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the beat mirror in the bathroom

Posted on February 15, 2016February 20, 2016 by

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Simon and Diamond

2 days ago

Ivor Novello Award nomination for Best Contemporary Song - Arranged Marriage - Apache Indian. Written by Simon Duggal (Sony Music Publishing) Diamond Duggal (Sony Music Publishing) and Steven Kapur (MCA Music Publishing) 1993 ... See MoreSee Less

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Simon and Diamond

5 days ago

In the early 90s, our studio was in the garage at the back of our parents house on Church Lane in Handsworth Wood - 4 or 5 houses away from Handsworth Wood Boys and Girls Schools.

Around about the time that we signed to Island Records to make Apache’s first album ‘No Reservations’, our studio got burgled. We went in there one day to find everything trashed and a lot of stuff gone. Obviously we were gutted but by the same token we had an album to get on with.

We put our energies into staying positive and quickly setting up a temporary studio so we could crack on with the album. For security reasons we decided to move the studio from the garage to the top floor of the house. That was all well and good except for the fact that back then we were recording onto an Otari MTR 90 MK2 2” Tape Machine which weighed around 1/3 of a tonne and was quite a bit bigger than your average washing machine!.

Somehow, we had to get that machine up 2 flights of stairs - which, without going into detail about how long and how many of us it took to do it, was no mean feat. When we did get it up there, we were advised to keep it in the corner of the room where the joists were stronger, otherwise there was a good chance it would literally fall through the floor under it’s own weight!

So, we set up in the large attic room at the front of the house, and were good to go. We had an Allen & Heath GS3 desk, all the usual outboard gear, Akai samplers, Roland keyboards and some Yamaha NS10 and ATC SCM50A speakers. We used the next bedroom as the vocal room and also recorded some percussion in there.

One nice thing about being up in that room was that we had a great view from the window. Looking straight ahead we could see right across Handsworth park to our grandparents house on Holly Road, and looking to the right we could see West Bromwich Albion Football Stadium. It was an inspiring view. The house had a very long driveway. Every day at around 3.30pm we could see loads of fans - mostly from the girls school and some from the boys school - gathering at the bottom of the drive waiting to get a glimpse of us and Apache.

Anyhow, the first thing Island Records wanted from us was a single, so in July 1992 we wrote and produced Arranged Marriage. We recorded it onto Ampex 499 Gold 2” tape - as we did with all of the album. We kept a track sheet inside each tape box so we knew what was recorded on each track of the tape.

Here’s the original track sheet for Arranged Marriage (Indian Wedding Version), which gives a little glimpse into how we recorded it. Track 24 was always used for SMPTE timecode to keep the tape machine synchronised with the computer (Atari 1040 ST), and we printed a mono music guide on track 23 so that we didn’t always have to boot up the computer and load all of the samplers when we were recording vocals or live instruments.

It was great to work with Tubsy Dholki Walla on this version of the record back then. He was and still is a great Dhol, Dholak and Tabla player! 🙂

Arranged Marriage got to number 16 in the official UK Gallup chart and stayed there for 6 weeks. For writing the song, we were nominated for an Ivor Novello Award in the category of Best Contemporary Song (alongside Take That and M People). It was a double honour for us as we were the first songwriters signed to Sony Music Publishing to ever be nominated for an Ivor. S&D 🙂 ... See MoreSee Less

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Simon and Diamond

1 week ago

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