Making Morning Loops
Ste’s Notes on the Making of Morning Loops
A bit over a year after the release of ‘A Country Supper with Le Emu Tavern’, Mol and Sanjoy left the band and for about ten seconds Le Emu Tavern was just me again. But, Cerys was sat right next to me on the couch when the messages came through and she asked if there were anything she could do to help.
Cerys is a highly accomplished musician in multiple fields so this really wasn’t a Wings situation in the making. If anything, I was wondering how I could justify my position in the band, but we had a gig booked and just had to knuckle down and that's how the new songs started to happen. The songs that would become 'Morning Loops'.
Ad Infinitum
The origins of this song date back to my old band Holy Roman Empire. I wanted a song that could twin with ‘The Hostage Moon’ and realised that ‘Ad Infinitum’ could be re-written to fit the bill, adding some colour to the characters.
Musically it was an idea that had been kicking around for a while, but it wasn’t until Cerys joined the band and brought the violin that I felt it could be done justice. That said, this song almost drove me over the edge trying to get it right and the finished form really is a testament to the endless determination of Cerys who would just not let it go.
"Never let a good thing die...."
The Hostage Moon
This song is kind of inspired by the book ‘And There Was Light’ by the blind French Resistance leader Jacques Lusseyran, which is an autobiography, history book and spiritual adventure. This was one of the first songs Cerys and I worked out together and for the longest time it was supposed to be the opening track to the album until we finished ‘Ad Infinitum’ and it had ‘BIG OPENING’ written all over it.
A key point in the book and song is that those (mostly) young people of the Resistance often threw themselves in the firing line because of their great love for the wider world. They knew that so much hinged on the defeat of fascism.
“And when we fell, we fell for all the world”
Home: The Right to Seek Asylum
We have played this song at a big antifascist night in Manchester, The Cavern Club in Liverpool and most significantly a small bar in Enniskillen on a rainy Tuesday night. And every time it is dedicated to my Dad who was born and raised around Enniskillen (Northern Ireland), worked for a while in a New York library before settling in Liverpool with Mum to raise a family. We often had visitors from overseas staying with us if they had nowhere else to go and eventually when Dad retired he put years of reading law books to good use helping refugees who come to the UK with whatever hassle they may have been getting from the Home Office. His main, but not sole, interest was in helping to keep families together.
“The Home Office picked a fight with a fire by the sea/That warmed the home Edwin, Kay, Andrew and Ste’
Whale
We are 4 songs in and Cerys has been all over this album but here is her first full song. We spent a lot of time watching ‘Whale Wars’ and bouncing ideas before deciding this had to be the ukulele song. Yes, it’s a Biblical pun about a ‘Profit’ in a whale being a harbinger of doom, but environmentalism is not a side issue on an antifascist album; the nihilistic nature of fascism means that those on the far-right are generally hostile towards action against climate change, save for a few eco-fascists who take a Thanos-type approach.
I tried lots of different ideas on the guitar playing this live before settling on this proper dirrrty sound.
’If there’s profit in a whale then the city will burn and fall into the sea forever.’
Horses to the Ground
One evening in lockdown Hooky from Joy Division/New Order appeared on the local news talking about a big livestreamed gig from Macclesfield and it prompted me to noodle on the lower guitar strings as if I were the man himself. And I came up with that looped riff, but had no idea where to go with it. We bounced ideas occasionally over a long period of time and it evolved into a song about our Lucy (woof), with a section lifted from an actual dream Cerys had. I love the bit on the album were the guitar feedback from ‘Whale’ is just dying out as this little gem kicks into life. Chef’s kiss!
‘Morning, Loops! Our faithful friend…’
The Axle & The Rose
I was home one day with our Edwin and put PMQs on, just to wind myself up. Some Tory MP stood up and asked a planted question along the lines of, “When will the government do something about Travellers staying on private property?” This MP knew that the government was planning to change the law to make trespass a criminal rather than a civil offence, at a time when local councils were failing to provide anything like enough sites for Travellers, despite their legal obligations to do so.
Now completely wound up, I thought about how I could explain what had just happened to a four-year-old. Not just any four-year-old, but our Edwin. So I fetched my guitar. The song later evolved into a folky country song, and I’m totally okay with that.
I always remember Trevor Phillips, when he was head of the Commission for Racial Equality, saying that discrimination against Gypsy and Traveller communities was the last respectable form of racism. It’s estimated that around 500,000 Roma and Sinti people were murdered by the Nazis. So, yes — this is another antifascist song.
’There’s a chronic shortage of approved sites where Travellers can stop/Cos some people are born to roam and some people are not.’
Dinosaurs
Not long after Cerys joined the band in 2019 we went on holiday to Portrush in Northern Ireland and spent fun summer evenings putting a set together for an upcoming show.
I remember being stood in the kitchen playing the beginnings of this on a guitar as we threw ideas around. We worked out ‘The Master Race...’ and ‘Hostage Moon’ on this holiday too, but ‘Dinosaurs’ is the song I most associate with it because it’s a fun song from a fun time.
‘Animals surround me, rainbows paint my path…’
Fireworks
Cerys came to me with some words about playing with fireworks and I thought “what!?” but we went on to turn into a proper banger, if you’ll pardon the pun. It’s definitely our lockdown song because it was from that time, but also refers back to it throughout (including our ordering for deliveries of burritos).
Yes, the moon referred to is The Hostage Moon and did you know that the “Fireworks” video was filmed in the farm house where we worked out those first songs and had honeymooned a few years previously?
‘Tell your Mum I saved your life/Tell the moon the war is over.’
Saturpool
When we were preparing for our first show after lockdown (the ‘22 Comeback Special) we thought it might be cool to ask Jonesy from Holy Roman Empire to read the intro to the ‘Master Race....’ video like a news report, to break up the performance a bit and let everybody know where the song was coming from (geographically as well as politically). Jonesy made the recording on his phone in his kitchen in Oxfordshire and sent them over.
For the album we went a bit Mayhem-Lettuce and set the monologue to music. I think it’s musically the darkest thing Le Emu Tavern has done, but that’s the perfect way to tee-up what comes next....
The Master Race Made a Big Mistake (When They Came to Our Town)
I was with former band mates Mol and Sanjoy at the Battle of Lime Street and remember the antifa chant “The mater race? Yer having a laugh!’ tickling me a bit. Not long before those mates left the band, we were booked for a Hope Not Hate fundraiser actually on Lime Street, so I started writing this song. The lids left, the show never happened and the song was turned upside down and rewritten once Cerys joined the band.
This is not just a song about how cool Liverpool is, but it’s a song to remind everyone that when the far-right take to the streets they can be defeated if enough people turn up.
By bizarre coincidence, having been conceived as a song to play on Lime Street, our first booking once it became ready was at Live Bars in Warrington - the very town in which National Action had been found to have a headquarters and training base.
‘Fascist ambulation trapped in Lime Steet Station…’
The Soul of Jimmy Carter
I always thought Jimmy Carter deserved a song and we did write and record this while he was still with us fighting the good fight. In a world of political horror stories and disappointments Carter was not perfect, but he was on the side of the angels and he just did not stop until he was physically unable. The bit about the solar panels is true, every POTUS is remembered for a failed struggle and arguably Carter’s most heroic effort was the 1977 Labour Reform Bill. He’s not the only JC to be demonised for a refusal to turn his back on the Palestinian people, but history is proving him right on that and so much else.
‘From perpetual motion to Eternal rest/The Soul of Jimmy Carter, that Soul of Jimmy Carter.’
The Artwork
The artwork perfectly exemplifies the blurring of the lines between family life and the life of the band in recent times. The photo was taken in Sefton Park on Christmas Eve 2022 and we loved the look of it, thinking some time we would recreate the shot with ourselves in place of the boys. We never got round to doing that and eventually warmed to the idea of using the original as those kids now opened the album and had been in the studio for much of its recording.
It should be said that while the boys’ older sister generally has better things to do, she did sing backing vocals on ‘Whale’, so we really do have the whole gang on this album.
Covid 19 & Le Emu Tavern
Work on ‘Morning Loops’ began in January 2020, and we managed to record three songs — ‘The Master Race Made a Big Mistake…’, ‘Dinosaurs’ and ‘The Hostage Moon’ — before the first lockdown hit.
We had no idea how long we were going to be stalled for, so by the summer we decided to get two of those tracks mixed and put them out as a single.
The video for ‘The Master Race Made a Big Mistake…’ was filmed at home using a screen we sometimes hung up to put films on for the kids. I found a video on YouTube of the events described in the song and contacted the journalist who had filmed it to ask permission to use some of the footage. Jim Wood was very forthcoming, and we thought we’d got a bit of a bargain given how much the clips added to the video.
The day the single came out, former bandmates Mol and Sanjoy — the two who had been with me in Liverpool that day National Action came to the city — were able to pop round for a socially distanced drink out the back.
As lockdown eased, we were eventually able to get back into the studio, but we still couldn’t leave the kids with their grandparents. That’s how it came to pass that the kids ended up being in the studio with us so much. They enjoyed it, and we loved having them there, so even once they were able to go back to their grandparents, they often came to the studio anyway.
It became a strange but very happy part of making ‘Morning Loops’: what had started as a necessity during lockdown became part of how we made the record.
Without Whom
Jon Lawton
This is the second Le Emu Tavern album made with Liverpool’s top producer, Jon Lawton, at Crosstown Studios, and we can’t imagine making another one without him now.
It’s a mistake to underestimate what Jon can do. I sometimes think the best recordings happen when you shoot for the moon and fall spectacularly short — but in your own unique style.
While recording ‘The Soul of Jimmy Carter’, I asked if we could get the ‘ba ba ba’s sounding like the vocals on the old Pearl & Dean cinema advert from the 1970s and 80s. Jon directed us to add the necessary harmonies and, sure enough, it sounded EXACTLY like Pearl & Dean. Unfortunately, it was also completely inappropriate for the song.
Stephen Kerrison
With the tracking and mixing nearly finished, we needed someone to master the album. I’d been enjoying a recent single by Ruins and noticed they’d tagged their mastering engineer on Instagram. I checked him out and immediately appreciated his cool name: Stephen Kerrison.
One of his recent photos showed him at a social event wearing an antifascist T-shirt. I immediately passed the phone to Cerys and said, ‘I think we have found our guy’.
We checked out some more of his work just to be sure, then got in touch. He completely understood what we were doing, did a beautiful job on the album and even labelled a line on the invoice an ‘antifascist deal’. This wasn’t just the icing on the cake. It was an entirely new cake, served at a different brilliant party.
We are very proud of 'Morning Loops' and it means a lot to us that these guys are too.