PART 3 – A historic insight on the Ill At Ease Recording Sessions

If you missed Part 1 you can find it here, or Part 2 is here. Now let’s get into Part 3…

Remember Me

I was playing bass in an Adelaide band called “Grunter” with Kelly Hewson who is the brother of Aaron (our drummer then). I had the riff for this song and took it along to rehearsal and Grunter had the first version of this song. I liked the idea of “Remember Me” and since it was my riff TMOC used it but had different aspects of it than the Grunter version. Kelly and I split the difference so he is a co-writer on it. Be good to hear both versions together actually.

Lyrics all taken from my big split up…All about loss, argument, and separation, with this whole Remember Me part to it, we rarely play it live nowadays – we played it a lot in earlier days in the 90’s. As we got more songs, some songs move further down the list. This was one of them.

Walk Away

We don’t play this much but I really like this one. It harks back to the sort of riffs and rhythm we used to do in the early days when Julian (John) Rickert played drums for us. I also like the riff that sort of ‘dances’ around as the bass chugs along in that staccato feel that we often go for. All in E of course. I wrote this in Israel on a Fostex four track. “Gotta get away, from this town”, could mean Tel Aviv or Adelaide, your choice.

Recording it was straight forward – usual bass and drums then layer the guitar later plus vocals. I reckon I was listening to some Ministry too which might explain the move up to F then back to E again that happens at times. Henry always plays this one on his show “Harmony in my Head”. Loves the guitar riff in it.

And this has the bombastic intro to it – a joke we take from a Big Black song  – but it does have this ridiculous intro to it, good though (in my humble opinion) and then it has the guitar riff, that is reminiscent of Joy Division sort of guitar notes, which is why I like it. I just listened to it then, makes me think we should definitely get that one back in the set. Has a bit of everything.

John Scott