Heifervescent / Andy Doran

The seemingly never
ending music project
and ramblings of a man
who's old enough to
know better

The Age of Incoherence

After two years of writing, experimenting, mixing and 40 rejected tracks, an album has finally found it’s form. The Age of Incoherence is Heifervescent 16th album and is available and all major streaming networks.

Listen on your favourite streaming service

MONKEYLAND / CANNULA / EARLIER PROJECTS

A long long time ago, before internet trolls appeared, before global political corruption became really transparent and before the era of entitlement began, I was part of a little band called Monkeyland, in the North West of England. After previously studying art, design and animation, meticulously, for a few years, it was liberating for me to walk away from it all and instead of joining the rat race, do what I loved most; writing, recording and performing music.

We had some great laughs along the way, put vinyl out, got radio play, supported some notable bands such as Shed Seven, The House of Love, The Railway Children, Power of Dreams and others. But at some point, life just got in the way and we all walked our own paths for a while.

Then a few years later in 2000, we did it all again, this time with a new band called Cannula. The rapid advancements in digital tech meant that we could now record our own album and distribute it to the world quite easily.

It’s been interesting, experiencing tape based recording studios, getting excited about the first automated mixing desks, marvelling at the first Atari midi sequencers as they added mutes in sequence with a tape. The new clarity and clinicalness, in the early 2000s was impressive, but to me, my immediate thoughts were that with these advancements, the soul was disappearing from music. Then throughout the next decade  I watched as all the new tech seemed to be focused on fucking everything up again, making things sound older, saturated, warmer, overdriven… “lets make it sound like it was recorded in a crappy old tape based studio again”.

I find all this fascinating, but it’s because I come from a time when we didn’t appreciate all the shit things that we now crave. Grass is always greener on the other side I suppose. I could waffle on for days about ye olden days, just like every boring old duffer does, but I can tell you’re already bored, so if you’re interested to read more about this bit, click at your peril…

AGE BEFORE BEAUTY

Let’s not hide behind a load of moody, cryptic, fish face ballyhoo, let’s get straight to the depressing part; I’m now officially old. I made it past the half century.  I’ve made myself a big badge to wear every day, that says ‘you’re an old c**t’ in reverse lettering, in a vain attempt to remind myself of this truth. Unfortunately these days I avoid mirrors like the plague and so I never see the badge. I was exactly the same in 2015 – the words to Fountains of Soul explain this better.

I’ve always been acutely aware of my age, but I stopped giving a shit when I was in my twenties. When I was 21, whilst in Monkeyland, we were looking for some good management and at the same time we were approached by a company called Paris Press, who managed The Paris Angels in the 90s. They gave us an application form to fill in and we enthusiastically went through it, until we got to the bit that asked our ages. Well at 21 years old, I thought I was a living fossil, an old charlatan, pretending to be young, in a young man’s world. So I lied about my age.

Whenever I think I’m too old or too young to do something, I look back at that time and use it as a benchmark. I call it my f*&#ing stupid c*#t phase. We, as a species, really don’t understand time. We look at people different to our age and immediately judge them. “She’s too old to be doing that”,  “He’s younger than me, what the f**k does he know?” etc etc

I used to think like that, until I got older and started to realise that so many things can easily break down that way of thinking. My thing has been music. The older I get, the more I want to explore. The more I explore, the more fascinating it gets for me. The day I lose that fascination will be the day I die.

HOOFED AND DANGEROUS / VERBAL BANDIT / MURDER IN THE GARDEN / PONDLIFE FIASCO

In 2002, after writing music in Cannula, but not words, I realised that my own words were actually a big personal fundamental for me. I have a constant need to wrap my thoughts up in words and write them down. Much of it probably makes no sense to most people, but for me, it’s like an audible diary. On many tracks I forget why I wrote specific lines, but they always trigger memories and questions in my mind, that would otherwise have been lost.  Maybe it’s just selfishly therapeutic, I don’t know, it just works for me.

I’ve never thought of myself as an Adrian Mole type person, scribbling away in a diary late at night. However, channeling my experiences and emotions into sound, music and production… and then adding words for clarification, has always been my way of remembering things, evaluating thoughts and holding onto significant moments in life that I don’t want to forget. Also, I can outdo Adrian Mole’s late nights any day of the week as I’m a natural owl and everything I’ve ever written has been at some godforsaken hour when nothing is around to distract me.

FROM TAPE TO DIGITAL TO TAPE

I come from a very musical family, in which nobody could read music. My Dad was a jazz musician, frontman of The Chicago Teddy Bears Jazzband, trumpet player and devout whiskey drinker. My Mum produced drama and musicals and was also a devout whiskey drinker. They were both dreamers – Dad would improvise in front of an audience, Mum would be constantly acting out all the parts in her own productions, to make sure they worked.

They were always either busy or in the midst of throwing a party, and so I was usually ushered into the spare room. The only interesting thing in this room was an old reel to reel tape recorder – a Phillips 4307. You could switch between two speeds and record onto two tracks, but it was pretty useless because you couldn’t hear track 1 while you were recording to track 2. Somehow I perfected a way of a recording some primitive instrument on track 1, then switch to track 2 and ‘guessed’ how track 1 was playing while I recorded an extra instrument or maybe some singing onto track 2. Obviously the two tracks were never in time, but this imperfection made it interesting to me. I used this pile of crap for years, basically recording different sounds to find out what they sounded like at different speeds. Such was the bleakness of the pre-internet era.

At the age of 13, I graduated to a tape to tape machine, where you could mix in extra sounds while you were recording from one tape to another. This allowed me to layer sounds. A drum track would get a bass added and bounced to track 2. Then you’d switch the tapes round and play the drum and bass and add a guitar. By the time you’d added vocals, the mix was 80% noise and hiss and the tape would be warbling all over the place.

My life changing piece of kit was a tiny little Fostex X26 4 track tape recorder. I could record 3 tracks; drums, bass and guitar then bounce them all to track 1, then record two more tracks; second guitar and synth and bounce them to track 2 leaving me two empty tracks at the end to fill with vocals. The quality was still terrible and hissy, but compared to everything before it opened up a whole new world of demo material.

To illustrate how hissy the quality of tape demos were back then, here’s a comparison between my 1992 cassette demo for ‘Don’t Die on Me’ and a re-recording I did in 2011. Noisewise and technical qualitywise, it’s a big improvement, but even now I’m finding many faults with the 2011 re-recording, the initial crap quality demo had a bit more urgency. The 2011 mix is also pretty bad in the low end. More often than not, the singer’s belief in their lyrics, or their passion, is far more important than the quality of the recording. This will definitely need to be re-recorded in 2024.

After that we entered the world of 16+ track tape, professional studios, and it seemed like a lifetime till digital recording became accessible. But when computers became fast enough to record to and mix multi tracks, the world opened up. You could spend as long as you liked perfecting a sound, editing audio, rearranging, remixing… it’s strange that as soon as all those tools and options became available, I just really wanted to simplify everything, capture a moment with one take, leave all the mistakes in, leave all the noise in, the feedback, the overdriven vocal mic. Maybe next year I’ll want to clean it all up again, who knows, it’s great to have options though.

COLDER THAN THE EDGE OF SPACE

Why do people love complaining about something in songs? It seems to me (after many decades of intense investigation) that there are far more sad/angry/disgruntled songs than there are happy songs. Is it because the songwriter needs to convey their own personal sadness to the public, in the hope that someone will pass them a tissue, or is the songwriter one of the new, modern, ai fuelled psyops, homing in on people’s insecurities, in the hope that they’ll stream their track, millions of times?

Who knows? Probably a mixture of both. I only have my own personal mindset to throw into this. When I write lyrics, I’m really just affirming what I need to be reminded of. I look back at those words 10 years later and I can remember everything that was going on around me, what my worries were, what my goals were, what my priorities in life were. This helps me.

If someone listens to one of my songs and make their own assumptions about the lyrics, decide it’s about something relating to them, and it helps them in some shape or form then fabulous, everybody’s happy! That’s all it is, I’m not a big advocate of protest songs. I like to laugh at most situations in life and maybe that explains why I use a lot of irony and sarcasm.

However, one of my recurring subjects is religious fundamentalism. It bothers me. I’ve written about life & death since I was a teenager – it’s not necessarily morbid, it’s a fascinating thing to think about. When you learn everything there is to know about a subject, it ceases to become interesting. But you and I will NEVER know all there is to know about life and death and so it constantly fuels the fire. I consider myself a free thinker – I like to consider all the possibilities in the afterlife. But when a religion becomes a struggle for power, I dismiss it. I like people who have faith and hope, but I don’t like organised religion at all, and that has become a recurring theme, where I ask myself many big questions. Evolution Gains Again probably asks the most questions in this respect.

"They formed a line like a scene from Braveheart and then there was silence. I stood holding an alka-seltzer while thirty cows stared, seemingly hypnotized by this little white tablet."

The origin of the word Heifervescent