The Ballad of John Green
Well finally we've released it! It feels like an age has passed since we recorded this track (we started recording in May 2008), and even longer since we actually last released something new (Jan 2007).
At lot has changed in Zeptepi-land since the last album (Universality) - keyboard players have come and gone, annoyed us and amazed us, and in the end we gave up on the idea entirely. Hayley Anderson has joined the band on violin and for the most part the electric guitar has been dropped in favour of the acoustic, the sound taking on a much folkier bent.
Another big influence on the changing sound of Zeptepi has been my discovery of the legendary Irish band The Dubliners. Growing up in England I'd always been aware of them but never really listened to them until a couple of years ago when I picked up a cheap compilation cd of their stuff. I felt like I'd known the songs all my life, or even longer, and the influence is now beginning to come through in some of our recordings from the last year. Discovering Luke Kelly in particular was something of a personal revelation.
Anyway, this song was written back in 2007, not long after we'd finished a series of gigs in support of Universality. I wrote the lyrics after reading Paul Broadhurst's wonderful book on British mythology 'The Green Man & the Dragon'. It's essentially a contemporary re-writing of the old English folk song John Barleycorn, coupled with Green Man legend - John Barleycorn being a character whose story represents the yearly cycle of the barley crop, and the Green Man being a kind of Celtic Pan. Rock and roll, man.
We started recording it at Forge Studios in Reservoir, Melbourne, with the owner and all round nice chap Aaron Bateman engineering for us. We added stuff over the next few months at Forge including the mandolin and violin, and I think we recorded bass and backing vocals at my home studio. I also took a trip out Bacchus Marsh way to try a bit of an experiment - taking my portable studio to my friend Mark "Scully" Lanigan's house to lay down some banjo tracks (and to play some table football - in fact, mainly to play some table football to be honest). I was a little unsure that this had worked at the time, but listening to the finished mix it's great to hear the banjo twanging away in the background.
As with the last album, this was mixed in the UK by my old friend Pete Rowe at his Dacoit Studios in the Oxfordshire countryside. This time we communicated via email about the mix - no way I could afford another flight to England! As usual Pete's done a great job. Check out his band The Dacoits here on myspace:
http://www.myspace.com/thedacoits
So anyway, it took over a year, but we now have a finished mix to release. At this stage you can stream the track online here, and we're selling a limited edition CD (individually numbered, I've always wanted to do that!) at gigs during June, with a launch at the National Celtic Festival tomorrow. We'll probably release it via iTunes with some more new tracks in a couple of months to accompany the video clip we're currently making for the song.
There endeth the tale of the Ballad of John Green.
Inbetweens
Last year we were asked if we'd like to contribute a track to a project called 'The Other Ones', a tribute to legendary cult act The Only Ones. The Only Ones were my favourite band for a looong time, and nobody but Mike Scott has had quite as big an influence on my music as Peter Perrett... so I was only too pleased to take part.
We'd previously had a stab at recording The Only Ones famous "Another Girl Another Planet" but made a bit of a hash of it. This time we opted to do "Inbetweens" from the 1979 album Even Serpents Shine. We recorded the bulk of this back in August '08 at Forge. Later we added a few bits at home, and my friend Peter Donelly - soon to be famous as Ricky T - added some piano. We've decided it's much easier to used hired hands for keyboard parts ... although 'hired hand' kind of implies that we paid him. I don't think we even gave him the promised magic beans.
Hayley does a fantastic job of playing John Perry's guitar parts on the violin, really adding to the maudelin feel of the song. This is no mean feat - Perry's playing can be quite breathtaking at times.
Pete Rowe, also a big Only Ones fan, mixed this track too. We've got about another ten tracks we'd like him to mix, but we simply can't get enough magic beans together. With a bit of luck though the latter half of 2009 should see quite a few more new Zeptepi tracks released.
Phil
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