Chris Olley is a musician from Nottingham, U.K./ Germany and the primary member of experimental groups including Six By Seven, Twelve, Fuck Me USA.... Taken from www.chrisolley.co.uk: After one final show at Glastonbury and a farewell 2 hour set in Nottingham last year I finally left six.byseven, probably because for the first time I could look at the band not as a failure but as a success, that’s what gave me the strength to finally let go. When you believe in something so strongly it becomes hard to let it go, persistence can turn into stubbornness and you lose track of reality. I still believe I did the right thing in keeping it going and I still want six.byseven to be a success but I was probably the only one left who felt like that. Maybe being in a band that Peel asked to do five sessions was not such a failure after all. What next? I’ve got no band and who the hell am I going to convince to start another mad journey on the rock n roll road of doom? Everyone’s got older and the world is full of bands that we influenced and are doing it better or at least achieving success in their own way. I certainly couldn’t join any band, I was already playing with Julian Cope’s band and it did nothing for me, my love of music is self-expression, not playing someone else’s stuff all night. I had been working as a producer for some years now and to quote Neil Young I had to at last go about making a solo album, "just to see if I could make one." I had to try something different, at first anyway, to try and find myself within music see what I could do, I didn’t care if it failed, as an experiment it was entitled to do that, it just had to be me, good or bad. The answer for me was to go back to where I had started, pick up an acoustic guitar and write and arrange songs in a simple way without any other distractions. I would also be sparing in my recording and production techniques with bass and drums. Where I used drums I made the decision to use them only when really needed and totally without a snare drum. The drums can often colour the production and date an album. From a production point of view I wanted this record to have a feeling of being somewhere in time but in it's own space. With so many software instruments around and so many possibilities within modern music production, I again limited myself to only use guitar, voice and the G Force M-Tron mellotron as my sounds (because it has such a distinct sound which echo's time itself because of the nature of the recorded tapes). I didn’t use the infinite possibilities of computer software to pretend I had a band; everything was recorded live, music is about recording time, not piecing blocks of it together. I jettisoned the computer in favour of the 8 track portastudio and mini disc player. Lyrically I was coming to terms with my changing life and learning to make choice's to leave people and events behind, this was not only musically a new start, I didn't realize it at the time, it was also a personal retrospective on my life and a reflection of the past. Simple, open and honest, that’s what these songs needed to be. Whatever they are or have become, to me they are a piece of me and my life and where I was at when I made it. Other than that I try not to think too hard about it, just move on to the next thing. Chris Olley Read more on Last.fm. User-contributed text is available under the Creative Commons By-SA License; additional terms may apply.