Acid rain is stinging your eyes as you marvel at the crumbling city walls around you. It's the end of the world and the last cop wants to beat you to death for planting the last flower without a permit. Tear gas makes you claw at your face as you gasp at the beauty of the sunset. Red upon red upon red. "Must be all the pollution", you laugh, before you lose consciousness for the last time...

We're a DIY punk band that normally records ourselves and does everything ourselves. A few years ago, we decided to experiment with a different way of doing things. Record a record in two days on pro-equipment to see what happened. Tracks 2-5 are different to our earlier records in that it has an almost professional history. It was recorded by Hadrien Grange (The Shades and Shit Browne) and Manu Guiot (Mick Jagger, Eurythmics, Sid Vicious, Celine Dion, Patrick Bruel etc.) on a Neve desk that was used to mix the 2nd Oasis album. It was mixed by Steve Kravac in Hollywood. Steve Kravac is one of the mixers that has defined the american punk sound. He has mixed Blink 182, MXPX, Less than Jake, 7 Seconds, Total Chaos, Tsunami Bomb, Youth Brigade and much more. All these cool people for a budget of almost zero. We had a lot of lucky breaks making this record! Turns out Steve is a great guy who is very kind! Tracks 2-5 were mastered by Micheal Hateley who has mastered Green Day, R.E.M., Flaming Lips, Deftones, Lou Reed, Madonna you get the idea!

The remixes and the other songs came about by equally cool strokes of luck. Olivier Famin needed to record a group so he called us! Antilo is a fan from Twitter and we love the remix he did for us. The dude is talented! The video was an incredible experience, made by very generous and talented people.

And this is the chapter from our autobiography that deals with this record:

Chapter 10

Around 2011 while Gilbertmuda was still in the group, I had the idea to do something different and do a record quickly on world class equipment. We still didn’t have any money though so I didn’t know how we’d ever make a record that wasn’t just cobbled together in a basement or a bedroom!

My father-in-law had just bought a fucking huge Neve mixing desk from Manchester. It’d been used to make some classic records like What’s the Story Morning Glory by Oasis (and loads of others!) It’s like the Lamborghini of recording equipment! I managed to get a weekend of free time on the desk. It was a nice gift! I had hired a young assistant engineer who knew how to run the studio. He was all I could afford. (Even I didn’t know how to operate a Neve desk at the time!) He was an unknown quantity so we asked Clem’s little brother, Hadrien, to help us again. He always did good work. We had five classic songs to record! Let’s do it!

Before the session, the engineer called in sick, he said his boss would cover for him for no extra charge. His boss turned out to be Manu Guiot known for his work on the Eurythmic’s Sweet Dreams and working with Mick Jagger, Bob Dylan and Charles Trenet! One of the greatest sound engineers in french history! We started setting up the equipment and Hadrien and Manu started bickering. Uh oh! Manu retreated to his newspaper and let Hadrien take control. Oh well, in a session, you don’t have much time to second guess things. It was going to be OK! Manu told us some cool stories and anecdotes like how he played guitar on Sid Vicious’ My Way so it all worked out nicely in the end.

We played and recorded the five songs in the most basic way we could. That was a requirement of recording 5 songs in 2 days, I think. I remember that I struggled to sing in tune for the recording. That would be something that would hound me for every recording ever since! I just cracked under the pressure but Hadrien pulled some good takes out of me. The weekend was over and the raw tracks were good! The british jazz singer, Malia, was passing through and said that the songs sounded great! Thanks Malia!

The band was doing pretty well on a website called Myspace (we had more than 3500 fans) so I made an announcement: “If there are any superstar mixers out there looking to mix some hit rock anthems, we just recorded five of them so get in touch!” I never thought it would work but it did! The mixer, Steve Kravac was a fan and said he was up for it! Thanks MySpace! Now that’s a lucky break!

Steve Kravac is one of the sound engineers that is responsible for the californian punk sound. He had worked of Punk in Drublic for NOFX, he worked with Bad Religion and he had even worked for Steve Jones of the Sex Pistols! He’s best known for Blink 182’s first album and some absolutely great albums that he did for Less Than Jake and MXPX. Phew! Wow! That’s an insanely lucky break!

As you can imagine, he did a great job. The songs sounded great. Steve would later visit Paris and hangout with us in Le Feline bar and tell us cool stories and Blink 182 and all our punk rock heroes! Do I have permission to tell them to you? But that’s another story!

I could afford to get one song mastered by Streaky (The Prodigy, The Stone Roses, Paul Weller) and the rest were mastered by Micheal Hateley (Green Day, Madonna, Red Hot Chilli Peppers). Pretty insane stuff for a little anarcho-punk band with no money! My plan to do a record in a completely different way had certainly panned out and then some! Long story short: it sounded great!

Marsu, the owner of Crash Disques liked it too and agreed to release the record! Cool! Crash Disques was the best punk record label in France! In the 80s Marsu had managed Berurier Noir and Lucrate Milk and their record label, Bondage Records. In the 90s, he released Les Thugs (probably the most respected french rock band in history) and helped set up the CICP which is a cultural centre that has helped so many people and so many good causes that I couldn’t even begin to name them all. In the 2000s he released the first album for Guerilla Poubelle which kick-started an entire movement of teenage punk bands. Decidedly, this was a pretty cool thing that was happening to us! It was pretty damn cool! We started to have meetings with Marsu and throw record cover designs around….

However the record started getting delayed and a year went by. I was used to writing an album’s worth of songs in a year. That year I didn’t write any songs as I was blocked creatively and physically with the release of this record being held up. Another year went by. The situation was damaging the group in many ways. I had writer’s block and it was a huge disappointment for us after we had had so many lucky breaks… the last domino just wouldn’t fall for us. Maybe nothing would ever work out for us? Maybe this whole thing was going nowhere? You get the idea of the king of problems we were having.

We eventually released the record in 2014 with zero promotion and zero fanfare. It was released by Nacion Libre in Mexico and Magnatune in the USA. We didn’t have any energy or hope left for it. We bundled it together with some remixes done by some of our fans and friends and with an acoustic version of Twitter Riot that we’d recorded at SAE’s recording studios with Olivier Famin from Les Becasses (remember them! They’re still awesome by the way and would later go on to tour the USA!). I felt the record needed a new first track though as I pulled Bring It On off that record to put it on the next one. Damn! We needed a new song! The entire world had been going through some bullshit depression because some US bankers were being slimy fuckwit pieces of shit. People were dying of poverty all over the world. I even went on “Occupy Paris” demonstrations and met a nazi from french military intelligence who had tried to infiltrate our march. What the fuck? A song obviously needed to be written to catch the global down turn and my own down turn in relation to all this horror. We wrote it quickly and recorded it quickly with our new drummer, Greg in our rehearsal studio. I remember playing keyboard on the floor and generally doing stuff on the floor because we didn’t have time to put stuff on stands! I had a fever to get that song down! It turned out great and it went on the record as the new first song! We never worked out how to play it live though! We’ve never played that song live. Not once!

We needed a front cover so I asked Sophie Dargacha for a cover as the one she had done for us on Anarchist ‘til Death had worked so well. What do you? She had the perfect image for the times, a little girl with a gas mask on. It would prove prophetic as France and many countries slipped into civil conflict culminating in the Covid 19 pandemic and another worldwide depression. That cover resonates with me so much to this very day.

Even though the process of making the record had nearly broken our spirits, we received some news that lifted our spirits. I Wish I Was Dead ended up as the 2nd best song of the year in 2015 on Mick Fletcher from Just Song Punk Songs Blog and Global Punk Radio. We’d beaten off some really heavy hitters from Teenage Bottlerocket, The Spoilers and Leftover Crack! That really made me smile again and made me think that maybe there was maybe a reason to continue the adventure!

People have often said to me that No-one’s Illegal is their favourite song by us and Angry Bird got used a lot in illegal Polish car racing videos. The remixes have even picked up quite a few fans over the years.

We were actually improving our live act with Greg on the drums and we were playing some amazing concerts and festivals! We were having some extraordinarily madcap adventures around France and Europe. I feel bad not talking about all the concert stories in this chapter because I know that’s what people want to hear. I’ll tell those stories one day, I promise! This chapter’s just about name checking incredibly famous people whereas I should have been naming people from the punk scene from all our crazy concert capers. Well, psychologically, this record was hard for us and a bit of a turning point. Maybe we’ve never recovered from it? Maybe this record taught us a lot and has made us into the band we are today? Tune in for the next chapter where we would make our best record, the record that I’ll be proud of until I die, Favela Ninja!

louislinggandthebombs.bandcamp.com/album/songs-for-a-tear-gas-sunset