“…in a circle, so we wrote a song about them meeting in a circle.” The ludicrously cute laughter that continues is of the kind that makes you want to cuddle, then possibly spoon, the life out of them.
Back to the album… Down The Way was partly tracked in Queens, New York, and on the Gold Coast, with the majority being captured beneath a beautiful house that used to be a saw mill in Cornwall.
“They used to do a lot of logging around there and we’d just been recording some stuff in London, which was fun but really stifling in a way. Everybody was in agreement that to be near the ocean would be good. We found this place on the internet and it was on a tidal river and you can only access it by train or by boat. So we got there, packed all the gear into the boat and waited for the tide to arrive.” At this point Angus lifts his head from his plate of haloumi and starts telling the same story before noticing our looks of slight confusion. “You didn’t just say all this did you? Sorry I wasn’t listening. It was pretty amazing haloumi.”
Along with the beautiful studio, they scored themselves a ‘gorgeous mountainous pixie man’ for an engineer. “You know that guy out of The Lion, The Witch and The Wardrobe?” asks Angus. “Mr Tumnus? He’s like him. And he has this little cottage next to the studio and he wakes up at six every morning and does this big mountain run through the forest and across to the town of Foy, which is just like any picture book of castles and cottages. It’s right on the edge of a cliff, it’s just so special. Then he’d come back and we’d get started. He’d drink cups of hot water. He was such a bonus.”
Julia affectionately adds, “He was amazing, he’d spend hours in the little studio just trying to get the right sounds, he was just so driven.”
Angus and Julia start talking amongst themselves about tracking and the process of deciding what take to use in those moments where there’s many takes to choose from. “You can get to those really sticky moments where you’ve listened to them so often you don’t know anymore what sounds right, I’ll turn to Angus then, and he’ll say ‘That one’…”
“…and then she says ‘Ok, let’s go for the other one’. Then we’ll toss a coin and if it’s heads we’ll go for tails…”, says Angus with them both laughing, remembering many moments of paper scissors rock even over the artwork and the font. But with all those choices now behind them and the album making its way out into the world, Angus and Julia have before them the fun of daydreaming about the next stage of life.
“In Angus’ head right now he’s in a harem,” teases big sis.
“Well, you know, yes, but one day I want to get a place somewhere and disappear,” says Angus in all seriousness.
And for Julia? ”One day I’d like to write more for films. I’d like to have a space where I can work with other artists, where they can make pictures and I can make sounds that go along with those pictures. I’d like to write more too – just always taking a journal and keeping track of what’s going on.” And on hearing all that they’ve seen and done in the past 12 months, no doubt that journal is going to be full of words, pictures and pieces of two lives very splendidly lived.
Oh, but before we part ways, a story arises about spewing till you can spew no more with Julia finishing off the discussion with a demonstration of dry wretching and the comment “…when the only thing left to spew is eyeballs.” God bless their cotton pickin’ socks.
Down The Way is drifting through time and space now on EMI.
