Exclusive: The Making of Black Cab’s ‘Games of the XXI Olympiad’

Black Cab’s ANDREW COATES and JAMES LEE take us through the origins of their brilliant concept album about the 1976 Montreal Summer Olympic games.

After years of procrastination, existential meltdowns, aborted recording sessions and general frustration, Games of the XXI Olympiad only really started to take shape once we made the decision in late 2013 to bring Woody Annison in. Woody has mixed all our albums bar one and knows how we should sound – he has a kind of dark energy that really suits our sound and will let us know in very clear language if he thinks a sound or arrangement is not working. He also knows how to push a mix to get all the dynamics and energies flowing in the right direction; something that comes from using a Neve desk as opposed to doing it all “in the box” (in a PC), which is what some folks prefer to do.

One of the problems with the initial mixes was that they sounded very sterile and clean and just not very “Cab-like.” After Call Signs we were not really an “electronic duo” but we were no longer a psychedelic shoegaze band either. So what are we? We’ve been asked that question a few times and have no answer. In the leadup to this album our challenge as a newly reborn two-piece – and sometimes three-piece – was: How could we make an electronic album that still had the energy and chaos of a freewheeling rock band? How could we harness the best of both those worlds? This is how the mission to create such an album played out.

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Woody Annison mixing ‘Games…’ at Red Door, early 2014

‘Opening Ceremony’

This track was added very late and started out as an electronic remix over an older track (‘Underground Star’) we’d been doing as a stripped-down live unit. The album needed to start out with something stirring, and the major-key arpeggios we added to the live remix were sounding huge, so we built up the track from these and added some new beats and loops as well as some neat found sounds from the 1976 opening ceremony (including the Olympic Oath spoken by French Canadian weightlifter Pierre St-Jean). A good opener, as it sets the tone for the album both musically (programmed beats – corporate fanfare – big synths) and thematically (1976 Montreal Games – opening ceremony).

‘Supermädchen’

A tormented track that started simply enough after we scrapped an album’s worth of turgid guitar stuff back in 2011. After a little soul-searching we sacked most of the band, kidnapped Steve Law and headed down to the beach for a weekend of sonic experimentation and ouzo. Steve has some great analogue gear and a good ear for sonic weirdness and electronics, and his sounds and drones are a key part of the album. This track started life as a sequence we brought to that session. Steve layered another sequence on top of it and suddenly some chords came, then a change and before we knew it we were grooving on something that felt pretty good.

Back home we added a simple vocoded vocal line using an original Korg VC10. We worked up an initial arrangement that was then mixed in the UK by Tim Holmes, formerly of Death In Vegas. (Our drummer Wes Holland had worked with Tim on the last Sand Pebbles LP – we were fans of DIV and love their album Satan’s Circus). The initial arrangement Tim did was a bit too hurried and buried all the subtlety of the electronics that we liked from the original jam, so we then took the track out live, booking lots of low-key shows at more rock-oriented Melbourne venues like Bar Open, Cherry Bar and Yah Yah’s to play around with the track in front of an audience. Over time it got longer and longer as we added and removed things live using music-arrangement software Ableton Live to fly in new parts and loops and move sounds around. The live version started to push 10 minutes and evolved into something akin to those iconic longer Kraftwerk pieces we really liked.

‘Supermädchen’ eventually seemed to settle into three distinct parts; the last of which features some very nice vocal loops courtesy of Lucy Buckeridge (Lowtide). We asked Berlin-based John Barrie Dyke (aka Dyko) to phone in some electronic percussion, which you can hear at the breakdowns. At final mixing with Woody we also roped in Shags Chamberlain to track a little bass in the two chord changes and add incidental synth. We’d loved Shag’s bass and synth work with Lost Animal and he was great to work with in the studio. A fearless charter of new sonic territories, Shags likes to disrobe before cutting a synth take (“Music is a very physical thing”) and we knew something special was about to happen when he stripped down to his y-fronts. We placed a lot of his synth flourishes alongside some guitar dive-bombs to help give the track more depth. Woody took all that and did an amazing mix. It’s a great track to run or swim to, I’ve been told (though exercise is not really our thing).

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Korg VC 10 Vocoder

[Historical image is withheld pending rights review.]

[Historical image is withheld pending rights review.]

Tracking ‘Supermädchen’ at Portarlington in Victoria

‘Victorious’

This was actually the first post-Call Signs riff that [Andrew] Coates came up with after playing around with some arppeggiator sounds on the Native Instruments software he had been toying with on previous tracks like ‘After The War’ and ‘Dresden Dynamo’. The rolling walls of noise sounded great live when we jammed this at Cherry Bar as a three-piece (Here’s an early performance using lyrics from ‘After the War’, which worked quite well with the music.) Steve generated all the otherworldly drones that wash over the piece; something he’s really good at and which are core to the Cab sound.

Another key sound is the gorgeous 1976 Roland RS202 Strings synthesiser that Steve owns. James [Lee] talked Steve into letting him use the unit live and we subsequently used it on as many tracks as possible to drive the key lead lines and give the album a unifying sonic texture. We did a rough vocal-free arrangement that Tim Holmes mixed in 2012, but there was still something missing so we left it for a bit to work on other tracks. When we hooked back up with Woody in early 2014, we were pretty exhausted but he knew what it needed. Coates added some simple Gary Numan-esque vocals plus the strange electronic riff that comes in midway through the track. James added some Vietnam War-era helicopter pilot chatter at the end. We’re pretty happy with how the mongrel panned out.

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1976 Roland RS202 Strings synthesiser

‘Performance Center Obertauern’

One of the few things we kept from the earlier full-band sessions. This was recorded during some downtime at Head Gap after Simon Polinski rigged up a very long and convoluted effects chain for guitar – to add to the confusion, the guitar was put through an MS-20 patch that Steve configured. James started playing and what you hear is a Fripptastic jam that materialised as the tape started rolling. We really like little interlude pieces on our albums, as these are often the tracks you can explore over time. We added some German TV channel flipping over the original take to give it a more explicit visual element. The result is really quite strange and beautifully unsettling.

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Simon Polinski and Steve Law destroy James’ guitar sound at Head Gap, early 2011

‘Kornelia Ender’

Ender was based on a weird 4/6 sequence James wrote. Steve Law’s great evolving multi-harmony sequences and drones augmented the original sequence nicely. We wanted to create a kind of bombastic, string-driven epic and the Roland Strings are right out front together with some beautiful ‘bahs’ we tracked with Lucy Buckeridge for the chorus swells. We really wanted to get some more feminine sounds on this album and Lucy’s voice was perfect. The midsection also features a spoken word by Raffa Jungbauer, a German radio DJ who Dyko connected us with. And of course we became very unhealthily obsessed with the great East German swimmer Kornelia Ender, who won a bunch of gold at the 1976 Games and was almost certainly unknowingly doped to the eyeballs on the steroid Oral Turinabol.

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An original 1976 Games athlete card for East German swimmer Kornelia Ender

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Steroid Oral Turinabol, 5mg

‘Go Slow’

The most difficult track on the album but one that many people quite like. This started out as some nice electronic riffs and lead lines from the beach jam back in 2011. We did multiple mixes of the track, first with Simon Polinski and then Tim Holmes, but we weren’t completely happy with the result; our arrangements just weren’t quite right. So when we roped in Woody to mix it we gave him the keys, adding into the mix a nice bass line from Shags Chamberlain and some disco strings for the outro that evolved as we performed the track live. Armed with Shag’s driving bass and earlier stems from both Simon and Tim, Woody then tweaked the arrangement and turned it into a proper song with better dynamics. A fuck-up in sliding files around ended up with the disco strings in the wrong place, which was way better than originally intended – the sort of serendipity that sometimes helps you out just when you need it most. Add in some more gorgeous Lucy backing vocals and the final mix was done.

‘Problem Child’

A track that also had a long gestation, with the core string riff tracked on a Mellotron at Head Gap. It was a bit too slow to do live (although we did perform this once as a full band back in 2010 or 2011); it took shape gradually over time and various studio sessions. Ex-Sand Pebble Wes Holland did some nice live drums and this is one of the few tracks that has a reasonable dose of guitars, including some nice 12-string electric that comes in over the second half that was tracked at Soundpark. This is probably the closest sounding track to anything on Call Signs. Great mix by Woody built on some earlier stems pulled together by Tim Holmes.

‘Combat Boots’

‘Sexy Polizei’ set us out on the road to a more electronic sound but ‘Boots’ pretty much alienated everyone in the old band, as it was almost impossible to play live with the previous wall-of-guitars line-up. ‘Boots’ started out as just a simple distorted synth riff and when we sat down with Simon Polinski after the ‘Sexy Polizei’ single to go through various incomplete full-band tracks to work out what was what, ‘Boots’ was the only one he thought had any potential (which pretty much doomed all the other tracks). So we focused on ‘Boots’ and Simon added some nice Cure-style chorus bass and electronic noodling, James added some guitar, Wes tracked some super-tight drums and Coates wrote some lines.

The lyrics took ages; the whole combat-boots angle emerged during the drive down to Simon’s Black Rock studio to track the final vocal! Coates: “Each vocal just gets harder and harder as you get older and you realise you really have nothing much new of interest to say. Still, I prefer vocal tracks for that reason. They’re bastards to do.” The album version has a few tweaks but is pretty much faithful to Simon’s original mix, which was a ripper.

‘Little Blue Ones’

In early 2014 we did some last-minute experimentation with some of the more ambient tracks and outtakes with original Cab drummer Rich Andrew, who has a great reel-to-reel tape studio in Fitzroy. We slowed some stuff right down and then tracked it back to see what happened. We then left Richard to sort through it. He took one little piece and added some lovely Juno synth parts over the top that we really liked. And presto, ‘Little Blue Ones’. Another mysterious ambient track to break up the beats and add a little melancholia.

‘My War’

The main intro riff started out as a noodle on some iPad software. It may not have instantly been a song but what we had evoked a Simple Minds/New Gold Dream vibe; we could run with that. Tim Holmes had a crack at an early mix and added a lovely driving bass sequence that gave the track some good energy and we built it up steadily over a few years, adding sequences and otherworldly synth parts. Vocals were tracked with Idge [Andrew Hehir] at Soundpark and we whacked them through his old-school analogue tape delay to mess them up some more. The chorus once again features some nice backing vocals from Lucy Buckeridge. Tim Holmes did some great work on the stems, which Woody then mixed down through his Neve desk and box of tricks.

‘Sexy Polizei’

The first track we released from the album, way back in 2010! This was one of the few tracks that survived the cull of aborted guitar-based tracks. The lyrics were written in five minutes, based on the idea of a lone homicidal German highway patrolman cleaning up the autobahn, a bit like the cops in the Dirty Harry movie Magnum Force. Simon Polinski did a great mix of the initial single and also suggested adding some female backing vocals. Enter the fabulously talented Monique Brumby – Simon reckons she could have been an electronic dance icon if she’d wanted to be. Her vocals are super sexy and really lift the track. We tweaked the original single with some more strings and tighter drums and the result still sounds pretty good.

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Sexy Polizeis from ‘Magnum Force’

‘State Plan 14.25’

Another interlude track that started off as some random piano noodling over some nice Steve Law drones and some Polish spoken-word audio (actually a how-to lesson in swearing in Polish). “State Plan 14.25” refers to the East German state-sanctioned plan to super-charge their athletes to show the world how awesome their country and system was.

‘Closing Ceremony’

Another quick one – the album needed a formal ending, given the idea of opening and closing ceremonies for the LP. Steve Law had done some weird VCF pulses on an earlier full-band session, which we always enjoyed listening to, so we took it into the studio, added some drums and a treated piano, some bombastic Roland synth and a little vocal line and voila – a closing ceremony. The line “going all the way” may not be particularly original but worked well in the context of the album as a closer.

Artwork

Given how important the theme was, we knew we had to really nail the artwork and fortunately we have Luke Fraser helping us with design. We fed him a steady diet of images and design ideas based on the original 1976 Games and he did an amazing job of pulling it all together. The ’76 Games (like Mexico, Tokyo and Munich before them) had some brilliant design assets. In one sense, I think having such great design concepts to use as reference material made Luke’s job on this album perhaps one of the easiest. Whatever, he pulled off a great design using beautiful fonts, lots of white and some screenshots snapped from video of the opening ceremony. Nice job Luke.

[Historical image is withheld pending rights review.]

[Historical image is withheld pending rights review.]

[Historical image is withheld pending rights review.]

[Historical image is withheld pending rights review.]

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‘Games of the XXI Olympiad’ is out now through Interstate 40 Music/Remote Control. It ranked at #4 in our 2014 Critics Poll. Read Andrew P Street’s On Rotation review. Black Cab are playing Howler in Melbourne on Friday, March 20 with NUN; get tickets here from midday.