BLACK IS THE NEW BLUE - ABOUT THE ALBUM
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Cover photo of Marek Black by Bob Carlos Clarke |
In 2005, Richard Alexander, the lyric writer on quite a few of my songs, suggested getting some tracks together as a response to a certain UK singer-songwriter whose singing style was described in a big grown-up newspaper as being “half Bee Gee, half Neddy Seagoon, and entirely irksome”. Wow, that good? Robin Millar – of Sade/Everything But The Girl/ Ive Mendes fame – agreed to arrange and produce, Mark Smith agreed to engineer and play bass, and, along with the Stacey brothers and The King Of The Hammond, my long-time keyboard pal, Pickford Sykes, we came up with three great tracks, ‘Diner On Highway 21’, ‘Fugitives’ and ‘Alice’.
Time passed, and, in 2008, when I was feeling seriously low and quite disorientated in this perverse Purgatory of a world, a comment was made that these ‘new’ tracks weren’t that dissimilar to several tracks on my ‘lost’, i.e. unreleased, album, produced by the indefatigable Chris Staines, which had been completed in 1987 after months and months and months of recording and mixing. Good call!!
Richard and I then listened to these old tracks, adding to the mix a hi-quality demo from 1982, ‘We All Need Someone To Die For’, and then set about putting them in an order that would work. After mastering by Maz, The Master Masterer Of Metropolis, and then some nifty re-recording on three of the old tracks and also on ‘Fugitives’ by the crafty musical genius that is Jon Banknote, accompanied by his merry henchmen in Norwich and Hoxton ... mucho respect for The Hof! ... and then some more of Maz’s mastering ... we ended up with ‘Black Is The New Blue’ ... a lovely cross-platform bundle of digital singles. Huh? OK, a lovely little album of many dreams and hopes and sadnesses.
I hope you like it ... and hope that it reminds you of some halcyon, no doubt unfashionable old era when proper singing and live playing by true professionals mattered ... and I REALLY hope that, although you’ll notice a touch of “half Bee Gee” in the end BVs of Diner, you don’t find too much that is either “Neddy Seagoon” or “entirely irksome” throughout the rest of the album ...
Much love from MB xx
