After roughly eleven months of saying we’d “properly” record something in an actual studio once we’d saved enough, we gave up on that plan entirely and recorded the demo in Deccy’s kitchen at 2am on a Wednesday, using a laptop mic, a duvet nailed to the wall for soundproofing, and considerably more patience than any of us knew we had. It sounds, against every reasonable expectation, genuinely good.
There’s something freeing about abandoning the fantasy of the perfect studio session and just making do with what’s actually in front of you. The duvet muffled the worst of the room’s echo. The neighbours, mercifully, didn’t complain, possibly because it was genuinely their bedtime and they slept through the whole thing, which I’ve chosen to interpret as a small miracle rather than question further.
What kept us company at 2am
Between takes, while Deccy fiddled endlessly with mic placement, I read out a story I’d bookmarked earlier about a newly discovered panel of the Bayeux Tapestry, and Nell, who studied medieval history for approximately one term before dropping out to join a band, had strong and detailed opinions about the whole thing that kept us entertained through an otherwise fairly tedious mic-repositioning process. There’s a specific kind of joy in finding out your bandmate has a completely unexpected pocket of expertise at 2am on a Wednesday.
We ended up writing an entirely new bridge for one of the songs based purely on that conversation, which is exactly the kind of accidental creative detour that a proper, expensive studio session, with the clock ticking and the engineer watching, would never have allowed room for.
The actual songs, for the record
Four tracks: one about landlords, obviously, because apparently that’s simply where I am as a lyricist right now. One about the rehearsal room flooding, which started as a joke and became, somehow, the most sincere thing on the whole demo. One about busking outside the station. And one, the new bridge included, that doesn’t have a title yet because we finished it at 3:40am and nobody’s brain was working well enough to name anything by that point.
What happens now
We’re sending it to three small labels who might actually listen to something recorded on a laptop in a kitchen, and if none of them bite, we’ll put it out ourselves anyway, because that’s genuinely fine too. The demo exists now. It’s got a duvet’s worth of dampening and a bassist’s unexpected medieval history knowledge baked into it, and honestly, that feels more like us than a pristine studio version ever would have.
Deccy’s already talking about the next one. I haven’t slept properly in two days. Somehow this is still the best week I’ve had in months.
The kitchen, the morning after
Deccy’s mum came down for breakfast the next morning to find the kitchen still covered in cable and a duvet nailed at a slightly alarming angle to the wall above the hob, and took it, to her enormous credit, entirely in her stride, simply asking whether we wanted tea before she started cooking around us. Some mothers would have had opinions about the duvet. She just wanted to know if we took sugar. I’ve decided this is the correct response to your adult son recording a punk demo in your kitchen at 2am, and I hope to be exactly that unbothered about something, eventually, myself.
We left the duvet up for one more session, just in case, before finally taking it down properly and giving it back its actual job. The kitchen’s back to being a kitchen. The demo, four tracks and one untitled bridge, is still sitting on Deccy’s laptop, waiting to find out if anyone beyond the three of us and one very patient mother thinks it’s any good.
Listening back, slightly terrified
Played it through properly for the first time this afternoon, sober, in daylight, which is a very different experience from hearing it at 4am still riding the adrenaline of finishing. It holds up better than I expected. The kitchen’s natural echo actually does something interesting on the quieter bridge section, a warmth no proper studio reverb plugin quite replicates, and I’ve decided that’s a happy accident worth keeping rather than a flaw worth fixing.
Sent it to Nell and Deccy with the subject line “it doesn’t suck,” which is, by our band’s internal standards, praise verging on the effusive. We’re calling it done. Now we wait.
One last note before I close the laptop
Whatever the three labels say, whatever happens next, I keep coming back to how genuinely good tonight felt in a way that had nothing to do with any of that outcome. Four songs, a duvet, a bassist’s unexpected medieval knowledge, and a mother who just wanted to know if we took sugar. That’s not a bad way to spend a Wednesday, labels or no labels, and I think I’d have honestly, quite sincerely said exactly the same thing even if the whole recording had turned out genuinely, properly, thoroughly terribly instead of however it actually turned out this time around.
