Recording ‘Doorways’ the beginning and the end, a conversation between Gary Smout and Peter Bright, to be overheard by other people who know nothing about Finish The Story. Transcript by MDM.
- “Tell me, after the Malvern gig did you take the synths back to Bromsgrove? How did they end up there because as far as I recall there was never any intention at that point to take FTS further and our going to Bromsgrove was more of an autopsy/end of gig thing – wasn’t it? That’s sort of how I remember it.” (Garry)
The only thing I can remember is my parents were on holiday and the three of us ended up at 59 Crabtree Lane. At some point you went back to Bristol and Nicola was still with me in Bromsgrove. I can vividly remember walking into the newsagent, buying ‘Record Mirror’ 1and reading a review of the Malvern gig. The review was full of praise and contained an intriguing and telling couple of lines at the end ‘..the crowd were obviously impressed, even though the band weren’t. Quite a début.’ I think we were prepared for an autopsy but not prepared for the praise. It was at this point we got our heads together and decided we would ‘have a go’ to see if we could build on the success. Unfortunately we weren’t strong enough emotionally or as a unit to cope with the sudden roller coaster ride – we weren’t allowed to make our mistakes in private (in the rehearsal room) we had to test-drive new material before we could actually play it with confidence. It was a bizarre journey – to be in the music press described as a ‘band’ with Nicola not knowing who I was and me not knowing who she was – you had to be the artery for our creative juices (yuk!). You could argue that this was pure, a creative, adrenalin driven ideal scenario for the creation of something different and unusual. – I would agree to that in theory but in reality it was incredibly stressful. We had got our product to market too quickly; we hadn’t invested enough time in development. We were ‘…better than the second coming of Jesus Christ’ – we proved that eighteen months later when we had matured and got to know each other better.
‘Doorways’ was recorded on a 4 track Tascam 144 cassette recorder – I had bought this in Birmingham – the store fleeced me with excessive repayments – they were expensive bits of kit and a piece of cutting edge technology – in comparison with today’s digital audio world they were positively primitive. This was a massive investment for me and at the time – it was the best available home recording equipment on the market and Finish The Story had two of them. (Peter)
- “Yep, two tascams, mine and yours. We both saw the Tomorrow’s World when they appeared and instantly wanted one – took some time I seem to remember. I don’t think though you bounced down to each other – I was sure you had a reel to reel but if not it does explain how it was recorded.”