Youth Group

For their new record 'The Night Is Ours,' Youth Group undertook a unique recording process. Over a couple of months late last year, the band holed up in a near derelict 1920s mess hall on Sydney’s harbour to create their fourth album. They decided against traditional studio procedures and turned a vacated building into a studio, bringing in all of their own gear to create an inimitable recording environment which allowed them to work at their own pace. The old dining room morphed into their ‘band room' and the old bathroom became the 'control room'. This unusual approach helped to shape the 10 songs that make up the personality of 'The Night Is Ours.'

"We didn't want to be constricted by the traditional economics of the past records we'd made where, so as not to waste time, the songs to be recorded needed to be tightly structured and well rehearsed before going into the studio. Not that there is anything wrong with that.

Since we hadn't sold a squillion records we couldn't hole up like used to be the fashion. We searched for church halls or warehouses around the place. Then Cameron's dad found us an old hall in North Sydney and we turned it into a recording studio. Perfect.

We prepared by growing beards. And by searching online for synths and drum-pads. Toby had a piano installed in his house to grow songs. And we recruited two friends to record us: Tim Kevin and Anthony The.

But the band didn't rehearse the songs Toby had written - we deliberately waited until we were in our studio and worked them up one at a time till we had them finished and recorded, so that the moment of creation was also the moment of recording. With the last record we found that some of the early demos had a spark that couldn't be recreated in the final studio.

A metaphor for the music we made could be found in the visual surrounds. We were away in a backwater of the Harbour, with lantana creeping over the empty space of industrial ruins and no neighbours in sight after dark. The songs we recorded had a sense of place: a creepy low-key anxiety, a door closing far away, a drone that sounds as a ship's horn does.

On the other hand, the surrounds were beautiful - abutting a pond made from a reclaimed oil silo (the industrial ruins) that contained turtles, ducks and crickets. We received nightly visits from a pair of owls and daytime ministrations from a brood of wild chickens.

There were less guitars on this record. If 'Skeleton Jar' was about learning to write songs in odd tunings then this record was about doing away with guitars.

Some studio experiences never change: "Was that the take?", "Maybe the chorus shouldn't come in there"; you listen to music in altered states, you decide to get take-away for dinner but everything is closed. Our studio was the same but different. We had no clock ticking - if we wanted to play the same two chords of 'Two Sides' for three hours we could. If we sat and played 'In My Dreams' all night, and then all day and night the next day and we still didn't have something we liked, we could start again the next morning and not stress about it. There were no studio expenses mounting. We had as long as we liked.

In and out of weeks and for a quarter year we sailed."

Patrick Matthews