THE RECORDING of a David Bowie cover with a new video by a Tamworth-based group is the first project to emerge from a new initiative funded by Arts North West, created to assist local artists during the COVID-19 closure of arts venues in the New England North West region.
Musician Alan Buchan spoke to Arts North West this week and reported the project, based on ‘We Can Be Heroes’ penned by Bowie and Brian Eno in 1977, is progressing nicely, with audio engineer Nathan Kaye currently working on tracks recorded by the group known as Al and The Buccaneers.
Recorded to honour those Alan identifies as the heroes of the pandemic – supermarket staff, truck drivers, medical teams and emergency service workers – the focus of this musical project is on those he believes have kept communities going, but it also led to Alan having to pull out a few stops of his own.
“Due to the home lockdown, I approached the project very differently by recording a complete ‘demo’ of the track, myself, in my home, using a portable digital audio recorder,” he said.
“I played all the instruments myself and I sang the vocal parts and then created a rough mix of the song and sent that demo to the musicians so they could rehearse their parts individually.
“Once the lockdown was eased, I invited the musicians to come to my home and record their parts, drums, bass, piano one at a time over the course of a week. I then recorded the final guitars and vocal and these things are usually done in a day, at a professional recording studio.”
However, that setting wasn’t available due to the closure of businesses and regulations against gatherings, so despite the technical risks, Alan improvised.
“It was time consuming and somewhat nerve-wracking because I have to keep the project secure for this entire time at my home, and now I have to finalise the guide mix and send it to the engineer for the final mix and mastering,” he said.
“I will then send it to the videographer (Terence Sadler) so he can match the images to the music and we will just have to wait and see what it comes back like, both in terms of sound and vision.
“As David Bowie himself once famously wrote: ‘waiting for the gift of sound and vision’.”
Authentic ‘lockdown’
According to Alan, the founder of singer-songwriter showcase Fretfest, now that widespread quarantine conditions have been relaxed and people are able to gather in small groups, he and the other musicians have finally been able to hear what they’ve created.
“We had our first run through of the song, live in the studio,” he said.
“This would normally be done first, whereas in this case, because of the COVID-19 lockdown, we’re doing it last, so this is unusual.
“However, it has given us a renewed perspective of our performances and, as a result, we can now go back and revisit our parts to see if we want to record them again so as to better reflect our arrangement of the song, as musicians.
“Thing is, we might equally choose to leave it as it is, because that represents the compromise we each had to make. This would make it more authentic to the experience of being in lockdown, that we recorded our parts individually and not as a band might usually do, in the studio.
“The whole idea is to raise awareness of the staff, tradies and professionals who went to work while the rest of us stayed home, so my hope is that this video will receive widespread coverage and promotion,” Alan said.
This video of ‘We Can Be Heroes’ will be released on social media. Find Al and The Buccaneers on Facebook.
