Even now, after so much public success, it's still exciting to see my name on a new record.  I still don't find it easy to write about myself.  It's always better when your efforts speak for you but I'd like to write about how this record and the Stereo Society grew.  I hope it will develop further and take unexpected and exciting turns.  In this introduction, I'll avoid striking a pose at the risk of sounding a little ingenuous and naive.  If you get bored, it's your privilege to click off somewhere else.  I'd rather you didn't, so here goes.

I was a commercial record producer for nearly twenty years.  For much of the time, I enjoyed making music that I liked with people that I liked.  Miraculously, people bought the records, and that music became more than self-supporting.  When I started in the do-it-yourself punk era, an album could still be made in a novel and different way.  During the late eighties, I realized that I was becoming bored making records to a marketing specification: lucrative and glamorous, but repetitive.  Having the Spice Girls at the top of the food chain did feel like the heat death of the Universe.

There was another way, attracting some of us in summer 1997. After quitting commercial production in 1994, followed by two years working hard at Warner Music in the new technologies and their overlap into music, I still liked making records.  With time and economics on my side, I thought I could call up a number of capable friends and gather a repertory company to make the record that people had been on my case to deliver for years.  Children playing in the sandpit again,  including a few people old enough to know better.

Also, I was lucky to have the space to think about the sound I wanted.  This could not be some ghastly, self-indulgent, private social club jam session.  The songs and the record had to have a point, and a clear, new arrangement.  When covering someone else's song, the difference in approach had to be sufficient to show the song in a new way, to reveal new poetry.  Things got personally scary; for the first time, I am in the front line.  Since I'm directing the action, the responsibility for success or failure is mine and no-one else's.  My first real taste of fear was in 1981, when I wrote a feature film score, Memoirs Of A Survivor, and realized that until you were done and had delivered the finally frozen music, the stuff jangled constantly and obtrusively around in your head.  I always would tell artist/writer friends how I couldn't face that again, very good luck to them, and that I admired their fortitude.  But, for me, sleep deprivation returned, 16 years later.

Finding a balanced team isn't something you do theoretically, sitting on a comfortable sofa with the TV remote in your hand.  Vocally, I was lucky to have friends with attitude who were also good at working with and developing large arrangements.  I realized that for the record to have an integrated sound it had to have a vocal 'sound' which didn't rely on the projection of the personality of a central singer.  Contemporary pop records almost always adopt this attitude, but if I employed it the album would have been just a disjointed collection of other people's singles.  This was to be an integrated repertory company.  We needed a big vocal 'thing', in the way that gospel, old Motown and doo-wop projected.  With those styles, you weren't so much aware of the singer as of the singing itself. 

The instrumental foundation combines techno rhythm and human horns.  This developed well, but real drums and percussion were very welcome to take it over the top at the end, finally added after I could see a strong album emerging, recognizable life crawling out of the primeval ooze.  It's satisfying playing to people's strengths, coming  back to music I like with people I like, and hearing it all work.  I go back a few years with most of the people on this album, but there isn't a complacent old pop star among them, and they've all got sharper, edgier and more effective with the years.  Excuse me, I'm not ready to calm down yet, and neither are these associates from my criminal past.

Since too much is never enough, I'm halfway through a book about the interaction of technology, economics and music, written for the non-specialist reader.  The full details of the record, its making and the artists involved are used as an example for one of its sections, Logistics: Before The Music Gets Physical that is also on this site.  Each artist also has their own section here.  As you can guess, it's a complicated and ambitious effort.

After the concept was underway, it became clear that I probably couldn't get arrested with the proposal alone in the mainstream record business, so I didn't even try.  Their economics are necessarily oriented towards clear, previously proven genres, and my new effort simply doesn't fit.  However, the beauty of the Web is that it can provide exposure for new, different ideas (although the politics of its democratic/leveling influence is seriously over-hyped).  At Warner Music, I had proposed a worldwide classical music Web as the only progressively effective way to start selling low volumes of records (and gain a relatively small but project-sustaining profit) and to facilitate entry level economics for new artists and ideas.  It was time to put my money where my mouth was. 

Although I have done very well as a commercial record producer, I have no illusions about people's current record-buying habits.  It would have been pointless trying to put my record in stores and attempting to use familiar mass-media channels on the off-chance that I could attract the public into the stores, on the off-chance they might find it, on the off-chance they might buy it.  Statistically, most human beings don't visit record stores anyway.  The assumptions about who buys what become self-reinforcing if you go by last week's sales figures when planning the next move.  On the Web, I don't have access to just the record-buying public, so much as the public.  Most of whom don't visit record stores.  Hello.

Our storefront is now only on the Web, and we communicate directly with the people who might like our recordings.  It gets quite personal and folksy: we are talking to you.  I wanted the 'Thorne' record 'act' to be a group collaboration, not just a collection of hired guns blasting off at what they were told.  Time to quit being shy and become 'Thorne', not some clever pun of a name.  And this is not a one-off record.

After the idea for this ambitious record settled, I looked in the closet.  I found three further albums which I had made, using my studio, because I thought the artists had something to say, and because I thought people would appreciate their music.  One had been released on a small scale; the other two had lain discreetly gathering dust.  Suddenly, The Stereo Society had four albums to release.

Here we are.

Please look around.