Vice Squad have a DIY approach to making music. Is it a case of following a punk ethos or is it down to keeping control of your music and image?
A bit of both I think. It’s good to have control over your music and image but it does mean that you have to do all the work and take all of the financial risk. I have had to be tour manager, warehouse woman, accountant and lawyer as well as singer, songwriter and guitarist. Most of my time is taken up with non-creative things which is very frustrating sometimes.
Do you think this DIY approach is harder in 2020 than it was in the early days of Vice Squad or easier?
We weren’t DIY for very long in the old band. The original guitarist Dave Bateman booked the early gigs. We paid for the recording of our first single but after that we got management and signed to EMI. Over the years we’ve seen the best and worst of both approaches.
From a recording perspective it’s definitely easier to be DIY now. Home studios were few and far between back then so if you wanted a decent quality recording it was very difficult to do that with a DIY approach.
How did you write and record Battle of Britain? Did it require a different approach to other Vice Squad albums?
I think we’ve finally mastered the art of recording and production for this one, which is the main difference. Other than that we took the usual approach of writing and recording songs, keeping the ones that suited the album and discarding the others or using them for EPs. It’s actually quite difficult finding time to concentrate on recording and balancing that with booking gigs and running the band. You’d be surprised at how much trivia has to be dealt with just to get 4 musicians and a driver in the same place at the same time!
Some of the songs came very easily and we only struggled with one, ‘You Can’t Fool All Of The People’, which was initially a lot faster than the version on the album. It took me a while to find the right ‘feel’ for the voice. The final track ‘Pulling Teeth’ was great fun to record, I was trying not to laugh while singing the ‘Dithering Jibbering solid as jam’ bit and if you listen carefully you can hear bassist Wayne screaming ‘Aaarrrggghhhh’ in the middle eight!
