Night On Bald Mountain

[Scotty Anxiety]

I'd love to know the story behind the recording of this track from the Straight to Hell returns soundtrack. It sounds like it was played on the worst most out of tune piano ever! (which certainly gives it charm:))


scott

[philipchevron]

I'd love to know the story behind the recording of this track from the Straight to Hell returns soundtrack. It sounds like it was played on the worst most out of tune piano ever! (which certainly gives it charm:))


scott

There were two pianos in Elephant Studios, where we recorded most of the Straight To Hell music, an expensive Grand and an old pub upright. Apart from the Pogues using Elephant on a regular basis, myself and engineer Nick Robbins worked there together frequently on other projects, like The Men They Couldn't Hang, the Tall Boys and Agnes Bernelle.

During the recording of Agnes's 1985 album Father's Lying Dead On The Ironing Board, her musical director Charles Barber deployed a number of modernist effects, like placing screws, nuts, bolts etc on the strings of the Grand Piano. But for certain tracks, I wanted a more consistently brittle sound, not quite pub piano, but still evoking the Weimar era whence most of Agnes's songs eminated. Graham Sharpe, who owned the studio, had a special bar installed for us in the upright piano, with little steel studs positioned in front of the piano's hammers, so that the hammers would hit the metal studs en route to the piano's strings. The beauty of this was it could be switched on and off, as it were, so the piano's main functions were not permanently impaired. Also, because the metal studs were somewhat loosely positioned (dangling from a metal bar on little red felt ribbons), there remained an element of the random, the unexpected, when the piano was played and the bar was "in".

Anyway, the bar remained available to anyone who used Elephant Studios after the Bernelle album was completed, including, of course, The Pogues. From what I remember of the session in which James recorded the Mussorgsky piece, Nick Robbins almost certainly added some digital delay lines to make it sound less in tune, a factor we did not use on the Bernelle album, as I recall.

[Benno]

i had no idea you guys knew about mussorgsky
i think my respect increased 10 fold

[Mick Molloy]

Haha I was listening to that track 2 days ago and was meaning to ask a similar question. When I heard it the first time I was absolutely blown away by a 'pop' band doing this kind of things

[JamesFearnley]

It was Alex Cox that asked to have Night On Bald Mountain for Straight To Hell. I remember listening to a tape of it for a week or two, and trying to work out bits of it in the BBC studio where we were doing a John Peel Session or one for Kid Jensen. I assembled all the bits I thought were important - well, important that is for a pig roast scene, if you understand me - and made a table out of them and arranged them up and read from the table when it came to recording it - on what I thought wasn't much more than a honky-tonk tuned piano with some strips of felt hanging from a rod inside, with drawing pins hammered flat in them. Weimar? Dodge, more like.

[Benno]

this all sounds a bit like john cage to me

[philipchevron]

this all sounds a bit like john cage to me

We taught him everything he knew. Indeed, we wrote his "Four Minutes Thirty Three Seconds".

[firehazard]

this all sounds a bit like john cage to me

We taught him everything he knew. Indeed, we wrote his "Four Minutes Thirty Three Seconds".

I'm most impressed, if somewhat surprised... I just can't imagine what a Pogues performance of the work would sound like. You haven't ever recorded it, have you?

[DzM]

this all sounds a bit like john cage to me

We taught him everything he knew. Indeed, we wrote his "Four Minutes Thirty Three Seconds".

I'm most impressed, if somewhat surprised... I just can't imagine what a Pogues performance of the work would sound like.

".... Wha'?

Oh? We started. Oh.

...

[shuffle shuffle clink]

.., mm nnna bicycle michael mmm naaa mmm ...

Oh. Right.

... ...

Have we started? Oh. Right! Right.

...

[CRASH]

Ssshhhh! Jem! We started! No gong!

Right! K. ... I'll just get out my video camera then. ..."

Etc.

I'm probably wrong though.

[nboldock]

this all sounds a bit like john cage to me

We taught him everything he knew. Indeed, we wrote his "Four Minutes Thirty Three Seconds".

I'm most impressed, if somewhat surprised... I just can't imagine what a Pogues performance of the work would sound like.

".... Wha'?

Oh? We started. Oh.

...

[shuffle shuffle clink]

.., mm nnna bicycle michael mmm naaa mmm ...

Oh. Right.

... ...

Have we started? Oh. Right! Right.

...

[CRASH]

Ssshhhh! Jem! We started! No gong!

Right! K. ... I'll just get out my video camera then. ..."

Etc.

I'm probably wrong though.

Heh heh heh.

That was funny, that was.

[NYPiper79]

I love the original "night on bald mountain"
just shows the intelligence of the band...