Hattersley Loop

I’m doing exactly the thing I promised not to do; namely listening to the Hattersley songs on a loop! We went down to a country estate outside a little village near Horesham to mix them this morning and I’m thrilled with the results. PK, the producer, is a man with an eye for detail, and an extraordinary sense of the space that music needs to breathe. I couldn’t believe how much work he’d done on the tracks before we arrived. It was a pleasure to work with him.

There was a massive flurry of snow last night. In fact, because of the weather, I drove into town to pick Nathan up from work. As I passed through Camden, a blizzard started, which became more and more intense. It got incredibly confusing at one point and I found myself driving the wrong way down Endell Street because I couldn't see through the snow. I reached Nathan’s work to be told that, because of the weather, he’d been sent home early. I tried to call him, but he was already on the tube. I’d gone all the way into town and driven the wrong way down a one way street for nothing! By the time I’d turned around, negotiated a ridiculous set of road works, and started to head north again, the roads were gridlocked. It took me an hour to get back home.

The recording studio where we mixed the tracks today was in a sort of stable block in the grounds of a massive country house which belongs to one of the former members of Depeche Mode. It’s a stunning house, which looked even more beautiful in the snow, particularly as the sun set. We worked incredibly hard, but the studio didn’t have heating. It was so cold, in fact, that at one stage Nathan and I were both sitting underneath blankets. As we pulled away in our car, the temperature gage suggested it was -4.5 outside.

350 years ago, Pepys went to the bookshops in St Paul’s churchyard, where he found a volume called “England’s Worthys”, by Dr Fuller, one of his favourite authors. The book was a sort of Who’s Who of notable English families and Pepys sat and read it keenly. He got so engrossed, in fact, that he completely lost track of the time and was very late home for lunch. He was, however, very unhappy to discover that his own family weren’t included in the list, summing things up, rather sadly; “indeed, our family were never considerable.”

Well, they are now, dear Mr Pepys, they are now...