Enemy Chorus Day
On this day in 2007 we released what would be the last Earlies album, The Enemy Chorus. Without getting into the specific numbers, These Were The Earlies didn’t sell an outlandish amount, but this one definitely sold less. In a world that is focused on growth, whether you’re selling shoes, planks of wood , missiles or albums if the graph starts pointing down you’re out.
I like it though. I don’t listen to it as much as I listen to it as much as I listen to Booker T and the MGs but whenever I do put it on it grabs my attention. There are some great sounds and unusual arrangements. It’s inventive in all sorts of ways and I can vividly remember almost every moment of it being put together. Our collective weakness as conventional songwriters meant it had little chance of gathering any airplay past our loyal friends at 6 music. It wasn’t going to cross over.
Whereas the first album had slowly gestated across four or five years of DATs being mailed back and forth this one featured a good month or so of us sitting in the studio trying things out together. JM and Brandon were still in America but we had just got to a point where we could share sizeable files online for the first time, We would work all day and then they would record vocals and slowly upload them while we were sleeping. I can’t remember the name of the online drive, it was before dropbox or onedrive or anything else you might think of.
It was released as a series of five 10” vinyl singles. The artwork spread across the covers of the first four and the fifth one was a box to store them all in. It was a lovely idea, they released 2000 of each single over the course of the year. Unfortunately by the time it came to the fifth and final one featuring the box the label couldn’t quite be arsed. High staff turnover meant there was already hardly anyone at the label who knew who we were and they didn’t see any massive injustice in letting the series fizzle out after four. Our A & R man Billy managed to talk them round to an extent but there were only 500 copies of the final single featuring the box released. I got one, but it pains me to think of those loose records lurking on shelves.
I remember getting a really pissy email from a record collector in New York who couldn’t get hold of the box. He wanted to let us know as a band how much we sucked for only releasing 500 of the last part. He said he would never buy anything by our band again.
Anyway, we didn’t make anything else so that showed him. Misery guts.
Take some time out to enjoy the Enemy Chorus, still as glorious as it ever was.