Pop-Punk: just in case you missed the billboard sized memo, it’s back, hotter than ever, and it now comes in a fetching shade of British. Hot on the heels of fellow countrymen Neck Deep, ROAM, As It Is and Trash Boat, Brighton quintet Six Time Champion are making their presence felt with storming new five-tracker, Expecting Honesty. Released on the 1st December, the work is buoyant with hooks and drives its points home with fiery panache, Six Time Champion’s rougher edge reveals their boisterous live energy. Here, drummer Rich discusses their time in the studio creating this offering.
To record Expecting Honesty we headed to The Ranch Production House in Southampton. We worked with Lewis Johns on our first EP and were really happy with how it came out, so going back to record with him again was a no brainer.
We began day one with an early start and a few hangovers as we’d played a show the night before, opening the Brighton date for Roam on their headline run, and after arriving and loading all our stuff into the small room we’d call home for the week, we got the drums set up and sounding huge pretty quickly, so we started tracking before lunchtime. I managed to smash out 3 out of the 5 songs over the course of the afternoon and we finished up day one on schedule. We then headed into Southampton that night to catch Roam, As It Is and Light You Up on day 2 of their tour.
Day two Started with Steve (Bass) bitching about James (Vocals) keeping him awake by snoring all night. It was a unanimous decision that he needed to man up, so after a few insults being traded and some breakfast, we cracked on with day 2 of drums. I finished up the last 2 tracks by early afternoon and the rest of the day consisted of beers, films and playing Xbox, whilst Lewis and his assistant compiled and edited the drum tracks ready to start guitars the following day.
Day three was all about guitars, we spent a couple of hours testing out different combinations of heads and guitars to get the tones we were looking for. Once we’d made some decisions on which way we wanted to go with it, Simon and Will got to work laying down the rhythm tracks. Again we made great time and got a large chunk of the guitars done which set us up nicely for day four. That night we ticked a pop punk cliché off the list and ordered £100 worth of Dominos Pizza and worked our way through as many Jackass movies as we could find on Netflix.
Day four: It didn’t take long for the boys to finish up the rhythm tracks for the remaining songs, we were done by early afternoon and once again we had the rest of the day to hang out whilst Lewis was editing. We took this time to explore the countryside around The Ranch as by this point we’d been indoors for 4 days straight. We ended up walking for a good couple of hours and came to the conclusion that there were a lot more Horses than people in that area, and those people do not take kindly to a bunch of guys singing (badly) walking past their houses. Once we’d found our way back to the studio we discovered the biggest spider any of us had seen in the roof of where were staying. So naturally we spent the rest of the night torturing James with the thought of it landing/crawling on him.
The next couple of days were a bit of a blur. We made the call early on that we had to consider the impact on James’ voice of tracking 5 songs in a short space of time. We were quite lucky as there were no other bands at the studio during the week we were there, so we had the facility to alternate easily between the two parts of The Ranch and record vocals between Simon laying down the lead guitars. Splitting the vocals over a few days meant that James was able to rest up between tracks and make sure every take was a strong as possible.
Steve smashed the bass out in a matter of hours one morning, meaning that going into our final day at The Ranch we only had backing and gang vocals to record, so Lewis was able to spend the majority of the day working on the final mixes.
We had an a lot of fun at studio this time round and pretty much had a GoPro running the entire time we were there. As a result we had a lot of footage of the recording process and decided that it’d be cool to put it to use. Once we got home Simon spent the next couple of weeks piecing together the footage whilst we waited for the mastered tracks to come back from Alan Douches studio. That footage became our first music video for the title track of the EP.
A few setbacks and delays happened during the run up to recording this EP but I think we made good use of the time and the result is something that we’re all massively proud of. We feel it’s a big step up from our first release and we’re excited for everyone to hear it.
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Six Time Champion release Expecting Honesty on 1st December.
