Getting Away From It All

"Leichhardt's not that obscure,” Stormcellar's singer and harmonica player Michael Barry responds, tongue in cheek, to the suggestion that the band seems to prefer obscure recording locations, a natural assumption given they recorded their most recent album, Hired Guns & Borrowed Glory, “on location” at the eco-retreat Bawley Bush Cottages, Bawley Point, on the NSW south coast. Sydney inner west suburb Leichhardt is the location of the studio, Goose Studios, in which the album was then co-produced and mixed by the studio's owner/operator Pete Doherty (not the one of Babyshambles fame).

“It was about getting a particular drum sound,” slide guitarist Paul Read chips in, “and everyone playing together.”

“When we recorded [2009 album] Space Junk,” Barry continues, “we recorded on analogue tape at the Mangrove Mountain Community Hall [on the NSW Central Coast] and the vibe was fantastic – you can hear the atmosphere. The mixing was done by some film [audio] engineers, so their experience in recording audio was recording dialogue audio. So instead of turning everything all the way up and compressing it or whatever it was they were meant to do, we had this tiny little signal with this massive amount of atmosphere noise. It gave a couple of the tracks a great sound.

“With Bawley Point, we wanted to be 'on location', so we could all be together during the recording, and see what happens. We got the entire album recorded in four and a half, five days. It was just a nice environment to record in, a good place to record drums – Theo [Wanders]'s happy with it, said it's the best drum sound he's got so far. We wouldn't have got the result that we got if we hadn't gone to the place to do it.

“The room in which they recorded was an A-frame wooden hall with a stage – it's a wedding venue as well – and Doherty brought down his Tascam US1800 connected to a laptop, along with an inconceivable amount of leads, mic stands, cables… I was at the back of the house,” Barry points out, “so we ran a really long mic cable and then I used a wireless receiver. Then we put everybody else in the room and we built what we called 'the reactors', which were old wooden server cabinet boxes, fitted with soundproofing material, and then we put the [Fender guitar] amplifiers inside those and we put them in the corridor outside the main room where they were recording and mic'd those up. When you sealed them, it wasn't perfectly soundproof but it reduced the sound spill so much that it wouldn't go into the drum mics in the room. The only problem was they got so hot, the valves, we had to take the covers off after every three takes – hence the term reactors.”

Aside from the US1800, Goose Studios boasts a 1966 Studer Model 089 12/2 Channel console, a Tascam M3500 24/8 Channel console and a 1972 Soundcraft Series 2 16/8 Channel console, so Doherty is obviously a lover of vintage gear. Acting as 'location engineer', he then recorded whatever overdubs – guitar solos, courtesy Read and guitarist Michael Rosenthal, backing vocals etc – needed to put the final polish on the album back at Goose before it was handed over to Rick O'Neil to master at his facility, Turtlerock.

As it happens, the album before Hired Guns & Borrowed Glory, 2010's Carl's Chair, was similarly recorded in an obscure location, this time live over four days and mostly acoustic on the porch of a 100-year-old farmhouse called Burgoon, out near Cumnock in regional western NSW. The prolific band has already started releasing a series of singles as part of their self-styled Curious Assembly project, but this time – or so far at least – they're sticking to proper studios

“We've done studio album, experimental album, studio album, experimental album,” Barry explains, “and we're now up to experimental time again. So we've recorded one track, Put On Your Sunhat, Sweet Adeline, at House Of Hits [again in Sydney's inner west], John McConnell's studio, onto [2” 24-track] analogue tape. We've recorded another track [Onward Traveller] with an external microphone onto an iPad at 2am after a gig – recorded on an Apple device and then sold through an Apple platform! – and now we're recording another one [Dirty Work] in Goose Studios, and the styles have been wildly divergent between them.”

As for recording his harmonica, Barry admits the band recently bought him the quintessential mic, a “Green Bullet”, the Shure 520, originally released mid 1949 and designed to withstand extreme temperatures and practically moisture-proof, which makes it ideal for harmonica.

“I was previously using a standard mic. I have a belief that when you use a Green Bullet, the valve mic, you can cheat, because everything sounds fantastic,” Barry admits with a laugh. “The biggest technological change for me was getting in-ear monitoring, which I did not for the vocals but for the harmonica, because I was competing against electric instruments and blowing out reeds. When I went to the in-ear monitors, I was pushing less air and blowing out less harps.”

Earlier this year Hired Guns & Borrowed Glory began receiving some airplay in Portland, Oregon, courtesy of KBOO FM, and has since gone on to debut at number 15 on the US Roots Chart, so Stormcellar are currently organising a US tour for September.