Jakarta is chaos. A motorbike club on every street corner – I’ve never seen so many. It rains but things don’t slow down. And it’s hard to walk along the side of the road – crowded with beggars, cars, stalls. From the rehearsal studio I look down on a busy intersection through massive windows while we smoke cigarettes. School girls and their teacher are picking their way along a broken gutter, balancing precariously next to whizzing motorbikes and cars. I can’t walk home from here, even though I’m only staying three blocks away – my friends are worried about me at night. How do we make something in this?
I have ten days to write and record an album with a rhythm section I haven’t played with in ten years, and a female singer I’ve never met. I can take away tracks to overdub, but I’m here to capture something unique and beautiful.
I’m glad to have bought my own M88 microphone – a swiss army knife of mics, I use it on vocals, bass, percussion, guitar. I carried a prized 5 watt valve amp head (a Valvetone) onto the plane – that I plugged into a Marshall Quad box. Despite the rain storm that cuts power mid vocal take; the rush to find a sound and write songs; and the early morning ordeal of negotiating with taxi drivers to get us through the crazy traffic to the studio, Yo Grabo¡ emerge with a confident and soulful take on a new kind of seventies sound – grooving and dark, edgey and sexy.
