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Re: Saturday Night



Title: Re: Saturday Night
My apologies Mr. Cady, you were right...the drum track is a bit of Simon and Jon as well.  Here's an article from Generations 14, I apologize for not citing who originally was nice enough to post it:

Inteviewers: Did the band have any problems working together after such a
long time?

Astley: They didn't work together.

I: You mean they weren't in the studio at the same time?

A: They had a meeting together to decide which tracks they were going to do,
with me, and then Roger kind of forced his way into doing SNAFF-being Roger.

I: Being Roger . . .

A: And I think it was his idea to combine it with "Take Me to the Pilot."
He'd say to me "Is there any way of combining that?" and I'd say "Yeah, I'll
sort something out" and from then on it was left to me.  I think we met
again and I played them a demo that I'd done which was basically the drum
track- a simpler version of the drum track- and we just sat there with an
acoustic and banged through it just to work out the arrangement, and at that
point the band went their separate ways.  In fact I don't think John came to
either of those meetings, so it was just Pete, Roger, Billy Nicholls, myself
and Bill Curbishley.  So I then programmed up a finished backing track, and
I programmed piano on it and then we got Pete in the studio for an
afternoon.  All in one afternoon we had to do 2 acoustic guitar passes, a
couple of electric guitar passes- one of which was fantastic.  It's a funny
thing about Pete in the studio: he'll go through the motions and then
suddenly he'll get interested and then everyone's rooted to their seats . .
  . . it doesn't  last long but it's brilliant, he's really going for it and his
hand is moving as fast as his brain.  He doesn't know what he's going to
play next, it's all of the top of his head and then he'll lose interest
again.   So unless you catch it . . . I mean, it was a brilliant pass.
Then, I said, "Look, I want you to sing harmony on the 'Take Me to the
Pilot'" bit, so without even the lead vocal-before we lost Pete, we got the
harmonising in.  Then about a week later we got Roger in the studio, and he
took a long time to warm up, but he was good.  He performed really well.  We
got Simon (Phillips) the drummer in- because originally I  didn't want to
use my drums- but I couldn't get a decent drum sound out of him.  I mean he
was okay- and I kept what he did and I kept what I did- and then we went to
Manchester and we put John on it at Revolution Studios.  John was just
brilliant, he came in with 2 little pre-amp things which he splits his bass
into.  One's the top end which we know John plays, and the other gives as
much bottom as we want.  So you can mix the 2 however you want them, you
know.  It's an instant bass sound.  He listened to the track and he played
almost note perfect, although he never heard it before.