The album cover features Lon Chaney in a still from London After Midnight, a lost horror film from 1927. The last known copy of the film was destroyed in the MGM vault fire of 1965.

This was The Grim’s first album (released in 2007) and was my response to the challenge that I set for myself (to release an album called It Makes Us Sad by a band called The Grim).

At the time, I had no idea what I was doing, but I thought I would try and recreate something along the lines of the infamous Werepigs’ album Songs For The Rectum, written in 1984 by myself and my housemate Dave when we were living in Mere Road, Leicester. We were looking after a Korg Polysix for a weekend (for a friend who was in the band Satsuma Nightmare) and couldn’t resist trying to write some nonsense (with the synth, along with our own guitar and bass, plus various effects pedals) and record it straight to tape using a (borrowed) cassette player’s inbuilt microphone. Weirdly, it came out alright, and we filled a whole side of a C90 with a dozen or so tunes.

A single cassette of Songs For The Rectum exists; it’s around here somewhere.

When it came to trying to write something for The Grim, I needed something that I could tinker about with on the computer, so I got myself a demo version of FL Studio (I also tried Reason and Cubase, but couldn’t really get on with them. Recording things into Audacity didn’t seem to work very well, I was having all sorts of latency issues).

As my FL Studio licence was only for the demo version, I couldn’t save projects and settings as much as I’d like, so I had to be careful not to lose my workings! Basically, I would keep FL Studio open while I placed things into the piano roll, selected various instruments and fx, piddled about with the mixer (not very much, because I didn’t really know what I was doing, and couldn’t be bothered reading the manual), and eventually wrote a finished piece to WAV and mp3.

I enjoyed myself so much that, not long after, I splashed out on a proper licence. Since then, I’ve never looked back! Well, I have. But not too far.