JJ writes: Following our debut year of touring as a trio, we begin our build up to the release of our first album ‘Who Writes The Story’. Starting with Ray’s recollections of the year and the recording of the album.
Ray says: “It was early in the year that John spent some days with Al and laid down the first selection of songs just with guitar and voice. Al sent the recordings to me in Sweden, I worked through them, adding simple parts and using whatever instruments I had at hand that seemed to suit the mood of each song: cello, acoustic guitar, mandolin, piano, organ, harmonicas and backing vocals. I limited my parts to what we could play on stage and that is why the album sounds exactly like the way we sound live. The process was repeated a few times and the only difficulty we had was what to leave out.
We met up at the Metway studios in Brighton a couple of times to record together. It was very easy to make things work as we had a long list of ideas to choose from, both from the Oysterband catalogue and from the various solo albums that John and I have made. All of this was familiar to Al as he had produced or mixed everything we have done for a long time now. It helps having a producer in the band!
The first tour was in Denmark in March, followed by England in April/May, some festivals and then Germany and Austria in October. It did not take long to get the live show up and running, but we got better as we went along and all the gigging certainly helped. “