Emperor of the Moon

This album happened on a spare of the moment evening when myself Mike Sowerby and Patrick Tobin were hanging out in Room Room studios and decided to record some jams....

We have quite a musical history between us, Paddy & Mike playing together in the psychedelic rock band The Last People on Earth. Myself and Paddy go back playing in metal and rock bands since 1990, those being Warp Spasm, Cosmic Juggernaut & Concrete Head. The three of us recorded several albums under the name Doomlord & Mike drummed on two previous solo albums of mine, namely The Wizards Bones & The Necromancer.

Tommy Concrete - Mike Sowerby - Paddy Tobin

At the point of recording this album, I was playing guitar for infamous punk band The Exploited and had for the past four months played only Exploited songs, so when we got to jam I was more than ready to relax and just improvise on some riffs totally at odds to what I was currently playing.

We recorded seven jams that night and if we may say so ourselves, it was absolutely happening... There is always a factor of hit and miss in improvisational music, but sometimes the stars align and they certainly did that night.

The plan was to come back at a later date and, trim some of the jams (they were great but not perfect), add vocals, solos and possibly some other instrumentation.... But disaster struck and due to a series of destroyed computers, the original jams were lost....

Studio footage from the original session.

Six years later, I find a memory stick at the back of a box, with no idea what was on it.... so I stick it in my laptop and am blown away to find all seven jams mixed to stereo wav files.... All I had to do now was finish it. I didn't feel like rushing it and really wanted to wait for the 'right moment' to work on it again. The 'right moment' occurred when I found myself with four days off at the beginning of November 2017. I was supposed to be going on tour with my band Psychotic Depression and Battalions, but unfortunately they had to pull out and the whole thing got cancelled at the last minute... So I figured, I had four days off work that I planned to be filling with music, it was a perfect time to make good out of a bad situation and I spent the four days adding vocals, solos, editing, mixing and finishing off the album.

Excerpt from Grotesque Wyvern

To keep with the spirit of the original evening, I didn't spend ages over the overdubs and went for spontaneous takes on the solos and vocals. Most of them are largely instrumental, just because it just feels like that is how they should be. What lyrics that are on them are based on the file names that the jams were saved as, I didn't want to make it sound like the overdubs and words were done so many years apart, and tried to utilise as much of the original vibe and improvisational spontaneity that the album was born from.

Trying to describe an album based around improvisation in terms of influence is sort of impossible by definition... It is simply a representation of myself, Paddy and Mikes musical connection and history unleashed into forty minutes of a power trio enjoying life and doing what we were born to do.....

It's a trip and a journey which I hope you enjoy.

Cheers

Tommy Concrete

Tales of The Necromancer and the nightmare that seemed to go on for all time

Wow, so here I am sort of in a bit of disbelief at the concept that this album is actually finally finished and released. It's quite a long story this one, the whole thing went through so many stages it is unreal, ten and a half years from playing the first note to actually having a finished CD. Some of this album was recorded under so much duress I am amazed not only that I managed to finish it, but that I survived with my sanity mainly intact. Anyway, enough of that as I wouldn't change a second of it, to me, every note oozes uncompromising belief and blind determination, makes me feel triumphant and I hope folk like it! Yeah, so this is the full unadulterated story from start to finish of The Necromancer.....

Recording 'Trawler Tales'

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Five tracks of psychedelic punk rock and roll, recorded at mountain sound studios in Hull December 2013, produced by Paddy Tobin. Out now on Howling Invocations! Everything played and sang by Tommy Concrete except the drums which were hit by Paddy. This EP was done in one seventeen hour session, for no reason other than why not. The whole thing was written, recorded and mixed on the spot. I had no equipment of my own with me and just used the studios interesting and unique collection of weird old valve amps and guitars that I really wasn't used to. The whole thing was very interesting and I am pretty happy with what I came out with.

I'd never even played a baritone guitar before and totally fell in love with it, all the songs were written on this, these are a couple of the fucked up old valve combos that I used for everything, really really nice sounding even though I couldn't get them to distort! I let the equipment lead me as to what the music should sound like.

Summoning the Devils Bee

 It's good to have lot's of effect pedals, especially when most of them are distortions. This is the arsenal of effect pedals used by me and Chris for guitar and bass on a first session of the recordings for the new jackal headed guard of the dead album...

We Have Bift Off

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This is my first solo album, it was recorded between 2000 - 2002 in various flats on various computers in the glamorous locations of Wealdstone, Maghull, Hull and Edinburgh.

I had made several albums prior to this, but they felt like 'demos' for production reasons. We Have Bift Off is the first one I feel to be a proper album as opposed to a demo. The reasons behind this are vocals, production and concept.

Microscopic Entity is about the blag knobhead regulars that used to try to sell robbed crap when I worked in Cash Converters (smack converters) in Bootle Liverpool, which was generally a shit experience.

Musically, I think it is the most successful track on the album at trying to get a trippy electronic rock vibe going on, and contains my personal favourite vocal performance on any of my solo songs.

Fun fact... the nonesense chat and orgasmic vocals in the intro were sampled off some video footage of me and my good buddy Sam Avery - The Learner Parent who I played in a band with back then, the legendary Dosser Beard. Interestingly enough the footage was filmed on 9/11 and was meant to be a 'message to the future' documenting our thoughts on the events of that day (after approximately 12 hours of drinking in raw pubs round Liverpool).... Now that Sam is a famous comedian it could work as superb blackmail material, apart from the fact that I come off 200% worse than him in it, which means our message to the future will go unheralded and Sam will remain un-blackmailed....

Many moons ago I used to make electronic music under the name Zaceus Zinetti, this track originally started off as a ZZ track. I ended up putting some atmospheric guitars on it and I realised that I had created something beyond ZZ...

The baseline on Ghost Worlds Dog is very 'riff' based as opposed to a typical dancey type thing, pretty dark and menacing. I was and still am not into any 'happy happy joy joy' music, I also don't believe that heaviness necessarily means loads of guitars.

When I figured that this wasn't going to be a ZZ track I tried putting a more standard rock/metal beat on it and it just didn't work. The reason being that back then (2001) nearly all music software was geared towards dance and electronic genres, so the best result was to go for these sampled trip hop esque loops. Any attempt to do realistic sounding rock drums just couldn't cut it on my primative soundblaster powered 96 megabyte PC...

The degraded sound of the drums is a happy fault, as the software I was using gave you more tracks if you lowered the quality, so I think this was done at probably 11mghz hahaha... thing is, I loved it then and still do. On my latest gear it would actually be a struggle to get this sort of dirty sound, modern stuff can be a bit clean.

It's an instrumental, but the title relates to a guy me and a friend Count ZOrg von Traveller (who I did the band Dog Muck with) saw whilst making a film (Segmenta) in Madrid. He was so pale he looked like a ghost, and he was with a dog who was wearing a jumper... one of us remarked 'Check out ghost world's dog!'

I really like the guitars on this and I spent ages getting them 'just right'. I used a gold top Antoria Les Paul played through a Fender Dual Showman...

I have often wondered what this would sound like played by a band... maybe one day it will occur live....

At the time of recording this album, I was largely influenced by the multitude of remixes that were done of Killing Joke: Official Pandemonium album. Conceptually 'We Have Bift Off' was meant to sound like a remix album, even though they were in fact the original mixes. This blast of sheer insanity was recently played live by Tommy Concrete and the Werewolves albeit a re-interpretation, a pre-mix if you like....

So this song originally came about through Jim Hodge, who currently provides vocals for Mastiff. He elected that he was going to sing on my album, so this track was put together especially for him. The whole process of writing and recording the entire thing was less than an hour, which is the best way in my opinion, I think the frantic inspiration comes through pretty clear. Jim added vocals to a few more tracks I was working on, but more of that later...

Yeah, so back then I was spending most of my Friday evening's clubbing at The Electric Ballroom in London, soaking up the multiple genres on offer there, hence this track being a mixture of metal, drum and bass, industrial and various nonesense....

The lyrics were originally written for Shitball and cover the concept of rubbing one out over an ex whilst depressed.

Love this track, totally mental sounding

The Eyes Say It All But Can You Hear Me

Gotta blow my own trumpet and say I dig this track, there are a lot of musical risks taken on We Have Bift Off, some work, some don't, this one works.

So it started out as a drum and bass track that I was working on to be used under my Zaceus Zinetti moniker, but felt like the baselines could be really cool riffs. So I tried it and was really into the results.

I put a bunch of effects like flangers and delays on the beats to give it a swirly trippy feel and the whole thing started to take a form I was really pleased with.

Recently, when working on Unrelaxed 2 I was seeking to try to invoke the atmosphere that this track creates, you will have to wait and see as to wether or not I was successful or not with that....

Really chuffed with the solo in this, its a nice psychedelic wha affair that really fits the song. Pretty much channelling Ed Wynne of Ozric Tentacles on this, one of my all time favourite guitarists. Although I love what they do, I always felt like I wanted to make music that sounded like the Ozrics came from an alternate EVIL reality.

Lyrically this was written when I was still doing personal type lyrics, deep and emotional and all that. Not really into that kind of style anymore, so I am happy that it is largely vague... The singing is a lot more traditionally metal on this track, with a noticeable James Hetfield influence mixed in with atmospheric screams..

It's one of my more popular tracks, if streaming stats are to be believed...

Skulls and Fire

Now, there is no point in this if I am just going to be showering myself with positivity whenever Ido this. So it has to be said that I think personally We Have Bift Off is a bit of a hit and miss album, which I am cool with because it was my debut after all. Anyway, I do think that Skulls and Fire is one of the 'miss' tracks :(

This was before I learned the concept of quality control, as in I put every track I worked on, onto the album, rather than just the ace ones. Also, the 90's had just finished and a prevalent trend in the 90's was bands trying to make their albums reach the full 80 minutes of a CD... So theirs my excuse...

One of the things that I would change (if I could go back in time) would be the samples on it. I think that makes the album sound dated in places, although it was cool at the time so whatever.

Paradoxically, I think the addition of samples on this track, which were put their to 'save it' sort of do, but not in the right way... Thing is, I wasn't very happy with the track, and although I think I do some good vocal performances elsewhere on the album, I was still relatively new to singing and couldn't put anything decent on this track... I had some audio outakes of blues legend Andrew Halfdeaf McLatchie talking whilst in the studio with Shitball, wherein he was basically saying that everything was improved with more 'Skulls and Fire' so I figured if I looped him saying 'Skulls and Fire' and had that as the chorus then the song would be complete... It did improve it, but not enough when objectively reviewing it in retrospect.

The solo is quite good, trying out some styles that I got much better at in later years...

I think the out of any sort of context samples of hawks screeching juxtaposed with loops of Matthew Dennett giggling brings a level of surrealism that is the one saving grace that actually convinced me to keep the track on the album (I considered leaving it out when uploading it to streaming distro)

Anyway, so people I present Skulls and Fire

Amplifier Setup to make the sky riven and rend some flesh

The Wizards Bones

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I think this footage pretty much sums up the atmosphere in the studio when we were recording. The Last Studios were my personal favorite place to record. I've recorded there with Doomlord & Man Of The Hour as well as my solo stuff. The actual recording was done in about eight days between August and December 2006. Produced by Paddy Tobin and featuring drums by Mike Sowerby, both of The Last People On Earth. Unfortunately the studio is no longer there.

Music Video for 'Beyond the Secret Island'

At the time I was very busy singing for heavy metal band Man Of The Hour and didn't have any time for Shitball. So over the course of a year I had re-arranged, re-recorded and added vocals to the demos. I had, by now decided that these songs were going to be the basis for another solo album. My first being We Have Bift Off in 2002. I added twelve songs from the three solo demos I had recorded prior to We Have Bift Off. These were Pierres Nightmare - 1997, Take Me To Your Love Hell - 2000 & Ibrahim and the beautiful mermaid - 2001. I split all of the twenty seven songs into two groups. Songs that it was possible to teach to a drummer & bassist in ten minutes and ones that were not. Plus six that I realised were shit and got chucked. This arrangement was the basic structure for The Wizards Bones and The Necromancer.

The Wizards Bones was recorded at the Last Studios in Hull by producer Paddy Tobin. The drummer who had to learn twelves songs in ten minutes was Mike Sowerby. We recorded the drums and guitars live onto 16 track tape in one long night. Each track took between one and three takes, with just a few goes inbetween. I wanted to get the loosest feel possible. The guitar overdubs were done the next two days and I did all the bass on the last day. I returned in the winter for three days to do the vocals and mix. In all, with various trips in and out as well, the whole things was recorded and mixed in ten days.