Friday Girl - Lost & Found

In 1978, I was 23. Punk was the rising fashion, but Rumours won Best Album at the Grammys, Mull of Kintyre became the best-selling UK single of all time, Saturday Night Fever the best-selling album and Wuthering Heights became the first UK number one by a female singer songwriter. Not that I was paying attention; even then, I was behind the times. After a brief flirtation with prog rock titans Yes, I was still stuck in the early seventies with Paul Simon, James Taylor, and Joni Mitchell.

For the previous couple of years, I’d been gigging quite a bit in folk clubs with my schoolmate David Croft and I’d taken to writing fake folk songs about smuggling, seafaring disasters, and other folk-appropriate topics about which I knew absolutely nothing to fill out the set list. This was going well; we were getting gigs far and wide, so naturally, I thought I was destined to be a rock star. Which is why I paid good money to record some demos at Surrey Sound Studios, how I struck up a relationship with Nigel Gray, the studio owner/engineer, and eventually signed a deal with Mike Cobb, sole proprietor of the independent publisher, Sesame Songs. So in 1978, two delusional twenty-somethings were given unlimited access to a 24-track studio to create their masterpiece.

Several things then happened to shape the rather disappointing outcome. Firstly, the studio itself became very successful. Godley and Creme, recently of 10cc, anxious to recover from their commercially disastrous first album, Consequences, booked the studio for several months while they recorded something more appealing for less money. In that same year, Nigel secured a life-changing gig to record the first two albums by The Police. It was great to rub shoulders with actual and soon-to-be rock stars, but it had several unfortunate consequences for us. On the one hand, Godley and Creme turned the studio into Aladdin’s Cave by filling it with every conceivable instrument, thus expanding the time we took to explore our infinite musical options as we borrowed their arsenal in the off-hours. On the other hand, the off-hours began to shrink alarmingly as paying clients formed a queue at the studio door. Another problem was that Nigel himself was no longer available to steer our project, so in the end, nobody steered it. Our lovely substitute engineer, Nick Smith, made sure the recordings were clean and tidy, but he wasn’t going to take control of the production, and we had no idea how to do it, so that was that. A year later, 10 tracks somehow escaped the studio and found their way onto a vinyl album called Friday Girl, which was released in 1979. It didn’t matter. By then, Punk had stolen the thorny crown, and our slightly prog rock-inflected singer-songwriter noodlings, already 5 years out of date, sank forever below the fashion waves.

I wouldn’t have minded so much if I’d actually liked the album, but I didn’t. I wasn’t sure why at the time, but looking back, it’s really simple: too much time, too little discipline. For a project that took a year, it sounds rushed. Lots of half-good songs, half-finished ideas, and uninspired performances. Fun, it certainly was, but a masterpiece it most certainly was not.

After that, I moved on and didn’t look back. There were other fun projects with other studios, and all those songs just went to sleep until 2021 when Hampus Gunnarsson contacted me through my website, asking to buy a copy because he’d found a track on YouTube and wanted to hear more. Sadly, or perhaps fortunately, he could not. David and I each have a copy, but the rest have disappeared. The masters and multitracks too are long gone, but it occurred to me, with the benefit of our combined experiences in the intervening half-century, that it might be fun to start over. Strip the whole thing back, re-imagine, re-write, re-arrange, re-record the whole project and finally get it right. So, for the past few months, that’s exactly what we’ve been doing. I have my own studio now, so there are no bills to pay or clocks to watch, and, keeping in mind the lessons from our first attempt, I’ve finally learned to tell the difference between creative freedom and procrastination so ideas have been flowing and progress is good. It’s been 30 years since I last worked with David in a studio, but we’ve clicked right back into it, remembered the joy of those original sessions, and applied our collective experience to scrape away all the clutter and finally let the songs shine through. To be clear, we’re not trying to recreate the way they sounded back then; that’s just the starting point. We’re going to make them sound the way they should; magical!

So this is the story of how a project, which began in 1978, was finished half a century later. The new album will of course be available for public consumption in some form or other. I’d love to make another vinyl pressing but this is frankly unaffordable for what is essentially a vanity project. Maybe a CD but definitely on-line so anyone who cares to listen can find out what I mean and maybe even share the magic with us. This won’t be until the Autumn but in the meanwhile, I’ll keep you posted on the story of each track, how it started and how it came together.

See you on the other side!