After researching, composing and recording THE RED PLANET, I soon realised that there was much more to this wonderful planet that was influencing me musically and so it was purely a matter of time before I returned. More has been discovered about Mars in the years following the original THE RED PLANET recording that to produce this album seemed to me to be the most natural musical progression.
I did however approach the writing and recording in a different manner to the first album and studying reports and looking at hundreds of new photographs and images of the planet were influences throughout all the compositions for this album.
I was also able to have all the musicians in the studio working together at the same time which I was unable to do when recording THE RED PLANET due to COVID restrictions.
This is still, in my experience, the best way of recording as musicians will constantly bounce ideas off of one another and when you have the talent that I was able to assemble for this recording in Lee Pomeroy, Dave Colquhoun, Adam Falkner and Mollie Marriott, then the results truly are on another planet – in this case, Mars.
I also decided from the outset to include vocals on five of the tracks, but not as songs. I chose to incorporate the voice as if it were another instrument and Mollie Marriott was the perfect vocalist for this difficult role, creating an atmosphere and understanding of each particular area of Mars with one in particular being a tribute to my very special late musical genius friend, David Bowie.
The musicians I chose far exceeded everything I had hoped for this album and coupled with the engineering and production skills of Erik Jordan and Toby Wood, RETURN TO THE RED PLANET has become a very special musical work that I have said I will unashamedly always be immensely proud of.
The music was recorded by initially recording templates of all the piece on a master keyboard with chosen sounds at Nursery Studios. These templates were then sent to all the musicians who could then listen and decide how they wanted to approach their contributions once in the studio. All the musicians met up at the residential Decoy Studios where they added all their parts with Toby Wood engineering and me coming in on occasions to listen, without getting in the way!
When all the guitar, bass and drums were completed, I added all the additional keyboards, engineered by Erik Jordan, and on completion Mollie Marriott added the vocal elements before the master recordings then made their way back to The Nursery where, after a suitable period of time of deliberately not listening in order to make the mixing experience as fresh as possible, Erik Jordan spent considerable time mixing everything in order to achieve the final result we now have, which I have to say, I am more than delighted with.