When the one-eyed jazz saxophonist who had booked the attended mastering session arrived wearing the stripiest satin waistcoat I had ever seen and sat down behind me at the mixing desk, I realised I had forgotten to ask him his real name; up until that point I had been calling him Mr Lips, his stage name.
‘It’s Horace.’
‘Ah,’ I quipped, ‘the Old Kingdom god?’
Blink.
‘Half-man half-falcon.’
Blink.
‘Horace the mythical Egyptian warrior.’
‘No, Horace Froggett from Sutton-in-Ashfield.’
I kept trying. ‘I think I know your brother Seth.’
‘I haven’t got a brother. I have a sister called Irene. She’s dead.’
I got to work. Horace relaxed his fat, purple face and opened the hardback book he had brought with him – Historic Residences of the Malay Peninsula – and settled back in his chair.
There were about seven minutes of what sounded like the musicians tuning their instruments at the beginning of the recording. ‘That’s the first number,’ said Horace. ‘Rhapsody in Green.’
It’s going to be a long night, I thought.
It wasn’t. As I reported yesterday, the whole job only took me about three hours from start to finish. I have no idea why clients like to attend these sessions, they never seem to have any useful input. Still, the customer is always right, eh?
As he was paying me, Horace asked what I thought of the female vocalist. She had a truly awful voice: an LCW singer as we refer to them in the business. Loud, Confident and Wrong.
‘She’s amazing,’ I told him.
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