Joy of Sex

Cardiff band.

Tracks : Colour Me Black / Swingers / Roland / Don’t Care

Max from the band says:
We got the session after I’d asked Huw Williams the best way to get radio sessions – not just on Adam Walton’s show, but generally. He advised me to simply ask outright, which I did – again, not just for Adam’s show, but for a handful of others. Adam was the only one who responded.

We recorded the session with Carl Bevan at Le Mons studio in Newport. Thanks to vehicle trouble, we were forced to take a much smaller car than usual, at the expense of one of our drums, which led to use using one of Carl’s instead. It turned out Carl’s drum was tuned completely differently to ours so we had to make some fairly dramatic modifications to get the drum sounding close to the one we usually use. Otherwise, the recording of the session as a whole was straight-forward; we recorded six weeks in advance and were finished in less than three hours.

For the session we recorded five songs instead of the usual three, simply because our songs are typically shorter than the average. The five songs all together clocked in at less than ten minutes of total music. We chose to record two older songs, two new ones and a cover of our friend’s band’s song (Don’t Care by Threatmantics). We used the Hammond organ in the studio on Don’t Care in lieu of our synth because Carl was enthusiastic about it, explaining how he tries to get every band to use it in some way, and we liked the idea.

Carl had promised we’d hear a final mix nearer the date of the show, about a week or so before maybe, and that we’d have a chance to make any adjustments we felt necessary. Come the morning of the broadcast we still hadn’t heard anything. We finally received the tracks in the late afternoon. We had several issues with the mix (for example, the Hammond on Don’t Care was almost inaudibly low) but Carl had some personal business to attend to that evening and didn’t have the opportunity to fix it, hence we were never 100% happy with the session recording.

The actual broadcast was a mixed blessing; on the plus side Adam had several flattering things to say about us and it’s always nice to receive radio play. On the minus side, we felt our session was somewhat incongruous with the tone set by the majority of the other songs and features aired on that edition of the program. Also, by the end of the evening only four of the five songs were played. During the recording, we had actually considered turning the five songs into three by segueing some of them together with guitar feedback (which we even went so far as to record) so that we’d stand a better chance of having all the material broadcast. We abandoned the idea after Carl was told by Adam all five songs would be played. By the end of the broadcast, we wished we’d stuck with the idea. Although Adam promised on air to play the missing fifth track on the following week’s program, the song was never played, and still hasn’t been to my knowledge.