S E C O N D      S I D E

"Big Sky" was a song that changed a lot from the first version of it on demo to the end product on the master tapes. As I mentioned in the earlier magazine the demos are the masters in that we now work straight in the 24 track studio when I'm writing the songs but the structure of this song changed quite a lot. I wanted to steam along and with the help of musicians such as Alan Murphy on guitar and Youth on bass we accomplished quite a rock and roll feel for the track. Although this song did undertake 2 different drafts and the aforementioned players changed their arrangements dramatically this is unusual in most cases for the songs. That takes us to the second side where that in itself had 2 or 3 drafts.

It was very different for me working conceptually across half an hour's worth of music rather than 5 minutes optimum in a song and it was very interesting but more demanding. It was changed by anything you did to one part of the concept. Once the piece was in context with what was happening before and after it, it would change it's nature dramatically and it was important that the whole side kept a sense of flow and yet kept the interest and kept building and ebbing in the right places.

This side is about someone who is in the water alone for the night. "And Dream Of Sheep"is about them fighting sleep, they're very tired and they've been in the water waiting for someone to come and get them and it's starting to get dark and it doesn't look like anyone's coming and they want to go to sleep. They know that if they go to sleep in the water they could turn over and drown so they're trying to keep awake but they can't help it, they eventually fall asleep which takes us into the second song.

The second song is called "Under Ice" and is the dream that the person has. They're skating on ice; it's a frozen river and it's very white everywhere and they're all alone, there doesn't appear to be anyone else there. As they skate along they look down at the ice and they can see something moving underneath. As they skate along with the object that's moving under the ice they come to a crack in the ice and as it moves under the crack they see that it's themselves in the water drowning and at that moment they wake up into the next song which is about friends and memories who come to wake them up to stop them drowning.

As they wake up and surface they are coming out of the whole feeling of deep subconsciousness. One of the voices tells them there's someone there to see them and here in the water is a witchfinder. This is a sort of nightmare they're having and this monster figure is basically trying to drown them, trying to see if they're innocent or guilty and if they drown then they're innocent. If they don't drown they're guilty so they'll be drowned anyway and it's the trial of this girl who's in the water and all she wants to do is survive and keep her head above water. This song was written through a guitarist -- Alan Murphy -- the track would have had the wrong feel with a keyboard instrument. All he had to work to was the drum track and I tried to hum and point patterns out and everything he came up with sounded great; we spent the day building up the guitars and built vocals, Fairlight, sequencers over the top. Thanks for that Al.

The next song is about how she wants to go home, that's really the thing she wants most, just to be in the cosy atmosphere of her belongings all around her and the security of those four walls and the firm ground and being with the one that she loves. She finds that she's there in spirit and there's her loved one sitting in a chair by the fire, but she hadn't conceived the idea that she wouldn't actually be there in real terms, she's not real and although she can see her man, he can't see her, she can't communicate with him in any way, it's more of a nightmare than anything so far because this is the closest she's been to any kind of comfort and yet it's the furthest away.

The next song is "Jig Of Life". This is about the future self who comes to her rescue basically -- she says look, I'm the next part of your life and if I am going to survive and enjoy the things that I've enjoyed; having my children, my happy home and my husband then you've got to keep it together, you've got to stay alive, you musn't drown or I will drown with you. It's the future begging her, pleading with her to let her, the future lady live.

The song after that is "Hello Earth" and is really the point where she's so weak she relives the experience of the storm that took her into the water. Almost from a view looking down on the earth up in the heavens watching the storm start to form that eventually took her and has put her in this situation.

This track features orchestral arrangements by Michael Kaman. It was wonderful working with Michael, he's a very receptive person to work with and the orchestral arrangements that he did for the tracks I felt were very atmospheric. It was wonderful for me to watch the layers of this song go on one by one. It initally had to be written with the verses symbolizing the storm gradually building and the choruses having a great sense of space and atmosphere and this I always hoped to be a male choir. When I first wrote "Hello Earth" I was very much inspired by a male choir that I'd heard in Herzog's film "Nosferatu" and although the versus are a very different piece of music, it was all designed hopefully to eventually link into this male voice choir which would take us to a very different place in the song. They really are meant to symbolize the great sense of loss, of weakness at reaching a point where you can accept at last, everything can change.

This takes us into "Morning Fog" and "Morning Fog" is the symbol of light and hope; it's the end of the side and if you ever have any control over endings they should always, I fell, have some kind of light in there. This was originally written to a Linn drum machine and I wrote, on the Fairlight, an instrumental piece of music using the sample of an acoustic guitar. I then later wrote the song on top of this instrumental building up the voices in layers. The piece I'd written on the Fairlight was transcribed by Dave Lawson for an acoustic guitar player and I felt that really one of the best people to play this was John Williams, a superb classical guitarist and who I had met on a couple occasions before when I was working at Abbey Road and it seemed like the perfect opportunity to ask him if he'd like to play on the track. We added Del's fretless bass, Kevin on synth, built up the backing vocals and Pad layered up "Appalachian" fiddles and Fujare. We kept the guide vocal as the master voice and mixed up the last track on the album.

Many hours were spent on tiny vocal ideas that perhaps only last half a minute, many hours went on lyrics -- one of the most difficult parts in the process for me in that it's so time-consuming and so frustrating and just always seems to take far too long for something that seems it should come so naturally. One of the difficult things about the lyrics is when I initially write the song perhaps half of the lyrics come with it but it's almost more difficult fitting in the other half to make it match than to perhaps start from scratch where, for instance, you might have just hummed the tune, or where in some cases, I wrote them as instrumentals and then the tunes were written over the top of this. Many times I ring up Paddy and ask him to come over to the studio immediately, to bring in that string driven thing -- to hit that note and let it float.

One of the most positive things is now having our own recording studio where we can experiment freely and it's definitely one of the best decisions I've made since I've ben recording albums. We've put a lot of hard work into this album so we've been waiting for it to be finished and ready and I know you've been waiting and I hope that after this time and after all the snippets of information we've been giving you that you don't find it disappointing but that you enjoy it and that you enjoy listening to it in different ways again and again.

This album could have never happend without some very special people -- many thanks to Julian Mendelsohn and especially Haydn Bendall and Brian Tench who put a lot of hard work into this project, to *all* the musicians who are a constant inspiration, to Ma who helps with every little thing, to Paddy and Jay for all their inspiration and influences and again to Del for all those moments we've captured on tape together.

lots of love

Kate

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