Out now Plunderers - Troy Horse

In 1990 the Plunderers booked a day at Troy Horse Studio (on King Street, Newtown) to record a bunch of tunes that we had decided to drop from the setlist, as we had too many songs. With Mickey Levis engineering, we recorded eleven songs on their ‘trusty’ Otari 8-track machine.

The 12 inch multi-track tape of the session has six tracks filled up with Stevie’s rhythm guitar, my bass and Geoff’s drums. We never went back in to Troy Horse to finish them off so the tape is all instrumental (with a tiny bit of vocal leak). You can hear where a guitar solo would have reigned supreme. Oh well, what could have been!

Recently, while going through a box of tapes, I found an unmarked cassette with rough mixes of these songs...with guide vocals!

There’s a little bit of wow and flutter on the recordings – due to the state of the cassette – and a couple of the songs you can hear where the tape has been a bit mashed up (at the beginning of “Way Past One” and “If You Could Read My Mind”). “Cool of the Day” was so crumpled it didn’t make the cut.

“Fidget” was transferred to another tape and turned into “Eskimo” which was released on the “Cheerleader” single by Hippy Dribble. “TEN (So Mixed Up”) goes back to the pre-Plunderers days with Elmo Z. Reed and was always a song that never had a defined arrangement, so it was good to have a recording of it. We also recorded our version of Gordon Lightfoot's "If You Could Read My Mind", which remained part of our setlist.