The Silverbeets recently hit us with Stay Tuned, an album throwing back to all the glory of the golden ’70s. It evokes the tune of a bygone era, one where rock ‘n’ roll reigned supreme.
But it was also a different time technologically, and radio ruled the world of music circulation. This became the creative lynchpin of Stay Tuned – the record an ode to radio as it used to be.
Caring to dive a little deeper into the album’s concept, we asked bandleader Farnz Cordeaux to elaborate. Read on for the genesis of Stay Tuned, straight from the horse’s mouth.
Been spinning Stay Tuned, the new record from The Silverbeets? Farnz Cordeaux explains the album’s concept, from start to finish and everywhere in between.
Further words by Farnz Cordeaux.
So it’s 2018, a long way from the age of the concept album, so where did the idea spring from and why?
Well like most ideas it sprang from something small, in this case trying to piece together two parts of a song that weren’t gelling together easily. The song was called Bad Radio and although the static never stayed in that song, the idea of piecing music together with radio static stayed.
Why radio static? Well TV and radio has moved to digital, but even when radio was still analogue the receivers had digital tuners so the radio static was essentially gone from listener’s ears. Sure that is in most ways a good thing, no one wants their radio stations to be slightly out of tune hearing half a song and half static.
Though it was a part of radio, from the days of the old crystal sets where you could barely move in the room while listening to the radio. In essence, it has barely changed in its history. People who love music go into a room, play songs to a mostly unheard from audience, occasionally talk to them and then go home. There is pretty much always someone listening, at the earliest hours of the morning, in the remotest corners of the world, always someone listening.
This disappearing of radio static from our aural experience needed one last revival, a nod to the past, a reminder to those who remember and an introduction to those who’ve never experienced it.
That’s just the one aspect of the concept though, the part that ties everything together as an album. The other part is the songs and the instruments. So when I spoke to my producer, Ernie O, about this album I basically said I wanted it to sound as much like 11 songs by 11 bands with static the end of the songs, as if the listener tuned into a new station.
This meant many different production techniques, it meant a lot of different guitars, a lot of different basses, different vocal mics, four different drum kits with four different sets of cymbals, two different studios to record the drums and a multitude of other instrumentation.
It’s the beauty of recording, if you think a song needs a violin, in a recording session you can do that. It’s not always possible to have a violin player hanging around the band touring to play just one song a night, let alone a cellist, a flautist, someone playing harp, a whole flotilla of keyboard and synths, a harmonica, a glockenspiel, percussion. I think I even used a triangle on one track.
Even still, only when it was 98% completed and all the songs had been laid together with the static did the picture finally come together and the concept felt like it had been fulfilled.
Stay Tuned is out now.
