A 20th Anniversary Edition of Zeptepi’s Travelling Through Time album is out on all platforms on 20th September 2024. This is why:
I still have a box of assorted unsold Zeptepi CDs. At no point did they exactly race off the shelf, but as the band hasn’t performed since 2015 and nobody buys CDs anymore anyway, I suspect they’ll be left for my kids to throw out after I cark it. The last year or so I’ve been playing with The Dawks, which has given me a welcome opportunity to reduce the surplus, and I gave my fellow guitarist Bevan a few CDs.
Usually in these circumstances the recipient will say oh wow thanks (with varying degrees of sarcasm) and that’s the last you ever hear about it. I can’t bear to throw the CDs out, but I have no problem with other people doing so. In Bevan’s case – much to my surprise – he actually listened to them. Even more surprising was that he named the Zeptepi debut album Travelling Through Time as his clear favourite.
Travelling Through Time was an absolute labour of love, created between 2001-2004 upon my arrival in Melbourne. I poured my heart and soul into that album for nearly four years, but I don’t like it. At all. I’m embarrassed by it, I hate listening to it, the mixes are terrible and my vocals sound dreadful, and I find it weirdly out of step with the rest of the bands catalogue – which is no mean feat given that all our albums are markedly different from each other anyway! I’ve felt this way for more than fifteen years, pretty much pretending the whole thing never happened. When the Zeptepi best of compilation came out in 2017 there were no songs from this album on it, and it damn well served it right by crikey.
Bevan’s insistence that the album wasn’t a steaming great turd made me think I should give it another listen. Instead of listening to the actual album as released, I found the studio sessions on a hard drive and burned a cd (yeah yeah I know) of all the songs I’d recorded at the time to have a listen to in the car. This was fourteen songs, rather than the ten on the original release.
I found I was very right about the album. The mixes of the songs are dreadful. I’ve quite a history of terrible decision-making at important moments, and the decision to mix this myself was right up there with the worst of them. I’ve done a lot of mixing in the last few years and like to think that I’m finally getting quite good at it – certainly good enough to know a shit mix when I hear one! But back then I was a well-meaning yet hopeless amateur, hence the album is a messy sonic soup of undefined noise, and much worse than I remember.
But surprisingly the songs were good, sometimes very good, the arrangements were great, some of the guitar playing is pretty cool, and there’s a cohesiveness to all the music that comes from playing all the instruments yourself. I recorded the songs fresh with no input from a band, built them in the studio and knew every melody line in every song backwards, so everything fits together really nicely. You know what, I think I have the original audio files somewhere…
So I fire up the iMac and load one of the songs into Logic Pro, my studio software of choice. I’m surprised at how good everything is – while I had no proper mixing experience back then, the raw tracks are actually pretty good. A few hours later I’ve whipped it into shape and I’m genuinely excited. It sounds like what it was supposed to sound like, instead of what it ended up sounding like. Hell, even my vocals sound ok. Definitely not great, but also not crap. Given what they sounded like before, ok is a welcome and notable step up.
I was enjoying myself so much that I remixed all fourteen songs over the next two months. The need to do actual paid work means I never normally work at that pace with my musical projects, fourteen tracks is the sort of workload that would usually take me a year or two. Bear in mind I started remixing our 2010 album Stormclouds two years ago and have finished precisely zero songs thus far.
The four additional songs were all very much part of the whole process first time around but I couldn’t find a way to make the album work as a whole and frankly I’d been working so long on it that I wasn’t really sure what I wanted anymore. This time around they seemed to naturally fall into place. Disco Boy, a song lamenting the good times had with my bandmate & writing partner Reece that ended when I left England, suddenly came alive and was surprisingly emotional (FYI, Reece is also the writer of Machine & Vision which both feature on this album). Experiment 195 and Strange Tales from Another Galaxy are really one long piece, and I wanted to get it on the original album, but the ten-minute epic made the album feel too long and I thought it really didn’t need an extra ten minutes of mid-tempo drudgery with six unnecessary layers of guitar parts, so I never finished it. I’m glad I have now.
The fourteenth song is Market Square Blues. The song dates back to 1995, but the version with these lyrics is from 2001 and was a nod to my old home of Aylesbury. In particular a friend called Carol Turner, and the acoustic sessions she and other friends would play every Sunday night at The Grapes. Carol was a wonderful person and a gifted musician that I really looked up to, who sadly died far too young. In 1996 I had had a few rehearsals with a new band I was trying to put together, which featured Carol on piano, and it never really got going as everyone had other commitments. But I still have a rough tape recording of us playing three songs – one of which was the original incarnation of Market Square Blues.
But I still had the original problem – these fourteen songs just refused to fit together nicely. What I needed was something a bit more upbeat to brings things together. At which point I found another song that had been part of these sessions but discarded early on, Perfect World. Funnily enough this was another song dating back to 1995 that I had on the tape from the band with Carol. I’m not sure how this song has laid dormant for so long. I’m not sure I’ve written many that are better. I’d never actually properly mixed it, but it turned out to be exactly the song I needed to bring everything else together into one cohesive whole. I got more excited mixing this than anything else I’ve done for fucking years!
I’m not sure I’d have gone through this process if I hadn’t given Bevan the CD – thanks mate. It feels like a redemption of sorts, like maybe I actually didn’t completely waste four of the best and most creative years of my life like I thought I had. The album now sounds like what I wanted it to sound like, in my head, at the time, which is good enough for me. Ok, it’s twenty years too late, but better now than never.
I’ve still got heaps of CDs if anybody wants one.