Matthew Jacoby – Founder/Leader
The early years up to 1996 are very blurry but I think the reason I can’t remember much is because there isn’t actually much to remember. We had a band with a name but really didn’t do more than a handful of small gigs a year.
In 1996 we recorded an album live in a church hall. It was one step up from recording an album on a Dictaphone. Our cheap microphones went into a small mixer that went into a digital audio tape recorder. The other songs on the album were recorded on a four-track tape recorder.
During the rough mastering session of the album Rod decided that he disliked the double bass bowing solo in the middle of the song ‘Hand to the Plough.’ He got the engineer to fade the song out in the middle and then fade it back in before the vocals came in for the last section of the song. Hmmm.
The cover of the album was a heavily pixelated picture of a double bass hovering over a desert all in one colour. I remember Rod and I around at Richard Beechey’s place (Richard was to become our drummer and long time recording engineer) marvelling at all the clever things you could do on a computer.
Well, our Hand to the Plough cassette may have been the dodgiest album in the history of recording but it had a good vibe to it and we were proud of it. The following year we re-recorded a couple of the songs on it, added a couple more and released it on CD.
