both the textile pattern AND the reverend Ian!)

Realising I didn't have anything else to put up this week, and with our conversation still in mind, I decided to fish out that old tape and, with a generous dose of modern studio magic (and a rare free evening) I managed to transform it into something that, whilst by no means brilliant, gives us something to show for that crazy night in the studio.