Wild Light Decade #14: Tunnels (Patreon)

Tunnels. Before it reached its ultimate title, Tunnels began as Tunnels. You'll recognise it as soon as it begins. This song is/was a pretty ambitious composition and it took us a really long time to write. You can tell it took ages because, when you listen to this recording, you will hear that the general level of production is pretty high compared to some of the other demos we have shared during this project, and yet it is still significantly different to the final album version of the track. Many, many iterations…

This particular audio file is not labelled very helpfully. Just ‘Tunnels’. We can narrow down when and where it might have been made, but for that to mean anything useful, here is a refresher on the various important locations for those who are not thinking about our Wild Light Project every moment. We have probably mentioned all of them in passing, but let's put them all in the same place. There was a lot of back and forth between the first three, but this is vaguely the order we worked in them:

65HQ - This is the cold little room in an old steel works where we were based during the main bulk of writing Wild Light. It would later get broken in to, loads of equipment would get stolen, and we would abandon it to move to (secret location), which became the new and current 65HQ. (At the time we moved, it was a literal building site. But now it is a proper, actual room, with a door and everything.)

2FLY STUDIOS - This is the Sheffield studio (sadly no longer existing), that we recorded all our early records in. Everything we made up to and including Silent Running, in fact. Helpfully, it was literally round the corner from the old 65HQ. Periodically we would haul all of our gear down three sets of narrow stone stairs, 20 metres along the road, and then up a different, also narrow, also stone, flight of stairs into 2fly. There we would spend one or, if we could afford it, two days of recording as much as we possibly could with either Dave Sanderson or Alan Smyth, the studio owners. Recording here would lead to a better standard of demo than we could pull off in 65HQ. Despite this, most 2fly mixes we made this way would be deliberately flat. This was because they were never intended to be of releasable quality, they were just for our own reference. We didn't want the mixes to add any personality of their own, or to ‘finish’ the songs. We just wanted to be able to properly hear how everything was working together.

THE LAUNDRY ROOMS - This studio was unique to Wild Light and was all thanks to Tom, one of the grizzlier 65 comrades. Tom is one of our longest-serving live sound ‘front of house’ engineers. He makes us loud. If you come and see us in September, while we’ll be cavorting around onstage, feeding our egos, he'll be down there with you in the thick of it. A man of the people, playing the mixing desk like Vanessa Mae plays the violin. Feel free to say hi. But also, he can be pretty scary if you disturb him while he's working. So that's entirely at your own risk.

Anyway, back in 2012 (or 2011??), for various reasons, he'd gotten hold of some free studio time at The Laundry Rooms, another Sheffield recording studio, and offered it to us. So in we went with Tom, and recorded whatever we had ready to test out. Compared to mixing live sound, working in a studio environment is quite a different discipline, so we came up with some refreshingly different recordings with Tom. Not all of it worked, not least because we hadn’t really finished writing any of the songs, but some of the Laundry Room recordings did actually end up on the final record. Not whole tracks, but various stems of various tracks, where we'd somehow managed to capture something special. For example, we’re pretty sure that Joe's guitar on Blackspots is from the Laundry Room sessions.

CHAPEL STUDIOS - This is a residential studio somewhere in the middle of nowhere (Leicestershire?). ‘Residential Studio’ means that there's bedrooms and a kitchen, so bands can go and stay there with zero distractions other than making a record. It is an intense but (usually) amazing way to work. When we were ready to make Wild Light for real, we went there for about two weeks with 2fly’s Dave Sanderson, long-time 65days co-producer and mentioned plenty of times on this patreon already.

CASTLE OF DOOM - This is a studio up in Glasgow where we mixed the record. It belongs to (or is co-owned?) by Mogwai, but the main reason we went there is because that's where Tony Doogan works. We'd heard his mixing work, it was solid, and we were very into the idea of getting a completely fresh set of ears and opinions on the recordings, outside of the usual 65 & Dave bubble.

Anyway, back to Tunnels. From the sounds of it, this could be a 2fly demo, OR it could be a lesser-spotted Laundry Rooms cut. A bit of 65archive hard-drive spelunking could probably give you a definitive answer to this, but where’s the fun in that? (Nowhere. There is absolutely no fun to be found in the 65 archive.)

Arrangement-wise it seems pretty sorted by this point, right? Quite similar to the final album version. The weird chord progression on the keys was the core idea that kicked the whole song off, so that’s been there since the very beginning.

The first big difference arrives at 1:12 and happens again at 1:53… the drops to just kick drums: they're subtle! How curious… I guess by the time we were in Chapel Studios, we'd got bored of being subtle.

In that second drop there's an interesting sawtooth-y synth floating around that never made it to the final song. Although there's a nice persistence and sharpness to the phrase that it plays, in hindsight it was a good idea to lose it because it drags the song back to a kind of electronic-ness that the album version doesn't really have, and is stronger for that.

When this version gets to the descend/ascend repetition at the end of the song, although it gets ‘loud’, it still sounds like a tremor compared to the earthquake of the album version.

This has got a great final outro though. Perhaps we should have made a version of Wild Light where it's just this bassline for 45 minutes.

That’s all for this week, friends.

The Wild Light tour begins in THIRTEEN DAYS. And also, the vinyl repress is OUT TODAY. We sold out of our copies ages ago but if you’re lucky you should be able to find a copy sitting in your local record shop. Failing that, check HERE for more options.

See you next Friday.

65.x