Today, the Janus Stark live album is released and available to download from Bandcamp. It was a gig where our greatest stage invasion in our history thus far occurred!
JANUS STARK LIVE AT UNITY FEST AUG 20th 2022
I’ve recorded many of our gigs or had others record them. I’ve also often gone to the length of recording each individual track through the mixing desk (that includes each individual piece of the drum kit, snare, kick drum, rack tom, floor tom, hi-hats, overheads) and then having them remixed, but this time I wanted to take the task on board myself because I’ve mostly not been satisfied with previous end results.
This gig was special in many ways: We were supporting The Ruts, one of our lifelong favourite bands. Segs had previously invited me to his house for dinner and we’d had a jam playing ‘West One Shine On Me’ and ‘Dope For Guns’. We’d gotten friendly and I really wanted Janus Stark to support this incredible band.
Also, we were sharing a stage with many bands that were our best friends: Desperate Measures, Spring Park, Healthy Junkies, A Great Notion, Transit Plan, The Blue Carpet Band and The Duel plus I was doing a bit of moonlighting playing with my old Placebo mate, Steve Hewitt in the band Love Amongst Ruin. Very importantly, we were playing for a good cause and the Janus Stark manager, Chris York, was organising this festival and this had been his brainchild and ambition.
When the raw files were e-mailed over, there was a massive amount of fixing to be done. Levels were going up and down all over the place and in the case of lead vocals, if I wanted to use a compressor to even out all the vocals then the volume of the background noise would increase as well. I had to painstakingly go through all the tracks, cleaning them up. The drums are treated with compression, EQ, gates and reverb but apart from that they are regular. I had to play around with the vocals so I could be happy but I wanted them to be real. What you hear is straight, it’s live and from the gig.
There was an electricity in the air in Corby Clubhouse that night and you can really hear it, especially during ‘Clique’, ‘Floyd’, ‘Every Little Thing Counts’, ‘Enemy Lines’ and ‘Barriers’, as well as on the enormous stage invasion during ‘Ever Fallen In Love’ when we made our best efforts with the help of the audience, to put the stage through.
Enjoy this live recording of Janus Stark, we’ve had a couple of good ones over the years but none with this amount of love, attention to detail and that amount of fine brush strokes!
Gizz Butt
28 April 28 2023