ABOUT THIS ALBUM
Album Notes
Produced By Neville Meredith and Russell Grooms
Recorded In England in 1996
Remastered in 2020
On the Romantown Label
Cover Photography by Russell Grooms
*********************************************************
Linear Notes:
By Russell Grooms (Bass, Drums, Backing Vocals)
Looking back 20 odd years to the UK CRISIS sessions for Adversity and Spirit Level, it’s mostly a blur.
Both Nev and I had come out of the wreckage of Shuzbutt and I think it’s evident that the material on Adversity reflects that. The pop influences on Masquerade and In Your Eyes were lingering reminders of where we’d come from where-as heavier tracks such as 40 Miles and No Good People were an outlet for the anger we both felt at being stuck in dead-end seaside towns with what seemed to be very little future. In contrast, Spirit Level seems a return to the EDM influences that Nev had grown up within South London, especially with a large amount of the drums and bass being re-samples from previously recorded tracks
Of the specifics, I remember from the sessions were the creative spaces we had to use to record drums. One place was an old barn off the A2 near Faversham. The hessian floor played havoc with the drum hardware; everything moved around as I played and it was freezing. I mean FUCKING freezing. It was all borrowed drums, half-broken mixing desks, and an unreliable ADAT machine. I don’t think we ever booked into a proper studio as we couldn’t afford it. For Spirit Level we used an early version of the Roland V Drum kit which you can hear well on Cradle; the backwards reverb is a patch I found buried somewhere in the brain. Other equipment I remember using was an old ’77 Fender Jazz bass which I’d had since the Shuzbutt days. Like all things, it was eventually traded for something else. Listening back I think a distorted Rickenbacker would’ve worked well but at the time it was a case of whatever we had.
Across the 2 albums, the only track I remember directly contributing to was Crash, and that was the middle 8. For the most part, these are Nev’s songs which I augmented where necessary. Nev would mix for hours on end and present different mixes and even when I thought we’d settled on the final one it would change. I guess the reason they’re being re-released again is that he’s never been happy with them. I don’t have an issue with that way of working, I’m just more of a get it done and move on kinda guy.
My lasting memory was that we knew we were good but we didn’t really know where we belonged amongst the pub bands playing the same old same old so we kept ourselves to ourselves while everyone else sang ‘Cigarettes and Alcohol’ at the top of their lungs.
Nev was an early adopter of the internet and getting music out there independently with full creative control. He still is and for that I applaud him. Listening back, I’m proud of what we created and it’s a shame that the quality can’t ever be the way we intended but technology has spoken there. However the songs hold up, the playing is pretty good considering how young we were so I’ll look back fondly to my time making music with Nev and be glad to have worked with someone so passionate and dare I say visionary. If the internet lets a few other people hear a snap-shot in time then why not. I hope you enjoy it.
******************************************************************
By Neville Meredith (Guitars, Keyboards, Vocals)
Russell and I shared a love of classic, progressive, and hard rock. Bands like Led Zeppelin, Deep Purple, Rainbow, Black Sabbath, and Cream were inspirational. But so were bands like Supertramp, Genesis, Yes, Rush, Pink Floyd, and Marillion. These were the bands we grew up with. We had also just come out of the Britpop band ‘Shuzbutt’ so several songs that had been destined for that band ended up on this album… I know we wanted a harder sound because we were both angry young men. The frustration in those days revolved around our location, the people around us, and the fucking madness of having to suck up to major record labels in order to progress. It’s not what I wanted to do. I did not want to be altered by record label suits. I did not want Producers or Stylists fucking about with our sound, our image, or our art.
Straight away I realised the Importance the Internet would have on the Music Industry. I already owned a record label I started with a friend. It was called ‘Kurve Records’. Releases Including the Shuzbutt vinyl EP, Escapism, House Of Cards, and various other recordings of bands I had produced. In 96 I founded the Romantown Label, at the time, specifically for ‘UK Crisis’. We started releasing music and videos on the Internet on our own website a year before mp3.com began and 9 years before youtube was founded. Our music had been downloaded thousands of times before we had any kind of online distributor. When mp3.com began it was exactly what was needed. An online Music Distributor for Independent artists that manufactured CDs and paid royalties. It was obvious that the established music industry, which was way behind on the Importance of the Internet, would eventually try to destroy Independents. When mp3.com was taken over by Universal, a major record label, It began a massive shift in the industry which has led to the market being saturated with huge amounts of garbage music. Making it virtually impossible to find talented artists. The death of the CD and the rise of streaming services have destroyed Indy musician’s ability to earn money from their craft. However, if you make music you just don’t stop because of adversity. You keep going, as long as you enjoy doing it, keep going. With a dedicated fan base, the UK Crisis keeps going.
The album ‘Adversity’ was a testament to the challenge of recording an album outside of a traditional recording studio setup. The main live recording sessions were done in 1996. The drums and rhythm guitar were recorded live in a damp, cold insect riddled farm barn. We used a dubious 16 channel mixing desk with a condemned 8 track adat machine. We had good microphones for the drums, every drum was miked up but we always had overhead mics and this usually ended up the mix we used rather than close mic mixes. We were always looking for the John Bonham / Cozy Powell huge acoustic drum sound.
I had two guitar amps I switched between. a 1972 Hiwatt custom 100 amp and matching 4×12 cab and a 1960’s Burns orbit 6 3×12 all transistor combo. This was a fantastic amp that used to belong to an ex-member of Hawkwind. It had a gorgeous Vibe setting on it which you can hear on tracks like ‘Still’ and ‘Living in the dark’. The Hiwatt has always been the main amp for guitar sounds. At the time of this album, I was using a ratt overdrive pedal, an old soundcity flanger, a very old Ibanez flying pan and a crybaby wah wah. But for the live recording, I would just use the ratt as it was important to record everything as clean as possible. I used my Gibson Les Paul studio for the entire recording.
Drums and guitars were recorded directly onto tape with no added effects. no compression, no eq. There was no separation between the drums and guitar amps so it was a live recording. A vocal track was recorded live as well, used as a guide but quite often made it onto the mix. It was important to maintain everything as live as possible. We had been used to live performance coming off the back of Shuzbutt and months of gigging. Other guitar parts, bass, vocals, and synths were overdubbed in various locations. Keyboard wise I used a Korg poly 800 II, a 1960’s Intercontinental Piano 7, and a collection of vintage synth sounds that were sampled and played through an Akai s950 sampler. An initial CD was produced that had only 8 tracks on it. This was then released later on mp3.com and various other OMD’s of the time. An 11 track version of the album was later released on cd through mp3.com.
When it came to remastering the album I wanted to remix it from the original adat tapes. However, over the years, they had not been stored properly and they were all ruined. I had hundreds of mixes on DAT tapes and cassettes. Several of the tracks on the album were digitized recordings from a cassette tape. It was a labor of love to try and get them to sound as they now do. In hindsight, I am glad the original adat tapes were destroyed because I found mixes of the tracks on tape that could never be reproduced. As we were only working with 8 tracks guitars and vocals were re-recorded so many times the previous versions would be wiped. I would always mix down onto tape or dat after a mixing session. That was how we backed up things back then. Completely different now with unlimited tracks and massive disk drives. Mixing was live, as it used to be… pushing faders and tweaking knobs in real-time. Modern DJs have no idea how much more skilled it was to mix a track off a multitrack tape machine on a 16/24 track mixing desk with racks and racks of effect processors.
In conclusion: I love this album… It is raw, It is unprocessed, it is live, it is how a rock album should sound. I could not have done this without Russell. He was the only person I knew at the time who was capable of working with strange time signatures and the habit I had of going off on one… improvising the song as we were recording it. He can anticipate what I’m doing as I do it. A rare skill and a multi-talented musician.