Blog Seven: Lockdowns and Lookbacks

I’m looking back at the photo we took when we finally got our previous album Stray in the can, as they say. Or committed to wax, as (whispering) Bob Harris used to say on the Old Grey Whistle Test. In the picture we are crouching in front of the monitor Richard uses to mix our stuff in Logic Pro, drinking some sort of fizz. But the most striking thing is we are almost touching. No social distancing! And now, never mind two metres, two miles would be unusually close to be as the three of us release our upcoming album Confection. I think only one track, Checking My Brake Cables Every Day, was recorded entirely together in the studio. Even the first single release 32 Years was mainly post-lockdown and remote, transferring files across the ether.

I’m the band Luddite, as you can probably tell by my referencing DJs no-one remembers. I’ve had a really steep learning curve with technology this past year (mainly Logic Pro). Apparently the most popular phrase of 2020 was “you’re on mute!” I’ve been teaching schoolkids on Zoom, their wi-fi cutting out while siblings played Call Of Duty next door and their parents tried to get on with their working lives, caught halfway between supervising home schooling and dealing with work colleagues from the kitchen table. It’s been a very 21st century kind of purgatory for many of us, and that’s for those of us lucky enough to have our kids of school age. It may be the same storm but we are not all in the same boat. Throw a toddler into the mix, maybe take away the garden cos you’re up on the 11th floor, and it goes beyond purgatory. Of course most of us will get out of purgatory. But our admittedly first-world problems do remind me of how fragile we are.

In Confection we’ve commented a lot on the events of 2020. The first two tracks we completed were personal. Released in July, Featureless Zone (https://lizard-brain.bandcamp.com/album/featureless-zone) is about the lockdown experience itself. Richard’s slightly wistful lyrics spoke about the weirdness of the passage of time when each day is the same. Do I even know the day’s name? Then we had two songs that both tapped into the political process in advance of the chaos that was the US elections: Othering (https://lizard-brain.bandcamp.com/album/othering-3) and Round And Round (https://lizard-brain.bandcamp.com/album/round-and-round-feat-tony-jenkins). On the Confection album cover below you can see the centre panel in black and white with the aftermath of the storming of the Capitol. Reality peeking through. While we were stuck in lockdown for most of the year, Boris, Trump and a side order of Brexit left us in no doubt as to the texture of what we were trapped in. And the next single to be released (Richard’s If Our Eyes Were Blue, date not yet confirmed, but the first track on the album) is inspired by teacher Jane Elliott’s US blue eyes/brown eyes classroom experiment in 1968, during National Brotherhood Week and the very next day after the assassination of Martin Luther King (https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=oGvoXeXCoUY). It’s been a year with many things to react to, not least the murder of George Floyd, Breonna Taylor and many others, and the ongoing Black Lives Matter campaign (https://interactive.aljazeera.com/aje/2020/know-their-names/index.html).

It is always a lengthy process deciding on the title of one of our albums. Confection gave us something carefully constructed, almost certainly artificial, but very agreeable to the palate. Richard came up with a quote from Socrates. The sweet shop owner says “the doctor hurts you, gives you bitter potions, and places restrictions on your eating and drinking. But I will serve you feasts of many and varied pleasant things.”

Confection – why would you ever eat anything else?

Enjoy. It’s out on Friday 9th April.

Lizard David xxx