Earth Born Collage

Writers

Original song Earth Born by Star Nation’s Bemand, Chadwick, Davey, & Wishart; Rewrite by Plumley & Wishart, with new material by Chadwick, Falcone, House & Sabatelli

Performers

Bridget Remembers

Star Nation played a version of this song at Inglestone Common Free Festival around 1990 (?) with Dave Brock doing the light show. I sang this song in front of tv camera crew in 1996 (?) when we were protesting the new road building in Bath. I wrote a third verse, Martin worked out new guitar parts and we worked on restructuring the song with acoustic guitar and vocals playing to a click track.

I sent Rich a CD-R of the new version and he recognized it from Star Nation days and in his programming (on the Korg Electribe) he recreated the original drum patterns he used to play.

At one stage we were having a lot of trouble fitting all the elements together and Martin did try recording heavy metal punk style guitar instead. We found a great sound on his TonePort but it never quite worked. What pulled the song together was Alan's bass playing. We sent out a track that we were unsure of but what came back was magic!

I hadn't been in touch with Alan for 16 years and was a little nervous of doing so. This was because I believed he had been responsible for me being asked to leave Hawkwind. Don was really keen to invite him and I knew Ian Abrahams (author of "Hawkwind: Sonic Assassins") was doing a lot of work with him so I asked Ian if he might broach the subject of collaboration with Alan. 'Affirmative' came the reply and the CD-R was sent out. Don didn't know that I added Candles on the end as I thought Alan might enjoy the challenge of a very different track. More about that on the Candles page.

Don Remembers

It’s a bit of a trip going back and reviewing how these songs were tracked. When you’re working on 5 projects or so over the same year, the recording and mixdown process can sometimes become a blur. But, given that I name versions of Pro Tools sessions based on the number of people on the song, and I keep almost all of the old versions, my handy external hard drives have an interesting story to tell if and when I want to reconstruct the past.

On examination, the first thing I realized was that Richard’s original space drums weren’t used. By the time he redid his part, Bridget, Martin, and my drums and synths were firmly in place. For keys, I used two Virus Indigo plug-in patches. The Virus Indigo is still one of my favorite softsynths. There’s also the M-Tron "Genesis Split" patch sent to an aux track with a lovely Voce Spin Tremolo effect.

The drums were a combo of a treated "urban" drum loop (low resolution and chopped up a bit) and a basic Strike plug-in part (but just hi-hats and cymbals). When we finished the track, the only question was whether to call the track and CD Earth Born or Earthborn. Otherwise, there was no question that this track was destined to be the opening number.

Don's Timeline