You Buried Me

Production Notes

We started You Buried me at Damien Gerards and all the tracking was done in Studio B. Studio B was bigger than A and with lots of concrete was great for drum sounds and big guitar. We tracked to two Fostex 16 track, half inch machines synched together, through a Soundcraft desk. Michael Woodcock was the lead engineer through the project. He was a keyboard player and had a good musical sense as well as a nice grasp of obscenity. His turn of phrase kept us laughing throughout those sessions.

Tim Powles played drums. He used a Sonor kit which belonged to Barton Price and had been left set up in the studio over the weekend as well as his own collection of snares. Powles was at his brutal gun for hire best. We did one 2 hour rehearsal prior to the recording and he murdered it. I don't know if he has ever sounded sharper than on this record and he made it possible for us to reach high.

Jon had his usual Maton/Kruger bass set up and I used mostly my Maton 303 semi, occasionally a Gibson Trini Lopez semi for a variation in colour. I had had the 303 since the early 80s but it had kind of been a second guitar as I went through infatuations with other marques. But the Maton had and still does have a beautiful tone and I have not used other guitars much since I re-adopted it. The same JCM 100 head and a quad were used for all the guitars. Often the guitars were tracked at ear splitting volumes, even for quiet parts and the purity of sound captured is quite exhilarating. I worked hard and did my first real singing in these sessions. We didn't get everything right but you can hear on the record that we had really grown.

We tried mixing at DGs but we convinced ourselves that the monitoring was not accurate enough so we moved to Eclipse in Kent St. This was a strange choice but because we had exceeded 24 tracks there were limited options. We transferred to 32 track digital and mixed off a Mitsubishi recorder through an SSL desk. We hired in the usual outboard stuff, Pultecs etc, but also a Fairchild, a 60s valve based compressor which we ran lightly over the whole mix to give it a kind of sparkle. We worked in the down time between 10pm and 8am to get a cheaper rate. I remember several times climbing exhausted but exhilarated into my van early on a Saturday or Sunday morning after a session and driving through the soft empty streets. It was a beautiful time.

Don Bartley mastered again and we sat on the sofa at 301 and once more We marveled as he chiseled away another sonic sculpture making us sound impossibly good.

Our sound had matured considerably and at the same time we found we were often mixed up with The Hard Ons. We made the fateful decision to change our name to Watershed. That is probably why you have never even heard of this record, because it was put out by a band with a nothing name that started with W. I think we had a lot of bad luck from this point on and I don't know if I can blame the name or the times we were working in - "the grunge times" - but when we re-issue this record it will be a Hardheads release.