Six days of the week it soils
With its sickening poison -
Just for paying a few bills!
That's out of proportion.

Lots of folk live on their wits:
Lecturers, lispers,
Losels, loblolly-men, louts-
They don't end as paupers;

Lots of folk live up lanes
With fires in a bucket,
Eat windfalls and tinned sardines-
they seem to like it.

Their nippers have got bare feet,
Their unspeakable wives
Are skinny as whippets - and yet
No one actually starves.

Ah, were I courageous enough
To shout Stuff your pension!
But I know, all too well, that's the stuff
That dreams are made on:

For something sufficiently toad-like
Squats in me, too;
Its hunkers are heavy as hard luck,
And cold as snow,

And will never allow me to blarney
My way of getting
The fame and the girl and the money
All at one sitting.

I don't say, one bodies the other
One's spiritual truth;
But I do say it's hard to lose either,
When you have both.

We started by recording drums and bass with a guide guitar and vocal from James, then overdubbed an acoustic guitar, electric guitar parts, Hammond organ and vocals.

Mics were as follows....
Bass drum mic..... a lone Audix D6 recorded direct to the Otari Radar through my TL Audio valve mic preamp and a Focusrite Red 3 compressor.
Snare Drum was mic'd with a Sennheiser e609 on the top, also through my TLA mic pre and a Shure SM57 underneath through a desk channel balanced, phase checked and summed to one track via a Urei 1176 compressor.
The toms were mic'd with Sennheiser MD421 mics, set to their “flat” position and recorded flat.
The crash cymbal was mic'd with an 87 and the ride cymbal with an ADK S7c condenser.
The hats on this track were recorded with a Neumann KM84.

Finally I put up an AKG414 on it's omni setting around six feet in front of the kit. This was compressed and fed into the final mix at more or less the same level as the overheads.

The bass guitar cab was mic'd with my trusty Neumann u47 fet routed through a GA Pre 1073 and compressed with one of my old AD limiters straight to Radar.

The acoustic guitar was mic'd with a Km84 opposite the neck/body join and and an ADK TT tube on the main body, both summed to mono.

The electric guitar parts and noises were recorded using the ADK TT close up against the amp grille.

I'd switched on our Hammond C3 immediately after we'd got the drums down. Like all old valve equipment it's a different beast when it's been on a while. Also it takes a while for our creaky old Sharma Leslie cabinet to stop rattling and banging. Many guitarists I work with look askance when I ask them to switch on their amps and leave them on all day but it definitely makes a difference! The Leslie was mic'd with a pair of Sennheiser 421s facing diagonally at the two front top corners. I always move Leslie mics around when the player's decided on the part and the sound...sometimes I may drop one of the mics to face the lower end of the cabinet but you have to be careful. The sound a Hammond makes contains a very complex harmonic structure and it's easy to get it wrong during recording.
I had to set up the Leslie control switch on a mic stand so that Carl could operate it with his mouth whilst playing the manuals of the Hammond with both hands and he coped admirably.

The vocals were overdubbed using the ADK TT, GA mic pre and Audio Developments limiter direct to the Otari Radar.
Because of the time constraints on these Larkin sessions (a single day to record and mix a song), mixing was quick and relatively painless. I spent an hour putting up a basic balance then tweaked it with the band putting their comments in.
On sessions like this you have think on your feet and record as many things as “finished” as possible.

JS.