Released Monday 18th February
Here are the full liner notes to the album 'Hard Freeze'
When Hesh left the band a few years ago we were left with several decisions to make. Break up the band? Get a new member? Change the way we play?
The first option was out of the question, we tried the 2nd option very briefly but in the end the only real option was the latter, we would change the way we played to compensate. Basically this meant I had to play guitar both better and differently. Initially I thought, ‘OK, let’s just get LOUDER’, but that quickly proved to be a pretty lazy way forward and over time I found ways of filling the space left by the second guitar and also, in a strange way, leaving it there. Jim and Geoff also had to step up to the plate and play more interestingly, with more thought and attention to the detail in songs, which they did also, they found a way to listen for my gaps and fill them themselves. The result was a new batch of songs that you have with you right now.
Whilst recording, we had one main choice to make. My initial plan was to record the basic tracks then spend a long time dropping all sorts of instruments and fripperies into the album to make it a ‘sonic cathedral of sound’, however, after brief discussion with Jim and Geoff, I found that they really wanted the album to just sound like we do when the three of us play, so that is what you will hear, with very few exceptions where an extra acoustic guitar has been added for simple embellishment.
I was ‘lucky’ enough to be able to purchase a 24 track desk so that we could record the whole thing ourselves, dispensing with the cost and pressure of hiring a studio, and record in our practice space, so this album is 100% self-produced, for better or for worse! So expect a quicker turn-around of albums now that we have our own equipment. ‘Not holding our breath’, I hear a few say...Hope you enjoy it and full reviews are compulsory with a purchase of this album! Let us know what you think, it matters!!!
Here are a few words about each track...
1 – Waiting For The Rain : Part three of a very long gestated and complicated trilogy of songs with ‘Soul Into The Sky’ & ‘Soul Train’. Seems a bit silly that the third part should appear before the 2nd part on this album, with the 1st part appearing on the last album?
Yes, well, that’s this band for you, nothing and everything makes sense.
For now I’m happy to let you figure what the meaning of the trilogy is but all shall be revealed a few months after the album has been released when all three songs will be released in a video-trio telling the story.
Musically quite a departure, the like of which we’re known for. We’ve not done anything as broody as this before and the band took a while to get/like it but they’re on board now, and a classic set/album opener. Solid rumbling bass from Geoff, some of Jim’s most inventive drums ever and a few firsts on the guitar-playing front for me build to a crescendo when the volume peaks after the solo that Dunf assumed was a few guitars over-dubbed...but wasn’t! I take that as a heavy compliment, cheers.
2 – Lyin’ To Me : Put simply, our tribute to Dr.Feelgood and Wilko Johnson with a tale to a broken boy/girl situation with similarities to the story of ‘Sheila’s On The Bus’ and a good sister track to that classic. Pop punk music simplified and personified. This is the single and rightly so. It’s direct and immediate and shows our pop sensibilities on our best side. Poignant in that it comes out in the year that the great man maybe succumbs to a terminal illness and leaves us. We love you Wilko and always will, who could ever forget that sound and face.
3 – Pick It Up As You Go : Many people’s favourite and another departure stylistically. Came about via an acoustic folky number I was working on whilst trying to write my ‘Wild Wood’. I think I succeeded but not in the way I thought, it was never meant to be a band song but it’s become outstanding in our set. Pick of the lyrics is about how the longer you go on, the older you get, all you do is carry around a metaphorical sack of bad shit that happens and you can’t let it go, you just drag it around and it gradually slows you down –
“You pick it up as you go, and carry this heavy load, from a prince into a toad”
...in your teens you feel like a prince and always end up feeling like a reptile.
I love the tight inter-play between drums and bass in the drop-outs. Weller gets a look-in in the lyrics.
4 – Street Talk : Next in lineage from ‘The Big Hairy Wheel’ I feel. One of a few tracks here about ‘the street’ and trying to keep communication between individuals face to face in combat to the increasing alienation we all subject ourselves to with Facebook, Twitter and all those other horrible ‘apps’. Why not go out and meet your friend in the street, coffee shop or pub like back in the day. The demo featured a drop into ‘Physical’ by Olivia Newton-John! Try and figure out where it was. Highlight musically is Geoff’s superlatively melodical bass runs and Jims awesome Cow-Bell in the middle eight, complimented by Geoff and I’s human Cowbells! A slight link to the song ‘Water Falls’ is that the lyric mentions a ‘big tsunami’, a few weeks after this song was played for the first time, there was a very big and documented tsunami on Boxing Day, people haven’t looked at me the same since. It’ll be water, I promise...
5 – Yesterday’s Papers : Don’t you just hate those songs by bands about being in bands and being on the road? Well this is one of them, albeit with a slightly different plot. Yesterday’s Papers is what we are – 3 x 40-somethings with a variety of ailments playing original music. How more un-popular could that be? If we sent our music without a biog or a photo to a record company, we would probably get a deal, if we added a photo or some personal details, we definitely wouldn’t! How sad yet plain and simple is that? Some beautiful playing though and a beautiful harmony thought up by Herr Rose.
6 – Urban : Now this truly is a bag of rusty hammers! Primarily about life in Nun Street, Newcastle, home to the Last Shop Standing, Reflex Records. The verses paint a picture of the way of life of the street and those creatures that inhabit it, whilst the chorus poses a clever (if I say so myself) conundrum. The words are simple – ‘And it’s all because we don’t care’.
The question is, is it that we don’t care, as in not giving a shit, or do we not care ENOUGH!? Yeah...profound, I hear you say.
7 – Water Falls : One of my favourites of this album, mainly because of the discovery of a new chord, maybe the ‘lost’ chord that PT talked of? It’s about the fact that water is ever more prevalent on this planet and will be the eventual downfall and destruction of the planet. Not aliens, asteroids or anything else beginning with ‘A’, just water. Water will eventually cover all of this planet and at the risk of saying Kevin Costner was right, we will be a water-world with only the strongest surviving. Seriously, I wrote this song a few weeks before the Boxing Day tsunami and my kids have thought I was weird since!...
8 – Rolling Stock : Have wanted to write a song with this title for a long time, great title, and this just came about with the advent of a great rhythm and melody. The words don’t mean anything as far as I know, just sound good together, bit like Bowie’s cut and paste method. One of Jim’s favourites and a lovely little bit of rhythmic use of the floor tom in the verses from him. Not my best vocal ever but you can hear what I’m trying to do, and it’s meant to sound ‘withered’ anyway. Was really pleased with the funky soulful guitar in the break, a sign for the future folks....and of course as ever, powerful bass from the R.B.
9 – My So-Called Life : Well this appears on the album because of an accident. Whilst recording backing tracks in our studio, we were on a bit of a roll and I said to Geoff, ‘what’s next?’ and he replied, ‘My So-Called Life’ and off we went and delivered the backing track for the song. It was only when I got home and made my entry into the album recording log that I realised the song was only on the ‘bench’ for this album and was not in the original 12 song track listing, hence the album being 13 songs! Aside from that, it’s a Cheesemakers classic and on subject matter, look no further than the 1990’s USA T.V. series of the same name for a full explanation. ‘I don’t get going when the going gets tough’...
10 – Pinball : One of our signature songs now and a powerhouse tune. Just a bunch of lyrical couplets that say that people aren’t as good as they used to be and that life used to surely be a bit easier but some of us are still trying. Lots of power chords vie with neat bass runs and solid ‘piss off’ drums to make just a great tune from start to finish, not the best metaphorically or lyrically but musically awesome.
11 – Soul Train : See track one for a part explanation, this is part of the Soul into the Sky trilogy, part two, and has been around for several years, only finally getting recorded now. As stated on track one the whole story will be told in due course but as a stand alone song, it now holds it’s own in the set, with the rest of the band initially reluctant to embrace it, they now love it. To be fair, it’s probably fairly boring for them to play but the importance of the song and it’s sheer musicality has won them round.
12 – Tony : Another pretty old song, several years for sure, that has only just made the cut but it’s another band favourite just for the sheer intensity of it. Lyrically about the scum on the streets in the North of England these days, it’s like an epidemic, scum everywhere that need stamping out! The amount of years defined by a generation these days is getting down to 14-16 years as opposed to 25-30 years when I was a kid, it’s nauseous. Musically a powerhouse of a song, that just rumbles along with a tense quieter interlude towards the end. The title is really ‘Falling’, cos that’s what society is doing, but in typical Cheesemakers style, when we were initially working on the song, I happened to mention that the bass should sound more ‘toney’, to which all three members of the band immediately piped up in Italian mafia accents, ‘Hey Tony, it warnts to be more Tony’, hence the end title! (Sigh)
13 – Sparkle In Your Eyes : Quite possibly the most important song I’ve ever written and a sadly classic example of how a song can change in meaning all of it’s own accord. This song was written to describe how my wife, Vicky, was feeling after her Dad, Joe, died from cancer. She was struggling to come to terms with it and the song was written in a deeply personal way from me to her, generally saying, ‘I’ll be here for you, I AM here for you, you can make it and it’ll be OK in the end.’ Vicky heard the song a few times via different versions, finally hearing it live for the only time at Charlotte’s fund-raising concert at The Office in South Shields. Vicky was not one for bold announcements from the stage so we privately agreed before-hand, so she knew which song it was about her, I would announce it as ‘the song after My So-Called Life’. She liked it and appreciated the sentiment. In a cruelly ironic way, (I hate life and there is no god) this concert was her last ever night out as she spent the whole evening with her sprained ankle up on a stool, that same sprained ankle would soon change EVERYTHING.
To try and find some solace from the event, I now remember it as Vicky’s last ever night out, where she saw my daughter Charlotte perform with the band on-stage, a hugely proud moment for me, but a moment that Vicky described to me later that night as “one of my proudest nights...my husband playing music better than ever, one of my daughters singing on-stage with him and my other daughter sitting taking entrance money from people who ended up being in the wrong venue!”
But then, after Vicky had fallen gravely ill, I had been urged to keep busy by getting the band playing again, and so reviewing some recent songs before our first practice in some time I came across the lyrics to this song and physically shook in shock at how the meaning of the words to this song had changed because of Vicky’s condition. Suddenly, without altering a word from day of writing it had moved from being a song about how Vicky felt about the loss of her Dad, to now being a song about her terrible predicament, the grave injuries she had suffered and the struggle she now faced to get well again! Lines like ‘want to open my eyes and for it all to be alright’, ‘I want to hold you when the darkness comes’, and ‘we can make it, there is no maybe’, suddenly took on a whole new meaning. As a songwriter, I cannot describe how this change in meaning affected me.
The tragedy of this song is that in the end, Vicky never got over the death of her father and she did not recover from her illness and died, an event that will shadow, destroy, haunt and consume me for the rest of my life. So all of my hopefully encouraging words of support in the song ended up counting for nothing, and ended up being fruitless words on a page. That’s the truly tragic blanket that the song finds itself wrapped in forever. And that’s why it will always remain a desperately difficult song for me to listen to or perform, I know I’ll never write another song more significant than this one ever.
When you listen to this album and you get to this track, please read these notes through first, then listen to the song with the lyric sheet, only then will you feel the true impact of this track with both of it’s implications and the end that followed and I doubt you will get to the end without shedding a tear.
With love, Andy X
