Circus worlD - The Dandelion Radio Session E.P.
2018 is the 20th Anniversary of Circus worlD - Mark and I first performed using that name in January of 1998. This E.P., recorded for Mark Whitby at Dandelion Radio and aired in the autumn of 2017, revisits the early years of the band, collecting some of our defining songs. It can be downloaded on a name-your-price basis as usual, or you can buy it on CD which comes with another five tracks from the earlier days of the band, two of which have never been released before now. You can find it here - https://circusworld.bandcamp.com/album/the-dandelion-radio-session-e-p.
Flamethrower - This is the oldest song here, I’d guess it was written some time in May of ‘98. At the time it felt vaguely special, a standout song from the early material; when we had the opportunity to record a song for a local compilation that summer this is the one that we chose. That recording, though exciting at the time, lost the essence of what the song, and band, really sounded like at the time. I wanted to try to recapture that here, though I’m not sure I succeeded. Hopefully I got a little closer though. Originally Mark played all of the lead guitar on this song. He advised me to add a new solo to it, I began and ended it in a similar way to his, but rather than repeat the same phrase throughout that section I moved off into something new. Strangely this is not a song that found its way into our live sets often after ‘98. For that reason it was nice to come back to it here. Marie from Postcode reprises her role from the original recording adding vocals; unusually I also sing on the choruses.
Green - If ever there were a song that came to define the band, this is it, whether we expected or understood it. I can still remember Mark showing it to me before an acoustic set at The Cul-De-Sac in the early spring of 1999; we played it for the first time that night and played it at almost every gig we did from that point on I think. I remember a few people singling it out for praise at some of our early performances of it but it didn’t seem to be until the early-mid ‘00s that it gained more significance to our fans, with other artists covering it and mass sing-alongs of the whole song, including the instrumental sections. I always liked the song but it was never my favourite, I’m not sure any of us thought it was our best, but we always enjoyed playing it.
Pandora - Another of the songs written in our first year of existence, this was written by Mark on a guitar with two missing strings, in an unusual tuning which was then expanded to feature six strings. Originally it was tuned lower, to sound in D, but we eventually tuned it half a step higher to match the bass tuning (at the time we tuned everything half a step down from standard). For this recording it is up to E, as we were using standard tuning for most of the other songs. When we first recorded this song, way back in 2002, I had added some keyboards to the latter half of the song, but here I decided to keep it closer to the way it was written and the way it was performed live. I did give it a slightly different intro though, with a new drum beat.
No Light Shines - This is in the same tuning as Pandora and was written the day that Mark showed me how to play that song. It started with me playing what became the verse lead guitar part, which Mark then wrote the song around. As with Pandora we played these songs a few times back in ‘98 and then dropped them for several years as it was a hassle bringing extra guitars just for two songs. Six years later we finally reintroduced them to the set and we played them at most of gigs from that point on, with them becoming high points in the show.
Viscera - This is the newest song here, though it is still almost 15 years old. We actually played this slightly differently live, with a simplified chorus chord progression, and I played the melody in the breakdown in a different timing, mainly because I had forgotten what Mark had originally written. So for the first time here I actually played it right, after all these years! Mark wrote this not long after the band had reunited following a couple of years of inactivity and it became a staple of our live sets from that point on.
Brood - This is another song that we played at almost every gig we did after it was written. It is a song that evolved over the years, starting life as essentially a jam on the opening section of the song, with me playing bass and Mark on guitar. We played it live like that a number of times, with Mark improvising different lyrics every time. Eventually Mark wrote the rest of the sections and I helped to arrange it into the form it has now. It was only after several years of performing it that it gained vocals over the last section of the song, previously that part had been instrumental. This is the first recording that features those final words. I originally used an E-bow for the lead part in the second vocal section, but it was always a bit annoying trying to switch between that and a plectrum, so at some point I ended up changing to playing it how I do here; I thought that it would be better to play that way on this recording to give it the same feel as our live shows would have.
