CORE
(What a Load of Demos)
An Introduction
CORE – as many Gary Numan fans know, is/was a covers project organised by Shaun Dubhead (also known as The Lemon Kid, Captain Numo and Vlad The Impal…er ok, I lied on the last one; he’s a nice chap really). Many moons ago he heard and remixed a Numan cover of We Are So Fragile I did some years ago with Andy McHaffie. Andy and I had finished 2 tracks - that one and a cover of Films - under the name Mrs Mopp…just because Andy always wanted to be in a band with that name. Seemed a good reason to me. We had vague plans to play live at 1 point, but real life took over (as it does) and it never happened. There was a cover of War Songs partly done, but never finished.
ANYways…Shaun liked the tracks and played around with/remixed the mp3 of Fragile and sent me the results. I made a few suggestions and he agreed, took them on board and sent me the final result - which was certainly an improvement over our original version. From doing that he talked about doing a whole load of other Numan covers with a similar “off the wall” kinda vibe. If there was a creative nucleus in the beginning, I guess it was Shaun, Andy and myself as we all put in the original ideas for arrangements at the time CORE started. That’s not to put down in any way the contributions of Roger, Blair, Gary and the other guys Shaun got involved who certainly all added their own input – without any of them, CORE wouldn’t have got to sounding like it did.
To cut a long story short, 4 years down the line and after a lot of “stop start stop start”, progress and non progress, Shaun took the decision to finally put it to 1 side for a bit and go and do other things. I’m sure the stuff Shaun was putting together will certainly come to light at some point, but in the meantime, for interest’s sake, here are the demos I put together and submitted to Shaun for the “magic fairy dust treatment”. All these are unpolished demos (although they gradually got better in sound quality as time went on) and are presented as is.
The Tracks
The first track I did. On the basis that this was “just a demo”, I used a really cheap sounding GM soundfont for the drum track just to keep time and indicate structure…for some reason Shaun loved it as was and kept it when he remixed it (an excerpt appeared on the CORE website which is currently offline).
Shaun wanted to polish up the version that already existed – except I had no source files other than what was on the 4 track version and the mp3! So I took the midi file and gave him this to use as raw material. The final reworked version was available for download on the CORE website and added back in the samples of me getting Andy to shout “oi Numan! No!”...
“Can you do a dancey trancey version of this?” said Shaun. Er…well, obviously I couldn’t as that’s not what I ended up with! Shaun rejected this and went off the idea of doing the track anyway, so it was canned. The piano line is only there as a “guide vocal” and would have been removed once there was singing on it… The piano may sound pants, but sounds better than any guide vocal I would have done! There is a brill Prophet 5 solo near the end though which is worth staying up for…
Probably the one I was most pleased with. Slow acoustic intro (which you can actually sing the verses along to) which…well, no need to spoil the surprise; have a listen. No vocal guide on this but hopefully you can see where the singing should have gone… Oh, and Shaun suggested the very slightly Reggae-ish bassline.
After a long period where not much happened from my point of view – I got asked if I could do something with this track. So…take a bit of “Rock Is Dead” by Marilyn Manson, a bit of Glam Rock, some harsh sounding synths…and this was the result. A spacey sci fi intro…followed by a glam-ish intro (why do 2 intros? God knows…!) and then courtesy of a sample from the original the song then starts. No guide vocal but the structure from the sample onwards is totally as the original was until you hit the outro.
This last track raised barely even a comment from Shaun, so human nature being what it is, my reaction was to say “bollocks to it then”! I guess it wasn’t what he had in mind. Blair got in touch and made a couple of suggestions but I think by that point I’d already had enough. When Shaun got in touch shortly afterwards when he was feeling like knocking it on the head for a bit, I persuaded him it might do him good to go and do summat else for a bit.
Whether CORE comes back at some point will be up to Shaun - its his project, name etc. That’s it really; I really wish the plans we had had all come together – doing the album quicker, playing live…playing some of the tracks live would have really been a blast. Wasn’t to be, but something may happen again 1 day. I hope Shaun puts up some of the other stuff – the stuff that Andy, Blair, Roger, Gary and others have worked on (as well as himself of course!) – as it deserves a wider audience.
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