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Return of the Sweet Prince

from A Decade Into Darkness by Shock Octopus

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The ‘Crisis’ recording sessions nearly killed me, and the resulting tour nearly killed Scott. I won’t go into the details, but we were adamant that we were going to spend a while as an acoustic two piece whenever I visited Perth or Scott visited Melbourne. This all seemed a lot more manageable to our frayed nerves, and early gigs showed promise of this complete 180 degree turn in direction.

Scott had a lot of self-penned rootsy songs, and he was very keen to spearhead a series of interconnected EP’s, in a similar mould to many of his 90s indie heroes.

I actually remember very little of the recording sessions for ‘Throughout the Winter.’ I recall Scott taking care of this and I vaguely recall some recording issues.

Personally, I think the EP was a tentative first step in a new direction, the only problem being that my voice and perhaps more broadly my general performance style, hadn’t yet adapted to this scaled back, introspective sound. It is all a bit chalk and cheese, and I don’t think I did Scott’s songs much justice.

One exception on this EP was ‘Return of the Sweet Prince.’ As this was my sole contribution to the EP it sounds a bit self-serving, but hear me out, it was an instrumental so at least I wasn’t singing! It retained a sense of power and pizazz that I struggled to bring to the rest of the record, and Scott’s guitar and production brought the second half of the song to sizzling life.

The song itself had a curious history as it is essentially a deconstruction of a song ‘Blue Highway’; a song that I wrote for the band before Shock Octopus and that never worked in its original form. I was also listening to a lot of ‘Throwing Muses’ – they had this trick with chords where they (for example) played a ‘b’ note over and a chord then an ‘a’ note over a b chord. The effect was strange but weirdly melodic. So I did this trick to ‘Sweet Prince.’ Scott came up with a joke title to celebrate the new chirpier sound that the song heralded, which actually stuck in the end.

- Michael Bayliss
Shock Octopus

credits

from A Decade Into Darkness, released May 29, 2021
Music: Michael Baylis

Scott Andrews: Guitar
Michael Bayliss: Piano

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Shock Octopus Perth, Australia

Contemplative, Existential, Art Rock.

A collective stream of consciousness and social commentary by Michael Bayliss, David Blair and Scott Andrews.

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