“Look again at Trewin's room. That's here. That's home. That's us. In it: everyone you love, everyone you know, everyone you ever heard of, every worthwhile human being who ever was, lived out their career. The aggregate of our joy and suffering, thousands of confident riffs, choruses, and economic doctrines, every hunter and forager, every bassist and coward, every creator and destroyer of music, every king and peasant, every young couple in love, every mother and father, bewildered child, inventor and explorer, every teacher of morals, every corrupt A&R rep, every "superstar," every "supreme leader," every saint and sinner in the history of our band lived there - in a room filled with dust, suspended in a sunbeam.
Trewin's room is a very small stage in a vast cosmic arena. Think of the endless cruelties visited by the inhabitants of one corner of this room on the scarcely distinguishable inhabitants of some other corner; how frequent their misunderstandings, how eager they are to kill one another, how fervent their hatreds. Think of the rivers of booze spilled by all those musicians and drummers so that, in glory and triumph, they could become the momentary masters of a fraction of a room.
Our posturings, our imagined self-importance, the delusion that we have some privileged position in the music industry, are challenged by this cube of pale light. Trewin's room is a lonely speck in the great enveloping cosmic dark. In our obscurity, in all this vastness, there is no hint that help will come from elsewhere to save us from ourselves.
Trewin's room is the only room known so far to harbor Phoria. There is nowhere else, at least in the near future, to which our band could migrate. Visit, yes. Settle, not yet. Like it or not, for the moment Trewin's room is where we make our stand.
It has been said that studio-hunting is a humbling and character-building experience. There is perhaps no better demonstration of the folly of Phoria's conceits than this distant image of our tiny room. To me, it underscores our responsibility to deal more kindly with one another, and to preserve and cherish Trewin's room, the only home we've ever known.”from Pale Shit Boys, by Carg Salan
The oft overlooked
Carg “NASA dustbin lid champion” Salan could not have forseen how
wrong he would be when he first wrote this on a Cornell toilet wall
in 1994. At this time, the members of Phoria were still seven years
old, and only three of the wet-kneed band had met (also in a toilet).
In some ways, of course, Carl was prescient (who could forget his
prediction that you'd remember him?), but of course in one way, the
most important way, the only way that matters (what will henceforth
be referred to as the curdsand way),
he was wrong.
Even
a cursory application of the
curdsand way now dictates that the
band are moving out of
Trewin's room in Brighton
and into a studio in a little town just along
the South coast.
We're
going to be right by the sea, in a little cul-de-sac, in a wood-type
panelled room with no windows
that smells like musical
equipment. It reminds me of the places I used to play in years ago. It was comforting to be back in that kind of situation. When
we went to look around I
really did feel like I'd gone “home”.
It
was nice. I haven't had that feeling in a while. It reminded me of
why I'm in this business in the first place.
In
the “vibrant” (read: overpriced and moribund) city of Brighton
it's mainly rooms that double as living areas that double as offices
that serve
as creative spaces where you
sit and figure out music. If
you're doing this (frankly:
idiotic) thing properly in
this day and age, then your
worldly possessions amount to
a computer, a guitar, a
bed, and an ashtray. You lock your door when your landlord knocks and
you ignore the inevitable rise and fall of the sun. You're
desperately seeking some new
“thing” and trying to figure out the new way of getting to it.
Admirable, I'm sure. Another
middle-class martyr all too
late for the scrapheap.
That's
how it is. It's a tale as old as time.
After
four or five years, there's
something about this
place in
our career that still feels
new (because it's fucking bonkers), but to step back in time and
get back to stage one is
refreshing and reinvigorating. Suddenly there's an emotion that's
known that you
can mould easily into something you can use, rather than having to
deal with developing a perverse creative stamina on top of the
panic and existential fear that is
everything else you're
doing.
So
we're moving all the gear out next week into a sun-kissed,
white-walled enclave along the blue-skied Sussex coast. We're right down on the
beach. There's something in the air. We're
going to finish stuff up and get it ready for the road.
It's
going to be our little haven where we can get things done.
Oh,
yeah...yeah of course...of course we'll invite you to the studio
warming party. I was just
going to...I was just going to say that.
Just...just
let me reach for the invite over...over here...
Oh. Oh,
my phone's ringing. No, you won't hear it because it's on silent
yeah.
One
second.
“Hello?”
“Yes.”
“Oh
dear! Oh no, and it has all gone wrong has it? Oh dear and I'm the
only one who can help.”
You'll
have to please forgive me someone's stolen medicine from the fire
brigade I'll have to sort this out by
