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The Shithouse Masters - notes by Steve The Shithouse Masters is the name we give to the archive of Johnny Domino recordings from 1993-1998 (up to the release of RABBIT THEMES). This period includes all of our 4-track home recordings before we "sold out" and bought an 8-track portastudio. Download THE BEST OF THE SHITHOUSE MASTERS full-length CD FREE These are not notes about every single Shithouse Master recording. What we tended to do was organise the songs into batches - often this would be due to the fact that we would be on holiday from University so it made sense to bunch the songs we recorded together. There are a lot of songs that were recorded around these groups of songs but these were the main ones that we tended to copy for people. If you had all of the songs we recorded on 4-track they would make 10 60-minute CDs - any takers? ------------------------------------------------------------------------ batch 1 What Made You Want This? - Weird Tunings? - Day Out - Playing With Bones - Music of The Cosmos - Lady Boxer - I'm Weird - Dick Has Gone - Funny (The Millers) - JD - Earth - I Wanna Be A Johnny Domino - The New Thing! - Life of the Mind - The Lonely Party-Goer In Summer 1993 I was recording a single with the band Peru which was eventually released on the WAAAAAAAAAH! singles club as a split with Mary Queen Of Scots. To do this Brian of Peru had borrowed a 4-track recorder for a month and as I would be recording the single as well as appearing on it, I offered to look after the machine - heh! At the time, Brian, Giles and myself were in a band called The Millers who had done some recordings for the Norwich-based Wilde Club record label but nothing was happening - the recordings themselves are pretty bad and are very po-faced - we wanted to sound like Fugazi or Slint but ended up sounding like the Wedding Present. Suitably disillusioned The Millers had all but split up, and hadn't rehearsed for a long time. Having the 4-track spurred Giles and myself into action - we'd been listening to a lot of lo-fi stuff, especially the first Palace Brothers recordings and decided to record some stuff the way they sounded - like they'd got their mates round and banged through a few songs in a rough and ready fashion. Also, our experiences in a professional recording studio made us determined to capture some of our sense of humour. The closest we got to a manifesto was when we said we wanted to be a cross between Uncle Tupelo and the Beastie Boys (the name JOHNNY DOMINO came about because we also wanted to record some songs as a joke country band). Subsequently what was recorded in this first batch is a bit of a rag-bag of Country (Earth, Playing With Bones, Dick Has Gone), folk (Lonely Party-Goer, What Made You Want This?), lo-fi guitar mangling (The New Thing!, Life of the Mind, Weird Tunings?) and the death of The Millers (Funny was originally by our old band and Giles and I systematically slaughtered it - it felt good!). We got mates in as and when we needed their help - Albert Atkin and John Richardson mostly on this batch. Many songs were inspired by Giles working in a nearby theme park for the summer - I was working in a supermarket. Quickest song recorded? I recorded 'Life of the Mind' from "go" to "woah" while Giles was in the shower. Brian released this batch via his fanzine, we got some interesting mail from France, Greece and Germany. ------------------------------------------------------------------------ batch 1 | batch 2 | batch 3 | batch 4 | batch 5 | batch 6 | batch 7 | batch 8 | batch 9 | batch 10 |