A Field Further

1998

A Field Further forms the second part of a double cassette issue from 1998, four years after the previous Voice of the Rain release, during which time I had been living in Berlin. Musical collaboration at such distance was ‘difficult’.

Difficult too to view it as a separate entity from its companion piece – we had four year’s worth of songs – Your breath on my glass, for example, had probably been around at least that long. The songs I contributed had almost all been written in Berlin and, unsurprisingly, took inspiration from my surroundings; Tommy and Brenda really did meet in a squat and end up getting married; The First Snow Of Last Year and The Last Of My Line distilled very specific memories of a particularly hard winter in a magpie surrounded flat and night life in the city. Other songs were more instances of ‘home thoughts from abroad’, such as Eversfield, which Rob transformed by elevating a simple whistled refrain into a full string arrangement.

I can’t remember now if we recorded things in much the same order they appear on the track listing but we were definitely keen towards the end to just get things finished. One of my favourites at the time was Still, to which I find myself wishing we had given a fuller instrumental arrangement and I think we both feel we could have done a little more with New National Anthem but there you go – we had been at it all Summer, for over a decade and we weren’t to know that these would be our last recordings together.

Richard Knowles April 2014

I agree with Richard that New National Anthem needed more but several attempts at the time and in the years since have failed to yield something I’m happy with. Still on the other hand works well as a lone plaintive cry to my mind.

Amongst the insights into the Voice Of The Rain creative process I can offer are that the guitar part for Taste was written whilst watching an episode of Columbo and Wishworlds exists because our recorder broke down and I was mucking about with my Alesis MT8 sequencer and Roland JV1080 synthesizer. The latter was a prize from a Sound On Sound magazine competition where I actually came third but was the only one in when they phoned round so got the prize. That was in the days before they started running sexist advertising from sE Electronics and blaming the EU and peoples ‘lack of a sense of humour’ for it which led me to cancel my decades old subscription.

Robert Boole January 2015

Reissue Track Listing

Your Breath On My Glass
Little Lightbulbs
Forbidden Fruit
Personal
How I Became A Killer
Harbour Lights
Albertine
The First Snow Of Last Year
The Last Of My Line
Eversfield
Padded Cell
A Last Supper
New National Anthem
Tommy & Brenda
Still
Wish Worlds

All the songs were written and
performed by Richard & Rob

The cover photograph, ‘Staircase, Montmartre,’ by Eugène Atget is courtesy of the Getty Trust Open Content Program.