How the hell did we get here so quickly? It’s the start of 2010, bloody freezing in my studio, and it seems like barely this morning that I was last writing.  Well, where do I start with apologies? Having said that, this time last year, I would endeavour to write more blogs, look what goes and happens. Not a dickie bird for a full 12 months. Of course I blame the economy, and my temperamental interface mate Mac, but the truth is that time is just slipping through my boney cold fingers like so much melted snow.

As much as I’ve missed you, my main reason for coming out of semi blog retirement is that the band’s new album is finally with us. I say finally, as the music was finished in October, but what with artwork, mastering, pressing, admin and general heel dragging to deal with, it seems like an aeon since we started it.

It’s called Cut Loose, has a beautiful cover, and is full of 11 great Mustangs originals. What? You want to know more..? Oh ok then.

The genesis of a Mustangs record is always a fairly natural thing. We finish one album, gig it for a year or so and then start thinking about songs for the next one. From this cycle a pattern of one album every two years seems to have developed. Cut Loose was no different. We played the last album, Nothing Stays The Same, to punters all over the UK and on into the continent. The record was a good one, and had some fantastic reviews, but most importantly it gave the live show a handful of stone cold (I know that feeling) show stoppers that will live on in the set for years to come.

But through the back end of 2008 and into 2009 I was living an itinerant lifestyle, and one of my stopovers was Ben’s place. Inevitably, we’d stay up long into the night drinking red wine, listening to old vinyl records and getting the guitars out. Oh, I forgot to add that we’d talk an inordinate amount of bollocks to each other too. We’d both have little guitar licks and riffs that we had come up with in moments of inspiration, often fuzzily recorded for memory on our mobile phones, and we’d play these to and with each other, sorting the wheat from the chafe, and fine tuning melodies and guitar lines until we knew we had a handful of potentials.

Next stop, rehearsals. JB would bring in an old creaky tape machine, we’d bash through the numbers one by one, knocking them into a full band arrangement until we could find that one sweet spot between space, power, energy and restraint. Interestingly, the longer the band has been together, the quicker we have found that spot.

With the numbers ready to roll, Ben and I set about researching what kind of sound we wanted to achieve on the record. This involved going back to his living room and vinyl record player, and listening intently to hundreds of our favourite albums while drinking barrel-fulls of Old Speckled Hen. It was hard work, but it paid dividends. After talking yet more bollocks to each other, we could start to hear the common themes in the production on the records we loved: Joe Boyd’s Fairport albums, Led Zeppelin, classic Neil Young, and many more. They all had a ‘room’ sound, that you could hear on every whack of the snare. In all those records there was space, power, energy, restraint. Bingo, we just had to record the sound of the band, live, in a good room.

So at the start of September 2009, all rehearsed up and ready to roll, the band crammed into Derek’s country pile, deep in the West Sussex green leafery. On the first night we set up the gear, plugged the guitars in and ..hit the pub. You can work too hard, sometimes, you know.

But we had already decided to record the album live in just two days to try and capture a spontaneous dynamic atmosphere that we thought, as good as they were, may have been missing from the previous albums. We spat out take after take until each track had the right feel. JB thundering away in the stairwell under one mic (thanks Bonzo), Ben’s bass buzzing and booming from an old fender Bassman. Me in the middle of the room, singing until my throat was hoarse, the sound of the instruments spilling over into the vocal mic only adding to the electric energy in the air, an energy we were all hoping was going down on to tape. Or 42 bit digital binary code, as it is nowadays, but that doesn’t quite fit the vibe now, does it.

Fast forward through artwork cockups, lost emails, awol record company execs and a whole litany of other obstacles that were eventually overcome, and Cut Loose finally arrived, looking splendid and sounding even better.

This is our favourite Mustangs record yet, and I think you’ll agree with us. Why it may even be a perfect record to stick on, kick back with a big glass of red wine….and talk utter bollocks to.

Hope to write again more soon

Adam