Adelaide Band ‘Uncomfortable’ With Smashing Pumpkins Producer

Adelaide band City Riots have opened up on how they parted ways with one of the Smashing Pumpkins producers when they initially started making their debut album Sea Of Bright Lights.

In this week's The Drum Media, frontman Ricky Kradolfer explained that producer Bjorn Thorsund, who had also worked with The Dandy Warhols, just wasn't fitting in with what they were trying to create.

“So we went to Chicago and lived at his house and attempted to record an album. We were actually to do it at Steve Albini's studio and maybe a month after that was confirmed, Bjorn rang and said that Billy Corgan has just finished building his personal studio and he said we could just come in and use that before he came in to record some new Pumpkins stuff, so why didn't we do it there because we wouldn't have to rush. We could record everything there, take our time – the catch was that we were going to have to help finish the studio. It wasn't completely done yet; so we'd have to tidy up, help bring in stuff. So we knew that the process was going to be a little bit all over the place.

“So we jumped on the plane and went and did it, and then it just became a process where, as we were doing it, we just weren't really comfortable. Bjorn was a lovely guy but we just weren't comfortable working with him and it wasn't 'til we came back and we were listening to all the mixes, and I think there were some good songs on there but definitely not enough to do an album that we were totally happy with, but just the way they were put together and produced really didn't represent who we are as a band and our sound – it just didn't sound like us.

The experience wasn't all lost on the band though.

“We rejigged a few things and kept moving forward – we used five of the songs and put them on as part of [last year's] Matchsticks EP, and then kind of had to regroup, 'cause it's also quite an expensive process, doing that.”

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