Regency Buck

“I think it’s like the driven disco of Daft Punk but darker ala Depeche Mode when they started playing guitars” DukeIronFist (AKA Paul Westwater) is more forthcoming than most as he attempts to explain his trio’s sound.
“There was no musical agenda when Disco and I started working together we just let it happen. I think maybe we had this vague notion we were writing soundtrack music.” Duke and his musical cohort Disco (AKA Dave McLean) were working in isolation in a suburb in the South of Glasgow. They were skint. There was a foot long Yamaha mini-keyed synth, a bashed up Burns guitar and a PC with a loop program called Acid on it. In Disco’s basement flat (Duke lived upstairs), they used these simple tools to record what was to become, their debut album “Deliverance”. They took on a singer, only when they found the music was falling increasingly into Verse Chorus Verse patterns.

“We had a few people over. Random boys and girls, but when Christian came and took care of five songs in one afternoon, our brief search ended.” Four of these songs ended up on the album, among them the debut single “Free To Change Your Mind”.

Christian, for his part, was more than happy to help out his two occasional acquaintances. “They gave me a CD with six or seven ideas on it and I liked it a lot. It seemed to me they were doing something akin to Air or Massive Attack but a bit quirkier. I had a load of ideas and recorded five of them quite roughly in an afternoon at Disco’s. I told them if they liked the tunes I would come back and do it for real in the next week or so.”

Christian never had this opportunity. Disco and Duke took his raw vocals and twisted them to their own end. Disco remembers “We treated Christians vocals as another instrument, we didn’t want just straight up clean singing. The music was all cut up and pasted and played backwards and delayed and re-pitched and we did the same with his voice. There were lots of plug in effects on the PC and we used them to the max with Christian.” The results are the various alien robot voices of “Deliverance”. “To his credit Christian seemed unfazed. We’d bring him a new CD and say wait ’til you hear what we’ve done to you this time.”

Recording continued at pace as interest in the trio snowballed, culminating in a deal with Dreamworks Records. Mark “Spike” Stent, whose credits read like a whose who of modern music (Massive Attack, Madonna, Bjork, U2), offered to mix the album for free. Duke, who had already earmarked Spike for the mix, could not believe his luck. “I was delighted he was up for doing the mix in the first place, and when he said he was doing it ’cause he loved it and didn’t want any money, I was blown away. I mean, that kind of stuff just doesn’t happen in this business.”

With the album finished, the three turned their minds to its visual representation. DukeIronFist explains, with his tongue planted firmly in his cheek “We wanted to express our collective individuality. We decided to appear in all publicity shots in identical outfits.”

Christian continues “I think we had an atmosphere in mind that wasn’t a million miles from some Kubrik films that we all admired. His marriage of music and visuals is second to none, and we wanted to touch on something like that, in the photos, videos and the live show.”