London three piece Red Racer release their debut album Define today. Recorded over at Rancho De La Luna in California with the help of Jesse Hughes from Eagles of Death Metal, the album is a furious affair that showcases Red Racer at their best. We’ve been lucky enough to get an exclusive track-by-track of the album from the band themselves…
DEFINE
This was an early song that Sean and I wrote and recorded in the first few days before Davey arrived. Because it was recorded by just us two, we both played guitars and I added bass and drums. We wanted something powerful and immediate and it needed to be musically progressive for ourselves. We were there to undo old habits and find something new. The musical programming needed to be undone and I figured that describing all the things a person or thing is not might somehow help reveal what they are. I came to the conclusion that I Won’t Define myself and we Won’t Define the music (petulant brat). The middle section sounds like a visual sweep through the Rancho front yard and all the unusual objects and decorations around; Davey’s punctured truck tyre, voodoo masks, bones and ancient, empty bottles of absinthe ‘for ladies’…it all seems a bit dramatic now but there was a real sense of having been overpowered by this place and, after all we had just arrived from Raynes Park, South London! Chalk and cheese…
PUT IT OUT
It must have been around the second day that Sean and I were at Rancho and I would wander around outside the studio with my headphones on, looking at the surrounding hills, all dead, barren, beautiful, like something out of an old Wild West movie. When you looked carefully you could see what must have been huge radio transmitter towers spread along the top of the hills, like lone figures waiting and watching. I started wondering how much information they were sending and receiving and where it all ended up. It occurred to me that if a signal was locking on to me then maybe I could use that signal to lock onto it? I suppose the song at that moment became about a battle of information and signals of the mind, sending messages to each other and also blocking them out. The chorus sounds like the person is pretty cocksure (“I’m a free-wheeler!”) and somehow immune to the bombardment…I suppose we’ll have to see about that…
PRETTY POLLY
Still on our own at the studio, we now were getting into a flow with the process. Once we had the basic structure of the song, Sean would do a kind of Buddy Holly leg-slap onto a mic while I played, on this occasion, an acoustic 12-string that we had in an open tuning. I then added drums before we put piano and some extra Sean guitars. Now at some point a guy called Danny shows up. This was Danny Frankel who has played drums with Rickie Lee Jones, K.D.Lang and more recently, The Mojave Lords. He said he could play percussion on the track if we liked (obviously we did like). He pulls out all these old hub cans and car parts and bits of old metal and plays them like a kit along with the track. It sounded great and that’s when it really seemed to come alive. Every day, we sat in the control/living room having a coffee and there was a beautiful picture, Davey must have taken it, of Polly Harvey, just standing in front of the door, book in her hand, ready to go somewhere and write something by the looks of it. I started wondering what was going through her mind at that moment, who she was, how all that swagger and sass comes from such a petite-looking person…and then imagined being one of the characters in her song…being ravaged, destroyed, abstracted and pulled apart. I thought, “I can handle it!”. Yeah, right. Me, me, me, always bloody me…we liked the title because it sounds like it’s about a Cornish pirate’s parrot.
FEED
This one began with an AC/DC type of riff we had. Hayden Scott turned up with a drum stool that he’d borrowed from Davey. The first thing we said when he popped his head round the door was, “are you Hayden? You’re a drummer aren’t you…do you fancy playing some drums?” Thankfully he was up for it so we jammed around the riff and recorded it. Finally a REAL drummer! The track sounded cool and it was great fun to play. It might have been the next day we were ‘seeing a man about a dog’ out near Eric Burdon’s place, a beautiful red house over yonder where someone mentioned that they’d seen a ‘red racer’ out in the back. We were told this is the fastest snake in that part of the desert and although extremely beautiful and not venomous, you definitely didn’t want to get bitten by the thing or try and out-run it. That’s where the band name came from and was the original title of the song. The song ended up a collage of thoughts of being hunted and drained by this strange serpent to whom you pour out your wonder and fascination as you are slowly put under its spell and then devoured. Nice. We were actually having a great time.
SHOTGUN SUZY
Another basic guitar riff. We weren’t quite sure where to go with this one. Joey Castillo came and played drums on it. Davey was back from the EODM tour by now and was starting to get involved in the recording with his great guitar playing, really cool ideas and amazing guacamole. We went out to ‘Pappy & Harriet’s’ that night and Davey introduced us to a friend of his. There had been a burglary at one of their friends’ places and she mentioned that she was a Texan and any intruder in her place would have to get past her shotgun. That seemed to be the way trouble would be dealt with out there…and funnily enough there never seemed to be any. That’s the inspiration for ‘Shotgun Suzy‘.
GOOD TIME
So finally reverend Jesse Hughes had entered the building! A tornado of information and energy, consuming everything in it’s path. He was staying at an apartment called ‘Hacienda Heights’ on the edge of the desert. He had a bunch of instruments set up; a little kit, a big tribal drum, Tuesday’s bass and theremin…and a vox organ with black keys instead of white. This is where the riff for ‘Good Time‘ came from. These days were fun and lasted long into the night and some good tunes came out of it and this was the first. We recorded the vocals outside on a 50’s silver microphone under a full moon. Good time…
VIBE BOMB
This track was recorded at Sean’s, pieced together from parts of the session out at Rancho exactly one year before. We ended up with an extra six songs by the time this album was completed and ‘Vibe Bomb‘ is one of them. The mood of this song is quite a contrast from the songs already recorded out in the desert. It’s one of the first featuring our Jesse (Wood) on bass and ended up working really well as part of the original album. There was also an injection of British musical influence (if you can describe it as that) coming through this and the other new songs that seemed important to include and was certainly due to the change of environment. After a melancholic start, it sounds like a failed bargain between someone and a sort of predator/remorseless psychopath, desperate for the moment to extinguish it’s victim’s very existence. At least that what the other person reckons as things become very fast and excitable. He seems to be seeing the monster as a bit of a killjoy. Maybe it should have been called ‘Bit Of A Killjoy’? I really have no idea where this stuff comes from…
COVER ME
More late night rock n roll. We had this thing that sounded a bit too much like ‘Can’t Explain‘ so we sped it up and rocked out at the end. This one was recorded live, Davey, me and Sean on guitar and Hayden on drums. I put the bass on after. By the time we were doing vocals there must have been 20 people in the control room having fun and hanging out while we recorded. A far cry from watering the plants in an empty ranch house only days before. The vocal makes me laugh because the maracas are all over the vocal mic I was holding so you can’t turn them off, up or down. It seems to help the vibe…
SERPIENTE
We were getting near to the end of our recording session by this point. Everyone had finally gone back home or back on tour and it was now just me, Sean and Davey again. We had this song in a basic musical form just before we left London and Davey liked it. With Abby Travis, who had played bass on some of the songs already while she was around, he recorded a new guitar & bass riff and Joey again had played the drums. A bit of post-chaos, comedown mish-mash…this one seems a bit of an introspective ramble of someone lost, pondering some internal and external emptiness. Better out than in, They say. Davey took us for a sound bath at ‘The Integratron’, an acoustic temple-machine built by an aircraft mechanic from Ohio based on the dimensions of Moses’ Tabernacle and the writings of Nikola Tesla under telepathic instruction from extraterrestrials…right out there in the desert. I highly recommend it. Sean reproduced feedback and other harmonic sounds on guitar that were reminiscent of the frequencies in the sound bath and I rambled away over the top.
SUCH A LONG WAY
Finally it was time to go home which was very sad. We had met some really great people out at Rancho and had been re-calibrated musically by the experience. This song is an emotional farewell to a magical place and it’s inhabitants with the knowledge deep down that we have to return one day because a connection was made. Permanently infected. Chemically rearranged and fused together on some level. We did, however have 3 days left in L.A before catching the flight home. The first of these 3 days/nights would be spent celebrating Jesse Hughes’ birthday where we briefly met the other guys from EODM, QOTSA and the guy who directed a couple of White Stripes videos, asleep in an armchair. A couple of days with our friend in Silverlake and then back home to our families to ponder over what the f*ck just happened!
Red Racer will be playing a couple of dates live this month (Bristol 3rd Nov, Manchester 4th Nov, London 19th Nov). More information on the band is over here at their official site.
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