ONCE UPON
A TIME
A loud and lively electric-band collection set against the fairy tales of contemporary Britain and Europe.
Released on 7 November 2011, this was Robb's first full electric-band recording since 2008.
ABOUT ONCE UPON A TIME
Released on 7 November 2011, Once Upon A Time was Robb's first full electric-band recording since 2008.
The album featured nine songs with The Irregulars, who on this recording were the long-time powerhouse rhythm section of John Forrester on bass and Charlie Waygood on drums, augmented by the ferocious fretwork of new recruit Tim Sanpher on guitar.
It was recorded as live as possible, with only the vocals, a harmonica part and tambourine overdubbed.
The band played a few gigs to celebrate the album's release, at venues ranging from Belgium to Bradford.
Irregular Records were also very excited to release their first recording on vinyl since 1991.
A second album, Happily Ever After, followed the next spring.
TRACK LIST
Nine songs on Once Upon A Time.
- Once Upon a Time
- Euroville
- Prince Charming
- Magdeburg These Days
- Feast of Fools
- Second Division Life
- Patterns
- Long Road Home
- Falling Down with You
WATCH
Watch Robb Johnson and The Irregulars from the Once Upon A Time period.
RECORDING AND COVER
Once upon a time, this album was going to be called Euroville.
I had accumulated a number of songs that were written, started or related to various different countries of the European Union.
Charlie was the first to express reservations.
I was a bit worried about how a themed album would fare — they used to be called “concept albums” — and Charlie pointed out that most people in the UK probably wouldn't care tuppence about the state of Europe.
Most people who like what we do are probably a bit more broad-minded about things, but nonetheless it seemed a bit of a risk giving critics another reason to ignore us.
The media and the business already had plenty of reasons to ignore us with this album.
For a start, it wasn't ever going to fool anybody into thinking that it could be nicely filed away downstairs, at the back of the shop or wherever else the “Folk” section, if it features at all, is hidden.
Our fig-leaf of folkability, our dear mate and melodeon maestro Roger Watson, wasn't with us on this one.
His last gig had been at Glastonwick Festival in June 2010. His doctor had taken him off medication prior to heart surgery. He was too weak to carry his melodeons and his amp packed up for a bit, but when he got it working he played like a demon.
The following week he went for surgery and suffered a stroke that left him unable to play or sing.
We didn't for one second want to try to find another melodeon player.
But without Roger, and with Tim on lead guitar, rather than pigeonhole us grudgingly as “folk”, it would probably be easier just to ignore us altogether.
I mean, rock music — whether metal, punk or indie — is something teens and twenty-somethings do, with appropriate silly haircuts, funny clothes and ostentatious tattoos.
And that's not us.
Anyway, we went ahead with it nonetheless.
SIXTEEN SONGS, TWO ALBUMS
In January we recorded sixteen songs as demo versions.
We recorded them all live at Transmission Studios in Hove, our studio of choice, with the genial wizardry of Ali Gavan at the recording controls.
And they sounded pretty good.
Although I was trying to avoid anything too thematic, the opening track was very likely going to be Once Upon a Time.
I had also written a song called Happily Ever After to be the last track, and the songs were arranged to present a kind of emotional narrative — although I usually try to do that with albums anyway.
Listening to the recordings, it seemed that a good title would be Happily Ever After, but then we felt that sixteen tracks were simply too many to put on one album.
I'd noticed with earlier albums of fourteen tracks that songs tended to get lost or overlooked.
Albums stuffed full of tracks can seem like great value-for-money bargains, but they can also prove a bit difficult to get all the way through.
I wondered whether this was just because I grew up listening to vinyl, where you had to get up every five songs or so to turn the record over.
But I think there's something about attention span, and the free time you can devote to listening, which means that if you exceed much more than ten songs or forty minutes, there's a danger that you're simply using music as wallpaper.
BACK TO VINYL
Coincidentally, while thinking about these questions, I'd just started listening to music on vinyl again.
One of the reasons was discovering that the latest Stooges album, The Weirdness, had a whole side of extra tracks on vinyl that weren't on the CD.
So a turntable needed to be purchased.
Even listening to records on the cheapest system from Richer Sounds that I could afford, music just sounded so much better on vinyl than it did on CD.
I looked at my vinyl copy of Raw Power — well, actually, two copies, because I'd found you could buy both the Bowie mix and Iggy mix in one gatefold version.
It had eight tracks on it.
This suddenly seemed the way forward: release the recordings as two different albums, and release them not just on CD and download, but on vinyl too.
That would be very exciting — a proper Irregular Record, the first one since 1991.
I looked at the songs and found that there were more or less eight songs that were a bit on the negative side, and eight that were a bit more positive.
The slightly more negative songs would form Once Upon a Time, while the slightly more positive songs would become Happily Ever After.
NOT QUITE THAT SIMPLE
Of course, it wasn't quite as simple as that.
There are variations in mood and content on both albums, and both are essentially collections of songs set against the fairy tales of contemporary Europe.
We thought the first album ended up a bit short, so we took Feast of Fools from the second album to bring Once Upon a Time up to nine songs.
That meant we needed to record some more tracks for the second album.
One of those was going to be Tottenham Burned, which thematically would probably have fitted better on the more negative first album.
But then again, maybe not.
Happily Ever After was, to put it mildly, partly an ironic title.
At one point I was thinking of having a cover using a photo of Berliners standing on and milling around the Berlin Wall.
It was never going to be all sunshine, bluebirds and fluffy love songs.
And ironically, the most overt straightforward love song actually closes the first album.
It's good to have some variety of tone on both albums.
THE BAND PHOTO
The plan was to use the same images and covers for both albums, but have the first release lettered and duotoned in blue and the second album in red — John Forrester's clever idea.
This seemed particularly appropriate because we'd decided it was time to put out an album with an actual band photograph on the cover.
I hate photos.
I feel deeply self-conscious whenever I have to do that sort of thing.
I much prefer interesting, obscure, complex images — like an ironic use of the Berlin Wall.
Unfortunately, apparently this is not a position shared by most members of the CD-buying public.
They like faces.
They like smiling faces too.
Maybe that's simply because it's what they're used to, or maybe the market-research psychological gibberish is true and we subconsciously relate better to faces and smiles.
Whatever the reason, in the past I'd definitely noticed people browsing Irregular CDs at gigs choosing a CD with a gurning Johnson mugshot over one with a far more aesthetically pleasing piece of artwork.
We'd never had a proper band-photo album cover, so we thought maybe now was the time.
It also prevented me indulging my propensity for the Berlin Wall approach to album covers, which would not only have signified “concept album”, but “Euro-concept album” to boot.
Charlie's partner Claire Pullinger is an actual, for-real photographer.
They studied a range of classic band-shot album covers and showed us some options.
Brickwork or plain background? Heads or bodies too?
Eventually we managed to get all of us in the same place at the same time — a Friday night in Hove.
The light had “gone”, apparently, by the time we all arrived, but we found a wall and arranged ourselves against it in rock'n'roll style, Tim looking particularly rock'n'roll after a long drive back from France.
Fog then decided to start rolling helpfully in off the sea.
So we parked John's car over the road with the headlights on and the engine running, and hoped nobody would nick it while Claire took the photos.
We chose the two we liked best.
Unable to decide on a favourite, we put the one where I am having a bit of a go at nearly smiling on the front, and the one where I'm holding a Telecaster on the back.
They were so good, we very likely intended to use them twice.
HAPPILY EVER AFTER
The second half of the original sixteen-song sessions became Happily Ever After, the companion album released the following spring.
EXPLORE MORE MUSIC
Discover more records, stories and songs from Robb Johnson.