Music in a bubble

“a group dedicated to making music with heart, that’s down to earth and real” (Andrew Smit, NZ Musician)

Formed in 2009, Both Sides of the Line has developed through country-rockabilly to surf and retro-pop still retaining a rockabilly edge important to songwriters John Sule and Glenda Rogers. The name of the band was taken from a song sung by Wanda Jackson - Queen of Rockabilly. The band released their first EP, 5, in August, 2012. This was followed by a full-length album, Sideshow in 2013 and Party Line! in September 2016 and their latest album, Dangerous! was released in September 2019. These have received favourable reviews from the NZ Musician magazine, the Otago Daily Times and muzic.net.nz. The albums were recorded and mastered at Arthouse Media in Dunedin by Paul Sammes, and mixed by Phil Rogers at Downstairs Studio.

Carrying on during the Covid-19 lock-down

The last band practice BSOTL had was Tuesday 17 March. Who knows when we will get together to practice again – let alone play a gig? Fortunately, writing songs is a thing well suited to a lock-down environment, and technology means recording doesn’t have to stop either. John Sule and I write the songs for the band, and although we are in separate bubbles for the lockdown period we can continue to write songs by file-sharing via the internet. John has musical ideas going through his head all the time. He translates these into musical tracks on his music programme Cubase, using a drum machine for the beats. He then records himself playing bass, acoustic guitar and electric guitar and bounces these down to one track which he sends to me for my part – which is writing and recording the lyrics using my recording programme, Cakewalk. In pre-Covid-19 days this demo then becomes a guide which we use in our band practice to further develop the songs with our drummer, Ruth Wheeler, and our bass player, Mike Hayward.

Touching is on Hold was written during lock-down and put together in this same way only without face to face discussions about the different sections of the song, which we usually did. The main difference with this song is that it is a much better demo than usual. This is because we had a discussion by phone about slight improvements we could make and because John put extra work into providing good quality individual tracks for mixing. We were then able to draw upon the help of my husband, Phil (who is in my bubble), to do the recording of my singing with his much more expensive mic. He also used the processing and mixing tools of his much more expensive programme, Pro-tools, along with his far greater skills! He insists on it being called a demo as the drum track is a very simple low-fi loop without any variation and there is “only so much you can do with it”. Personally I think he has done a great job of it. I hope you do too.

You can follow us on our Facebook page to find out details of upcoming songs and gigs.