Recording in Ouarzazate: three days in the studio.

The studio in Ouarzazate is one large room with a control booth at one end, a drum riser nobody uses, and acoustic treatment that stops about a metre short of where it should. It has recorded film scores, several well-known Moroccan records, and a great deal of material that was never released. We had it for three days with a desert blues band from the south and a rhythm section who had flown in from Lisbon the night before.

Nobody had played together before. This is the normal condition of these sessions and the reason they work more often than they should: there is no arrangement to defend, so the first two hours are spent finding out what everybody does, and by hour three either something is happening or it is not.

What emerged on the first afternoon was a tempo problem that turned out not to be a tempo problem. The Lisbon drummer was counting in four and the guitarist was not counting at all — he was playing a cycle that resolved every twelve, and the two things fit, but only if the drummer stopped anchoring the one. It took an hour and a half and no shared language to work that out. Somebody eventually drew it on the back of a cigarette packet.

Day two we tracked live in the room, everybody facing each other, no isolation, heavy bleed, two room mics doing most of the work. This is not how you are supposed to do it and it is the only way these sessions sound like anything. Separation gives you control and takes away the thing you came for.

Day three was vocals and a long argument about whether to double them, which the engineer won by simply not doing it. There are four finished pieces. Two are good. One is the reason the other three exist, and it happened at eleven at night on the second day when nobody was recording, which is why we now record continuously and sort it out afterwards.

Everyone was paid, everyone is credited, and the band holds the masters. That arrangement is not standard in this part of the industry and it should be.