Animal Kingdom Welcome Fans Into the Studio

Posted on Dec 8th 2009 4:30PM by Animal Kingdom
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Holed up in a North London church-turned-studio, Animal Kingdom are gathering material for their sophomore album just months after the release of their breakthrough debut, 'Signs and Wonders.' The British quartet will be checking in during their creative brainstorming process with personal anecdotes and photos, the first of which come from drummer Geoff Lea, who takes fans on a virtual tour of their new home away from home, Ark Studio.

Animal Kingdom's last few weeks have been spent writing and recording new ideas for our next album. We currently have a list of about 30 songs all in various stages of completion, and we are slowly demoing them up. Our studio headquarters is in this beautiful church in North London (built in 1800), and it's here that most of our work gets done.

The building is well known for its musical heritage. Dave Stewart and the Eurythmics owned the main studio in the 80s until a few years ago when David Gray bought it from him after hitting pay dirt with 'White Ladder.' Legend has it that Bob Dylan came to meet Dave Stewart, but turned up at the wrong address. He knocked on the door and the lady who answered informed him that Dave was still at work, but would be home soon. Not knowing who Bob Dylan was, she asked him in to wait for her husband. When the husband, Dave, arrived home, he found his wife sitting in the living room drinking tea with Bob Dylan, totally oblivious. Dave naturally nearly passed out with shock.

Upstairs, Feeder are busy writing their new record, but the main area of the church still has regular services, so we have to keep the guitar solos to a minimum on Sundays -- unless we are feeling in a gospel mood!

The studio is very basic, but works well for writing and demoing. It is spread over two rooms of similar sizes. One we use as a live room with our equipment constantly set up, and the other room is a chill out area or control room when we do demos/B-sides.

Our studio, like the others within the church, has been used since the 60s for creative purposes. Before it was a music studio, two famous animators owned it. In fact, 'Captain Pugwash,' 'Pinky and Perky' and 'Camberwell Green' were created here -- all big children's animations in the U.K., which probably means nothing to you if you live across the pond.

The church definitely has a creative vibe and the character of the room, the big church windows and old wooden beams, make rehearsing here very cozy. We actually have a plaque on the wall in the live room that is in "honour of the men in this church who fell in the war 1914-1919." It has some pretty cool old names like Percy Pilgrim and Arthur Squire. We thought it would be a nice homage to the soldiers to use these names as song titles, so our hard drive is full of World War I soldiers. The problem is trying to then remember which song is which name -- quirky, but in hindsight not practical!

The song writing process for AK is predominantly the same for each song. One of us comes in with an idea -- a verse or chorus melody or a simple riff -- and we start to build around it. Very few songs have come from just jamming. There are so many new songs on the table that jamming comes second to completing what's already there. To help for this album (and we wish we had done this for our debut 'Signs and Wonders'), we have a multi-track recording system with mics on the drums, amps, vocal and keys constantly set up so that any little idea is easily archived. It reduces the nightmare of not being able to remember a certain part or soon diffuses arguments as to how the original groove sounded or the original melody went. It's also really handy playing back two ideas, different bass lines for example, and deciding which to go with. We highly recommend this to any band in the writing process, and with the technology that is available now you don't need a state-of-the-art studio to do it.

- Geoff Lea

Download 'Signs and Wonders'

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