Shortly after Zeptepi had released our second album Universality, in early 2007, a personal tragedy meant I took a break from the band for about six months. When I felt ready to jump back on the horse towards the end of the year I wanted to start afresh with a new sound. I have often regretted not just splitting up the band then and starting again, but perhaps that happened on another timeline. In _this_ timeline, I replaced our synth player Alex Arbutnott with violinist Hayley Anderson, and for a brief period worked with a young piano player called Bryce Clark too.
I had started getting heavily into traditional folk music, diving in deep with artists such as The Dubliners and Ewan MacColl as well as reconnecting with records such as Fisherman’s Blues and Room to Roam by The Waterboys and Levelling the Land by The Levellers. The material I was writing was heavily influenced by this, and I started playing less and less electric guitar and focussed more on the acoustic guitar and the mandolin.
We had blown all our money producing the previous album, so whatever we did next had to be done on the cheap. The recording sessions for what would become Stormclouds began in early 2008 and continued through the next two years as we spent the occasional day tracking at Forge Studios in Reservoir, Melbourne, whenever we had some cash. All the songs that feature on the album were recorded there, along with a few extras that are available elsewhere – All Fall Down, The Great Awakening and a version of The Only Ones’s Inbetweens. There was also a version of the trad classic Whiskey in the Jar which featured as the “b-side” to The Ballad of John Green single released in January 2010.
The change towards a folkier sound had an unexpected consequence – we started getting gigs on the folk festival circuit, which proved to be a revelation. We began playing a lot more gigs to a lot more people, and the new sound also opened up the possibility of doing acoustic gigs too.
Towards the end of the recording I got to know Melbourne banjo player CC Thornley. By a strange quirk of fate I had discovered we had both written the same song circa 2009. I had been on holiday down the Great Ocean Road in Victoria and encountered the tale of The Loch Ard, a ship that was wrecked off the coast there back in 1878 on a journey from England. I thought the tale would make a great song, wrote it immediately, and then while searching for information on the story discovered another Melbourne band, with the wonderful moniker of The Black Swans of Trespass, had already written and released it. Doh!
You can hear the Black Swans of Trespass version here. Their song was an upbeat banjo-led number alluding to the story rather more poetically than my version, which read more like a Wikipedia entry. Nevertheless, I got in touch with band leader CC Thornley and we hit it off. I loved CC’s banjo playing and got him to play on a few songs we’d recorded (Everything is Everything, Come Home, Soldier Song and of course The Loch Ard). This dramatically increased our folk credentials and ended up with CC joining the band on a fulltime basis, which had all sorts of knock-on effects… but that’s another story!
The album came out in (I think!) June 2010. Along with 2013’s Coming Up For Air album it would go on to be our most popular, shifting over 1000 copies and earning us about the same amount of money as five billion Spotify streams.
I mixed the album myself. This was a mistake. Again. But we had no option, or rather no money. While I did a much better job than I’d done on the 2004 debut Travelling Through Time, the mix was still substandard and I grew to be a bit embarrassed by it. Nothing was as good as it could have been. But the main issue was that I was so delighted to finally have a violin player that I was blinded to the fact that half of Hayley’s parts were unnecessary or slightly off-key. Or both. You can get away with this to an extent live, especially as Hayley was a really good performer, but when I listened back to the original album I would spend half the time wincing at the violin. Hayley was classically trained but hugely inexperienced in a band situation and devoid of any folk chops, and I had failed to use her correctly. Which was a shame, as some of her parts of songs like The Ballad of John Green and The Sickness were superb.
Fast forward to 2022 and I’m now a fairly competent mixer. So I decided to remix the album. I completed a few songs, and then my hard drive crashed and I lost a huge amount of data – most of which was relating to this album. The new mixes were gone, and gone also were the lovely keyboard parts recorded by my friend Rob McDowell (Plastic Palace Alice) on Sail Away and The Falling of a Thunderstone. Likewise Peter Donelly’s organ on The Ballad of John Green. I had to dig deep to find all the other original recorded parts, but when I started loading them up I discovered a raft of other parts that’d I’d recorded originally but never used – predominantly electric guitar parts and backing vocals, but also some piano parts from Bryce. The guitar parts were a revelation and notably changed the sound and feel of the songs. I also added some of my own keyboard parts to replace what had gone missing and started remixing the songs again.
The main differences with the new mixes are many. Bernie Dodd’s drums now sound much, much bigger and better which give the album a much more solid base. At least half of Hayley’s violin parts are gone, and I spent some time on what remained using the Melodyne plug-in to fine-tune her parts and ensure the intonation issues that plagued the original version were all ironed out. Hayley’s reduced parts are now far more effective as a result. Less is so often more. The electric guitar gives the album far more oomph and changes the feel notably, giving me an album perhaps less like the live sound we had at the time but overall ironically much truer to Zeptepi.
I absolutely LOVE this new version, and I hope you enjoy it too! You can download the full hi-resolution WAV files from Bandcamp, or stream it on your preferred platform. I don’t feel any urge to remix any of the other Zeptepi albums, but there are a few more Z-related projects on the list… a live album from 2012 to finish mixing, and a slew of unrecorded tracks that I’m planning to have a go at finally recording over the next year or two for a new studio album. In the meantime I have an album by The Dawks to finish mixing and a few new songs to record as a long-overdue new release by The Gathering Tide!