RECORDING ANECDOTES
Near the end of our first tour of England we developed friendships with a number of other musicians represented by our agent, Borrow-Hunter Agencies of Middlesbrough. Bass player, Mick Sandbrook generously offered to drive us, along with all our equipment, down to London. Traynor amps of Canada had supplied us with most of our gear and it had to be returned to Wing Music in Bromley, Kent.  On our return to Canada we immediately started planning a second tour of England for the following summer. Throughout the coming year we kept up correspondence with Mick and he lined up session muscians and studio time at Impulse Studios ~ Walls End, Newcastle-On-Tyne.

As we had done on Album No. 6, we planned No. 7 to be a double concept package: Side One: Sue-On - The Newcastle Sessions which featured some of Sue-On's favourite solos and Side Two: Road Songs: On Tour In England for which I wrote songs inspired by our experiences on the road, both in North America and in England.

Side One: As with most of our albums we chose a number of cover versions of songs that would appeal to our record-buying fan base who always look for familiar titles. This allowed us to mix in an equal number of originals. We had done a less than spectacular version of Tiny Bubbles on our first album. Since that time we had combined it with Paper Roses in our stage shows.  Sue-On was anxious to hear how this medley would sound from a more acceptable studio. We had a ball doing this one in a shuffle rhythm and then used the synth to add some "bubble" sound effects to it. She also did a new version of Silver Threads & Golden Needles. It turned out to be a much more driving version than the previous album No. 1 effort. 

Another fan favourite at our shows and dances has been Please, Release Me. For this one I set the rhythm by using a drumstick to beat out a percussive sound from my guitar. We have a number of Neil Diamond songs in our repertoire and we finally settled on his Song Sung Blue. When we contacted Neil Diamond to pay royalties for the release of his composition he requested that we send album covers/inserts. They were to be added to the display of covers on the walls of his Nashville office. 

We sing the gospel great, Why Me, Lord? as a duet on stage. For the studio session, however, Sue-On sang a fantastic solo and overdubbed harmony parts, a la Mary Ford and Patti Page.  Impulse owner Dave Wood was at the studio while we recorded Why Me Lord? and was so impressed with it that he immediately took a dub down to the local radio station. One of the jocks flipped over it and played it three times on his show. They later featured the song as a regular on their Sunday religious programmes, as well. We were pleasantly surprised when Why Me, Lord? went on to receive a nice bit of airplay across the UK and Germany.

Side Two featured seven more originals - two of them written by Al Jones who had organized and accompanied us on our first UK tour.  Sue-On had recorded the ballad, While You're Away, the year before in London's Gooseberry Studios. Boogie Woogie Band had come out of the Free Spirit sessions we had done the year before.

Outlaw Ramblin' Band narrates the events of the first tour: the rather scary decision to leave the Canadian prairies to embark on a +30-night tour of English clubs, our first flight in a 747, the hectic confusion of Heathrow Airport, the crazy London traffic, the long commute to Northern England in a packed Commer van, and the challenge of playing for packed Workingman Clubs every night. This involved adapting to taking the stage after a warm-up variety act and house band intro, playing a show set, getting off stage while the audience indulged in Housie (Bingo), and then going on for a dance set, and shutting the whole thing down by 11 o'clock. It also gave us the experience of working with musicians we had heard about and admired for so long, exploring dressing rooms that the Beatles had used a few years before, playing up the novelty of our "American" accents and country-based music, being typical tourists through the day, and suddenly adapting to Canada again after being immersed in British culture for almost seven weeks.

One Night Stand is a sort of wistful reflection on our many years of performing one-night shows for just about every venue imaginable. This duet opened many doors for us as it became a Top Ten hit on many stations and we performed it on network television, the national Big Country Awards Show, the Opry North Show and shows in various Concert Halls. It was also instrumental in our receiving the Manitoba Entertainers of the Year Award, which led to media coverage on the CBC National News, newspapers, magazines and TV/Radio interviews.

Swamp Romp is a bit of a screamer but its main theme is that we were open to all musical genres and gigs. Over the years we have performed just about every type of music for all kinds of functions: military bases, TV/Radio, fairs and rodeos, outdoor festivals, arena shows and dances, auditoriums, penitentiaries, barn dances, high school proms, hoedowns, film soundtracks, commercials, churches, weddings, socials, Indian pow-wows, and festivals: folk, Celtic, blues, cowboy poetry, gospel rock, bluegrass, etc. ... we love 'em all.

Montana shares the experiences we had while performing on grandstand shows in US state and county fairs. All of our tours have been summer tours, taken during our summer break from teaching high school -- and university classes in our more recent years. Our backgrounds as geography majors and educators always influenced our appreciation of the geography and local colour of the places we toured. This fascination is quite evident in this song.

Good Time Jamboree  is a novelty song about our stage exploits and the experience of performing 30 years worth of one-nighters. It was recorded during our Newcastle sessions in England. This studio, like so many of the places we played in England, was inaccessible in the extreme. We had to pull our gear up many flights of stairs and through a seemingly endless number of doors because the facility was situated on the upper level of a large bingo hall complex. The building has a famous heritage stretching all the way back to Music Hall days and silent films. Thefamous Stan Laurel worked here in the early days of his career -- before he and Oliver Hardy formed a world famous film duo.  After surviving climbing ordeal, which anyone in his right mind would have left to roadies, I returned to re-park our Ford Transit van only to find that the meter maid had decorated it with a parking ticket - to add infuriation to fatigue.

Impulse Studios were located above a bingo hall in Newcastle.  The studio is pretty well known since many popular groups have recorded there: Lindisfarne, members of the Chieftains, Sting, etc.  Our bass-playing friend, Mick Sandbrook, had lined up musicians for the session and we were quite excited about working with a synth player for the first time. In 1977, synth players were still a bit of a rarity - the instruments were costly, not too versatile, and somewhat hard to master as preset sounds were not yet common. John Ashcroft's work on the Arp Odyssey Synth and his "string machine" really fattened and sweetened our sound.  We spent much of our time on the session trying to convey to him the arrangements and sound effects we heard in our heads but had no way of writing out. I was so busy eking synth arrangements I ran out of time, which resulted in not adding all the lead guitar parts I'd planned.

As usual we put in long hours and did the entire album in two days. We did the final mix far into the night, a job Sue-On has little interest in, so luckily our friends Keith and Margaret Jones from Spennymoor showed up and offered to take Sue-On to a gambling casino. She did quite well in her gambling debut and even won about 30 pounds. Keith is Alan Jones' brother and we've since enjoyed many get-togethers with them on both sides of the Atlantic.

---

PLAY
STING with LAST EXIT - Don't Let It Bring You Down (N. Young) 
Recorded in 1974 at Impulse Studios, Newcastle U.K.

---

DAVE WOOD DISCUSSES THE EVOLUTION OF HIS IMPULSE STUDIOS IN NEWCASTLE:
The Borough Theatre was built in 1906, it was a music hall at first, then a cinema, then a bingo hall. I got to know the manager and asked him for some space to run a studio. The studio was in the dressing room and the entrance to the studio was through the old stage door. There was a little booth where the doorman would of sat, well before our time (laughs).

I developed the space into a recording studio from scratch but it took years to get it all done. At first we used egg boxes for sound proofing then bricked up all the windows. Anything was used for padding because we never had enough money then and at first we only had a mono then a stereo studio. We then purchased a 4 track, then an 8 track, eventually a 24 track machine but this was done over 10 or 12 years.

This was all by the 1980s and by then we had the run of all the building and moved the studio to the top floor, which wasn’t very popular with the bands as we had no lift. Eventually Impulse Studios were on all 3 floors.

Sound engineer was Micky Sweeney, a great character, really popular with everyone. I used to do some recording as well. Micky ended up working with Lindisfarne

---

Sadly, the historic 100-year-old Borough Theatre in High Street East, Wallsend were entertainers such as Sting and Lindisfarne got their start was recently demolished.

The by-now-trademark filmstrip included some recent candid photos. We recycled some of our previous studio shots including the back-to-back picture that we had used on the cover of Album No. 6 and for promo 8"x10"s. Two other photos are with Mick Sandbrook and some of our English musician friends. 

During an all-day open-house visit to the famed Pinewood Movie Studios we visited the main soundstage where they had just wound up a James Bond shoot and were bringing in truckloads of white styrofoam to create a North Pole set for the upcoming Superman movie. I stood under the studio's Superman sign, pulled open my shirt to reveal my maple leaf T-shirt  and assumed a heroic Captain Canuck pose. My hopes of being signed as a stand-in for Christopher Reeve never materialized : )  This gigantic studio burned down soon after - but was rebuilt - even bigger and better. 

Two London photos have me aiming a cannon at the Tower Bridge and Sue-On welcoming pedestrians on London Bridge. The last photo is of Sue-On seated during a break at an outdoor street dance back home on Main Street, Strathclair, Canada.

I coaxed popular keyboardist Alan Clark to do all the keyboards -- synths, clavinet, grand and electric pianos-- on 20 of our recorded songs. A few months later Alan joined Mark Knopfler's Dire Straits with whom he performed for the next 15 years. 

When Alan accepted the Rock Hall of Fame Award for Dire Straits in Cleveland the Rock Hall used the photos we took of Alan that I took during our Durham sessions.

The photos were projected on a giant screen behind Alan during his acceptance speech. This ceremony was broadcast to a huge international audience.