Since at 12 minutes the video for Futura Motel is certainly the longest and most challenging music video I've so far worked on, containing imagery from a bunch of different sources - NASA to a 15th/16th century painting - I thought perhaps you might be interested in what some of the bits are and how and why they came to be in the video...

The initial inspiration came from a sculptural piece from Papamoa artist Alex Miln called 'Futura Motel'. This picture does it no justice as it is a large 3-dimensional "motel sign". For an imaginary motel of course. It's an amazing bit of work. Even the rust has been hand-painted by Alex. His work takes a massive amount of time to complete and is breathtaking to view in person. You can see more of it HERE

Here's how I approached things...
Since the song suggests a dystopian future I wanted the imagery to reflect that.

I started by generating literally hundreds of AI images of motels in various styles with the AI generator at Gencraft, some of which I then tweaked into faux 3D with another AI programme.

What you see in the video is only a very small sample of what I created. I didn't initially know which direction to take with the motels so I have dozens of pictures of flood-ravaged motels, dozens of pictures of motels in dust storms and overgrown by jungle and – most of all – on fire. Hundreds of those. The first edit was an almost endless stream of motels on fire.

As you'll notice in the lettering on the signs, some AI generators - like this one - are crap at generating actual writing. Others aren't bad...

But the video also needed moving images and I hit upon using sections of the German 1927 Fritz Lang film Metropolis, which after a series of contradictory court decisions seems to be back in the public domain (it went in then out then in again I believe...). The black and white workers come from there as do the pipe-playing skeletons which I "night-visioned".

All the early footage is courtesy of NASA and I'd highly recommend you check out their on-line presence as there is a treasure chest of fantastic film and the most extraordinary images there.

The only other significant imagery comes from a long time ago - painted between 1490 and 1510 - and the artist Hieronymous Bosch. I initially used a lot more Bosch, particularly some of the darker weirder stuff – and there's plenty of that and it is astonishingly dark and weird! - but in the end simplified it to just this 3D walkthrough of an extract from The Garden Of Earthly Delights. Light and weird instead of dark...

For anyone interested in editing I did it all on NCH Video Pad but am planning to upgrade when i get a boost in computing power. My current machine is too old to run the updated drivers. Oh well...
Anyway - hope you enjoy the video. In case that has whetted your appetite and you want to watch it again, here it is.

Most people look sideways at me when I say that we're about to release an electronica album. And that the 'title track' is 12 minutes long. More than a few fellow musicians have suggested that this will alienate most of our fan base. A few seemed generally amused by that and I hold no animus - if we can't enjoy our friends' misconceived disasters then who can?

But bluesman Grant Haua - no stranger to taking risks himself - was excited by the concept and our good friend and electronica expert John Heighes, working down at Flying Nun in Wellington, reckons there's really no such thing as electronica any more anyway... and he likes the album.

FUTURA  was originally intended as a companion-piece to WORKHORSE. The idea was that Workhorse would be a regular "blues" album and 6 months later we'd release FUTURA, half the same songs but in electronica versions and half new songs. So two albums, with crossovers, one traditional and one experimental.

But of course we got derailed. So two years later, here we go, Plan B...

Pretty much all independent albums these days are labours of love, and definitely this one. We do not, as you've probably noticed, use electronica live; this is a departure from our usual band sound. But this is intended for home listening - we don't plan to play these songs like this live. In fact we are already well underway recording the next - regular! - Kokomo album, KOKOMO'S PAIN-KILLING MYSTERY BALM.

FUTURA exists because Nigel and I share a love of Swiss titans Yello and Brixton anarchists Alabama 3 (known for the 'Sopranos Theme'). Apolitical Euro-cool meet dirty left-wing London. Perhaps uncoincidentally they're both “song” bands not simply groove merchants. We like songs. So these are largely songs (there's one instrumental, one with very few words). We hope you'll give the new sound a chance - we realise it's a long way from acoustic blues. But that's cool. 

I better stop. I'll do another blog about the actual songs in a few days' time. Till then...

Workhorse Blues is one of a number of songs on Workhorse that revolves around life choices. I guess when you get to this stage in life you start looking at the paths taken and not taken, sometimes with relief, sometimes with regret.

There were many inspirations behind the lyric. Tom Waits is in there somewhere, but then he usually is... But the person perhaps most on my mind was a bluesman from America who traveled to New Zealand and toured with Midge Marsden in the nineties. His name was“Mississippi” Willie Foster. I'd guess he was in his seventies then.














Actually, that was only his name in New Zealand. We were lucky enough to play support for him a couple of times and I also interviewed him for the local paper. As he pointed out, it's not much use being called “Mississippi” Willie Foster if you're in Mississippi. And Willie hadn't left Mississippi since the '60s. Back there he was called “Little” Willie Foster.

Willie was a sweet and dignified man. New Zealand was a country he didn't really know before Midge met him, and everything seemed like some fever dream, a truly bizarre experience, suddenly being a star in a far-off country and having crowds of mainly young - mainly white - people fete him wherever he went. If you've ever been to Mississippi you'll realise quite how important the word “white” is in that sentence, and how strange it was for Willie.

Willie told me he was born “like a rabbit” between the rows of a cotton field (in 1921). His mother went into labour while picking cotton on the plantation where she sharecropped. He told me about seeing Muddy Waters perform at the Dunleith plantation before the war, and he also remembered a visit by John Lee “Sonny Boy” Williamson. That's the first Sonny Boy, not the more famous Chicago harp player who Willie didn't like at all – reckoned he swore and drank too much...

Willie told me about his own days sharecropping. He'd done that until he signed up for the army and was posted to England during World War 2. Sharecropping was hard. He said to me: “We used to work out in those fields from cin till cain't.”

“Say what?” I asked. That was a new one to me.

“Cin till cain't? That's from when you cin see till when you cain't see” said Willie.

I saved that for 25 years to put in a song.

Mastering? If there's any part of recording that confuses people it's mastering. When I get to boring folk with talk of the new recording, the question I hear most often is “what is mastering?”.

So let me have a quick run at this – and I will keep it brief since it can be the sort of technical thing that makes eyes glaze over pretty quickly. I'll do my best not to make it too boringly nerdy despite my ever-present nerdish tendencies.

Basically mastering is the icing on the cake of a recording, a sort of brush and polish that happens after the recording is mixed. So what does that mean?

In our case, Nigel and I recorded and mixed Workhorse at the Boatshed Studio in Whakamarama and then sent it across town to Tim Julian at The Colourfield in Welcome Bay, who has all sorts of flash specialist equipment for mastering that Nigel doesn't at The Boatshed.


















At its most basic, mastering will do this:

• make all the songs of equal volume
• make that volume as loud as possible (so your songs aren't quieter than other songs on the radio or Spotify etc)
• even up the frequencies (rooting out any harsh tones that have slipped through, adding a little more of anything that's missing)
• make sure that each song has the same frequency balance (the same levels of bottoms/bass, mids, and tops/high frequency

 All these sound like things that could be done while mixing but, as I say, Tim has much more specialised equipment so can do a more detailed job.

The way mastering makes the recording louder is essentially by applying compression. Compression is where you squash down the loudest bits. That means you can then turn the overall volume up without those peaks being too loud and distorting.

There has been much complaint in recent years that to get songs as loud as possible – to stand out better on phones through headphones - too much compression has been used and the music has lost its dynamics (no loud and quiet). We wholeheartedly agree. Consequently we try and compress as little as possible to allow for dynamics. Our albums may be a little quieter than some but we like the sound better.

It is also possible to aim this compression quite specifically so it will affect only certain frequencies or certain places in the mix (e.g. just the left and right of the mix so it doesn't affect the voice in the middle). Tim regularly uses this to “tighten up” the bass sound, getting the low frequencies to be more punchy. He also uses it to add “sparkle” at the top making things like cymbals and tambourines a little more vibrant.

Of course you can really go to town with mastering by adding targeted effects. For instance, if you have a guitar part on the right hand side that is predominantly at a specific frequency, you could target effects – chorus, reverb, whatever – to that particular frequency specifically on the right hand side and essentially change the sound or volume of that instrument alone. So you can do all sorts of clever stuff, depending on how much time and money you have to throw at it....

But we keep it simple. We look to Tim for just the icing on the cake. We've already baked the damn thing at great length and it's just the way we wanted it so Tim just adds that extra 5% of fairy dust. And every bit of magic helps!

Just as an example - here's a minute of I'm Going Fishing - first verse unmastered, second verse mastered. It's quite a difference!

I was inordinately pleased with myself after writing Born To Bad Luck, until Richard O'Brien buggered it up.

The song, as first written, was a crack at one of those classic blues structures, a structure that has one line repeated three times and then a rhyming line at the end. It's one line longer than yer typical 12-bar blues and the first example that pops into my mind is Leadbelly's take on See See Rider. There are hundreds of others.

The blues is like that with structures - there are common ones that crop up over and over. Like many songwriters I have a "bucket list" of styles I'd like to write songs in and this was a good chance to knock that one off!

Since we were planning an album of blues songs - as much as we plan anything - this seemed like a real winner, since it required very few words, which suited me fine. I have always been a sucker for songs with a lot of words but after all these years I know just how much work that takes (or at least takes me). I am a very lazy writer. That made the idea of an "quick" song without a lot of words very appealing... each verse would effectively be only two lines (one repeated three times then the rhyme) – easy!

And, actually, it was. Of course when you're working in such minimalist territory you want to make sure all the lines are good ones but, hey, that's just basic quality control, par for the course.

So not long afterwards I happened to be out at Richard O'Brien's place of an afternoon. Richard is a friend; we often try out new songs on each other.
And of course Richard likes his rhymes. Fair enough too. Without exaggeration I regard him as one of this planet's most agile and imaginative rhymers when it comes to poetry or song. So when he offers opinions I tend to listen.

Long story short, Richard was unimpressed. He pooh-poohed all those repeated lines as being, well, what they were really - laziness. In the nicest possible way of course. And deep down I knew it too but I hoped I could get away with it.

So I asked him to help. After writing it one way the last thing I wanted to do was start again.

“C'mon Richard” I said, “You could whip out a few fun rhymes and clever lines.”

He declined.

I had another crack at it, but I really couldn't think of anything interesting so I asked him again. No dice. So I did what I knew (and he knew) I needed to: knuckled down and spent a couple of weeks actually doing the work. 

And, as he usually is, Richard was right. It's much better now. Nothing lazy or throwaway left - I reckon it's a fine lyric and I'd be happy to take it anywhere.

I sang it originally, in that first version, way back during lockdown in 2020 – here's a verse from that, with the simple lyric, and the same verse, rewritten, from the new recording due to be released on May 14th.