Found record in Abbey Road: Exclusive

Found are an Edinburgh-based band on Surface Pressure - their most recent single 'Mullokian,' a fantastic blend of folk melodies, found sounds and samples, was picked up by MTV Europe, and is reviewed in Issue 6 of The Skinny. They headline Headspin on March 25 at The Bongo Club. Tommy Perman of Found talks to us about his most recent recording session, in a rather legendary venue....

"Well we did it. We were in London for about 18 hours. Very tiring as you can imagine... but all in all it went smoothly – never having to wait long for a tube and the hotel was close to the studio. We met up with Morgan, Emma and their old friend Jose for a Thai curry in Notting Hill Gate – then a fairly early night so we could get up at six. True to my form of the last week, I barely slept a wink – I got a few hours I reckon, but I kept waking thinking it was surely time to get up, and I had some bizarro dreams. We made it along to the studio for 7.40 am and Gav's dad was standing on the steps taking photos of us getting out the cab. He'd been there since 7.15am and by all accounts was more excited than we were - he had a huge child-like grin on his face the whole time we were in the building, in fact the whole time we were with him in London.

We set up in the (ahem – legendary) 'Beatles Studio', which to me looks just like a big room, but what do I know. We met Ted Kelly the presenter and Vice President for UPOP the US radio station we were recording for (check these quality pics of him at last years Brits – www.clubupop.com/pages/photoalbum.php?album=9). He was exactly as we'd expected – no scratch that, he was a lot nicer than I expected – really enthusiastic, friendly and way too cheery for 8am. We had to do a little interview with him – which wasn't as good as it could have been. Ziggy didn't realise that it was the proper interview, he assumed we'd get to say more later on and so didn't mention any of the releases we have coming up. We're still amateurs and novices when it comes to this game.

The recordings went okay. No obvious mistakes, but it was very odd to have to all stand there wearing headphones. We each got to mix the levels in or own headphones and for the first track I didn't have Ziggy's guitar our vocal as it was muted... oops. It's difficult to give a passionate performance wearing headphones and in the 'rockier' sections of the tracks I felt we didn't quite give it our all. In the last song we played, I felt very self-conscious as I was playing the vocoder. Normally my idiotic humming would be drowned out by the noise from the PA – but I could hear myself over the sound in my headphones and I was aware that there were about ten people in front of us who couldn't hear the vocoder and only my 'doo – do – do – da – do – doos', the strumming of Zig's guitar and Gav and Zig's vocals and Kev punching buttons on his sampler. It must have been very funny to listen to, and even funnier to witness.

And then before we knew it, it was over and the clock told us it was only 9.30am. Gav's dad, Lyall, bought us all coffee and bacon bagels in the Abbey Road canteen and we tried to process what had just happened. We hung out for a while and then made our way back to Kings Cross where we meet our new PR man, Alex Black from a company called Rocket Science, in the Duke Of York pub on platform 8. Alex seems like a nice bloke and he's very enthusiastic about Found. We handed over some promo copies of our 7" which had just arrived from the pressing plant on Tuesday. It was a fitting end to a surreal trip to London. The train journey back was a bit of a drag... it's always that way when you are returning home and don't have the same excitement as you do on the trip there. Anyway – a good experience, and I'm glad we went for it. I will be hyping this story up on press releases for years to come!"