August Newsletter '26
I'm peeking my head round the door veeeery slowly..... I'm peeking at you all! Yes my flowers, I'm handing you a small piece of paper... unfold it... IT'S A SPECIAL BUMPER EDITION OF THE FOUR BLOKES NEWSLETTER! WE RELEASED A FILM AND AN ALBUM! Spoiling you all really - although many would say it's a form of punishment. More Four Blokes? The ant's nest swarms as i furrow my brow. A podium place at the Ant's Nest of the Year awards, that's all I want...
From the top of the ant's nest I gaze back across the temporal plain to the beginning of August... on the 1st, i overdubbed new vocals onto Monstera and Dockers & Dinnerladies, pretty routine stuff. August 4th was a different sort of session, working on the shortest Four Blokes song yet, Teacup Vignette, probably the shortest session too as I only had to sing two lines - sing two lines over the BBC Symphonic Orchestra's sampled harpist playing my fifty five second score. Two lines about teacups - "you can rub away yesterday's tanin with your fingertip, but once you're stained you better get used to it". I'm sure you all understand the metaphor, dear readers, I'm SURE!
On the Fifth of August I recorded my final parts for the album, bass on Bedtime Story for Pigeons and Wishes - increasingly stoned at a kitchen table i plucked away, thumbs waning but desire strong... lots of arpegiated stuff, going up and down the notes of each chord, something I've been digging.
Across the early part of the month I also filmed and edited the last few scenes for the movie! Fab sideplot where Im kidnapped and murdered in Mexico, ey? Plenty of scenes in the shed and a bit of lipsyncing with the banana lamp. What's the film about? I've heard a few interpretations, certainly... but we'll get back to that in the SPECIAL FEATURE ARTICLE later.
Barry Bannan, whatever happened there? August 12th, a trip to the THE LARGEST KITCHEN SHOWROOM IN THE U.K. - this will be important later guys, I mean it - very impactful on me, walking around all those display kitchens. Who would live somewhere like this? A cynic might say "a homeless person who's broken into the largest kitchen showroom in the u.k.". Anyways, while I was in the Largest Kitchen Showroom in the U.K., Aria was overdubbing the guitar part onto I Keep Waking Up, making her debut on a Four Blokes recording - once you do that, you're cursed for life - just look what's happened to the others! Soon she will be playing a guitar part on The Largest Kitchen Showroom in the U.K. - has anyone figured out what's going to happen yet? I found a Timpani player at a house party, and moments later i found the bag - ❄️ no two snowflakes are the same but they're all beautiful.
I think it's time for our SPECIAL FEATURE ARTICLE really, I shouldn't go waffling on so much about Kitchen Showrooms - I mean, there's probably gonna be quite a kitchen showroom heavy issue of the Four Blokes Newsletter coming soon, so...
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FOUR BLOKES GO TO THE MOVIES
On August 15th we released unto the world our FIRST MOTION PICTURE. I went over to Tiago's and we simultaneously witnessed it in it's complete form for the first time. Months of a slow hunch, recording little bits of footage and having little ideas for how to structure it, how to edit it, what to say with the film, had now been assembled into a neat little half-hour package.
"What's it about?" That's the first question people ask me when I say I'm making a film, and it's not particularly easy to answer - I'll save my interpretations for last, let's see what a few of you said...
TIAGO - "People thought you were missing but you just had to go on a little REFUGE, a little holiday, and to go see some goats... (stoned laughter) and cows"
SADIE - "It's an almost self-contained post-apocolypse. It reminded me of the pandemic in this way of being stuck only with yourself and the memories of others, of going through the random and at the time innocuous videos on your phone or camera and being overcome with emotion at them and at the passage of time. It felt like you as a character were somehow trapped and reflecting upon/reacting to life prior to something, with a certain sense of doom to that the prior life would not return. I think it’s visible that there are different phases of the film that aren’t necessarily in order but I interpreted that as illustrating passage of time - I think it’d feel much flatter if it all seemed recorded at one time like how it’d be flat if it was recorded all in the same place. The shed was kind of an anchor for me of okay here is where this character is “now” (whatever that is) and then the rest skips around time and place - You did get beheaded(?) but only after going for a walk and composing a poem - Not the worst way to go. It's quite ARG-like with it's story."
Ari: "It felt like you'd spoofed together your own in memoriam tape and the video diaries of a schizophrenic. Immediately recognised St Albans city railway station walk bridge."
Well, what did I actually mean? What was the film about? Why did I make the film? There is the overarching "archive of life on earth as made in a post-human future" storyline that goes across the film and album, but you wouldn't really know that unless you were told - I guess these days you get a little blurb on the streaming website but I don't think a plot is the point, I wanted it to be like a dream - as if made by the subconcious rather than concious mind. I bloody loved that "dissolve" transition where one thing melts into another, like in a dream where your subconcious starts to go on a different tangent and in, a way that completely disregards the laws of reality, swaps to a totally different cast and setting. At least I get this in my dreams! I kind of made it subconciously in a way, filming little clips for half a year then making sense of them all at the end.
I think Sadie was spot on, the central theme is probabaly loneliness - as much as there's the onion scenes and Mr Sugarlump and the Polish TV Presenter, there's lots of shots of me alone often looking rather glum, and almost all of the shots are completley devoid of people, even when in a city. It's all a bit empty and eerie. That sci-fi element definitely exists but in the absence of sets London stands in for a futuristic dystopia, very much like Paris did in Alphaville (which I've never actually seen I just know they did that). I actually used a Barbican exhibition on Future Worlds as a set for my own future worlds at one point. Filming in Antalya was very liminal, I think something about having nothing but sea forever and ever off the coastline made it feel like I was at the edge of the world.
I used double exposure quite a lot, putting TV static over things, often the surface of a river, sometimes strawberry jelly. Sometimes frozen meat! I don't know - I've kind of waffled around in a circle and not came to any concise conclusions, but I guess it's quite a hard film to pin down. I guess it's a journey through a dream, across all sorts of places and past all sorts of faces, into different moments of joy and worry that rise to the surface when the mind is unguarded by the logical nature of being concious. At the end of the day I had a lot of fun making it, and it's a fun and different vehicle for the music than what we've done before. Perhaps the best way to sum it up is I turn the record player on at the start of the film and the first track starts playing - when the last song finishes, I turn the record player off. I guess everything that happens in between was just contained in the record.
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Well, that was the film that was. If we're gonna crunch the numbers I do believe it's the most succesful thing we've done since The Wet Garden of Love, idk how Youtube views compare to streams but it's a good sign! It was also super fun to make. What happened in between the release of the film and the release of the album? Well...
For starters, a fair deal of mixing. The album versions of 5 of the 7 film songs are slightly different, which I love! I don't know why I love this, but minor differences in mixes between versions of songs scratches a little thing in my brain, it comes from the Beatles I think, the U.S. pressing having added reverb or a false start or a different solo.
Changes between film mix and album mix:
Monstera - backing vocal on final section comes in 4 bars later
Robot Samba - tremolo and echo effects added to Portugese verse
Teacup Vignette - master track is faded out to silence rather than ending while the reverb is still slightly audible. Absolutely tiny change but it bugged me
Bluebells in the Meadow - bass is tidied up in intro, stray noise from pot is removed in first chorus
Theme for a Mountain Goat - instruments are panned differently, volume of Cello boosted in choruses
I'm hoping someone reading this is the right kind of neurodivergent and finds that interesting. Anyways! Continued mixing endeavours, including miraculously syncing up me shaking some loose change into the microphone with a tremolo effect so it swaps sides with each shake... on the 27th Ari recorded the guitar part for Ultrapop, the last session for the album, and I mixed that in quite a drastic way. I was kinda inspired by how the frequencies in hyperpop are taken to extremes, very rumbley low bass and very trebley guitars. It kinda ended up sounding like Psychocandy - convergent pathways, ey Oh! And just before that i was the compère for a drag night and met two fantastic clowns.
On the 30th of August, around 5 hours before the album came out, I performed an acoustic set on Southampton Common for one of Zakk Paules' DIY events. It was a bit different from what we've done before and what we plan to do next, but it's got me out there playing in front of a crowd for the first time in nearly 11 months and also was my first time playing bass live. Sat on a log, I opened with a reading of Data Processing Machine before a 4 song set on acoustic bass - I Can't Help Being A Lover, a cover of Vegetables by The Beach Boys, Popworld (possibly the final ever performance), and I Keep Waking Up. I closed with Bedtime Story for Pigeons - all in all pretty good, I was followed by their old English teacher who sang a nice song about Southampton he'd written for some sort of Civic event and then we all watched Zakk huddled under a tarpaulin as thunder struck and the rain clattered down. A few bong hits later I headed to meet Jan and Matt for the midnight first listen of the album.
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"NOAH, TAKE ME ON YOUR ARK"
A second special feature article!!! Well, it is our first double release month, so double articles it is. I'll speak briefly (well as brief as I can get it) about the album before handing it over to some of you guys.
As I write this, around 24 hours since it's release, I'm very happy with how it turned out. All the ideas I had in my head I made real, and all the themes I wanted to include are omnipresent across the whole project. The dream-like surrealism, the lyrics about a post-apocalyptic dystopia brought about by Capitalism, the unique mix of orchestral,
electronic, and found sounds. All the dichotomies I wanted are present - past and future, organic and robotic, beautiful and horrible, organisation and chaos. It's flawed of course, and I already know what things I want to differently next time I go into the studio, but I'm chuffed with how it turned out and how, out of a time in my life when I suffered with a lot of loneliness and depression and anxiety, I've created a coherent work of art that I'm really quite proud of. And now it's yours! Anyways, tooting my own bloody trumpet here, what did other people think?
JAN- I'm noticing great developments in the sound. I'm a big fan of the direction, y'know, a direction has been chosen and I'm one of the travellers.Noah, take me on your ark! There's definite bangers , but there's not a song I'd rate less than 6/10. I feel tender towards many of the songs - I like Data Processing Machine, Bluebells in the Meadow, quite good song.. Theme for a Mountain Goat - that's my favourite one - a beautiful arrangment, and the ending is so beautiful - number one (stoned laughter)
SADIE- There was something almost Circus-like about it in a way i really liked. Through the Peephole is so Pulp - "This is Hardcore" like. Eligible for Addition I'd say (she then sends a playlist called "Beautiful Ballads for Cucks and Pervs"). Favorite song is between Monstera - it sounds like the intro for a 70s sitcom, The flute and the little “woa-ah” ad libs, good pick to lead with - and Bedtime Story for Pigeons, which sounds like a cross between Slint and Tally Hall.
WILL - My favourite is between Data Processing Machine, Ultrapop, and Bedtime Story for Pigeons. I really love the end of robot samba transitioning into data processing (the found sound industrial percussion is seriously good). I really love bedtime story for pigeons it sounds like early human league but more whimsical!!! I really like the vocal(?) harmonies at the end of this one with the crazy synth stuff in the background, Very nice chord progression. (Ultrapop) felt like an old punky one but with your now more industrial and electronic sensibilities. Just to nitpick: some of the timing sometimes gets a little sloppy, some of the vocals need to be double tracked (especially for the 60s pop sound) or recorded/eq’d differently they sound too thin, also I think u need to do more takes just to get the vibe, sometimes they sound like guide vocals yk - and you should sing higher!The beach boys esque aaaaahs fit your range better than the baritone croon imo.
It's only been out for a day or so but it's very rewarding to finally hear what OTHER PEOPLE think and feel about these songs I've been living alone with for half the year. If I was to look at the early figures for streams and listeners objectively perhaps there would be worrying signs there - if you look at first day for albums 1, 2, & 3 it's a case of diminishing returns each time BUT - And this is a big but - as much as the streaming figures have gone down with each album, not only my satisfaction with the final work but also the joy I've had in making it has improved EXPONENTIALLY with each project. I've been writing songs for about 9 years now, and recording them for about 8, and never in that time have I taken such joy in the writing and recording process as I have with this album. It was an extremely freeing experience making something a bit more zany and creepy and out there and I feel like I've really found my voice now both as a lyricist and a composer - sounds like a fucking uni essay this. CUNT SHITE BOLLOCKS AND BALLS! That's just to make me feel free from the claws of academia.
Now I realise this is becoming an incredibly long newsletter, possibly the longest one yet (fear not, it's quite possible next month will be the shortest one) but I have to just say - this album is dedicated to Brian Wilson! I was a bit late to the Beach Boys Party, it was Brian's death that really sparked my intrest, but it's a love that's just grown and grown and grown over the last year and a bit. Especially with this project I found myself taking inspiration from hearing Brian direct in the Pet Sounds session tapes and doing extensive research into the making of Smile. In many ways I see this as my Smile, the wacky album I made in solitude while having you might describe as a series of mental breakdowns. The joy and the sadness, a kind of manic polarity. But anyways, wherever you are, thank you Brian.
Oh! Finally just to thank Justin for bringing my vision for the album cover alive with his 3D modelling skills and all the guest musicians who appear on the record - Caitlin with Flute, Aria with Guitar, Oliver with Accordian, and Harvey with Trumpet, Trombone, Euphonium and Melodica (+ the 81 darts score announcement).
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Well, that's about it for August - sorry to keep you so long folks. What's next for Four Blokes? Well, with the album complete and me returning to London in a few weeks, focus is squarely on A RETURN TO STAGE! With all the power I can muster I will manifest it. Oh, and I'll probabaly tell you about my ideas revolving around "The Largest Kitchen Showroom in the U.K."
Love to all
M x
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