Bought some peanut M&Ms on the way home.

Wednesday 7th July
Move everything from the studio to the hall again and plug it all back in. This was very exciting to begin with but sadly less exciting now. MVB arrives and we start work on Anaesthetic - a strange but captivating tune by the Matts. It requires the use of brushes for that jazz-type feel. This and relative unfamiliarity of the track makes for a long afternoon of takes. If too many cooks spoil the broth, then too many producers can spoil the sound, so I read my book instead and chip in with pertinent comments. As the evening approaches MVB pulls off two splendid takes and we decide to stop with some relief, MVB especially.

Wind up leads and move everything back again. Discuss imminent heavy lifting job we are about to perform. But I'll tell you about that later.

Thursday 8th July
Take my acoustic guitar to the studio for to play it on Time is the enemy and Thinking it over. Do an interesting close-mic- and-ambient-mic set up which creates quite a nice effect when panned either side. You can check when you hear it. Inspired by the trickety drum track on 'the enemy' do a super-widdly acoustic/mandoline-y part, to help us sound like Led Zeppelin 3.

Feels good to be moving on to some other material - was getting a bit sick of Sundial.

Saturday 10th July
Father Stephen is coming up today for a hard day's bassing. He seems very happy with his little Hallum, and doesn't mind too much that we have to teach him some of the basslines as we go. Do I thought you'd never ask, Got to tell her, Time is the enemy and Thinking it over, then set up my Hello there-style stereo vocals thing to redo the bvs on Sundial. There surely can be nothing else to go on Sundial now - best to mix it, all in all.

It gets too late for us all to go and meet Reto in town (he's visiting for a few days) so me and Steve stay behind to finish off.

A productive day but god, it sounds dull now I come to tell you about it.

Monday 12th July
Travel down south to Mum and Dad's house for the daunting task of removing their piano and planting it in the studio. It is extremely heavy, but with some borrowed wheels, an old door and a lot of family teamwork we get it in the van and wobble home.

We are fortunate on our return to be greeted by the South London Women's Piano Moving Team who assist in rolling it out of the van without anyone being killed - quite an achievement. Matt plays a midnight serenade to the street and then we wheel it into its new home. He'll be pleased, he's missed that piano.

Thursday 15th July
Now to record the relocated piano. Miraculously, it has survived its move intact and also in tune, and with a little correcting tape-speed adjustment it sounds almost exactly like a really good piano sample.

Do Time is the enemy, which is sounding superb and then set up for Matt's lovely song Just for a moment which is going to be very minimal. If you want to get a nice piano sound it always seems to be necessary to cover it in a duvet. I seem to remember putting a mattress in the piano when we were recording Harrison. I leave Matt to it - doing a whole track without the aid of a click track? He'll be there all night.

Friday 16th July
Today is an interesting day for we are recording some brass. True to our subconscious ethic of never using any experts on our recordings, our very old friend Neil has come over with his French Horn and his Trumpet, neither of which he has played since he and Matt were in the Thornden School Wind Band in 1988. Still, he used to mend oil rigs, so this can't be too much of a challenge. First, though I have to help Matt repair his piano take because he accidentally recorded over the last note. It ought to be harder to press 'record'.

Matt has done a three part horn arrangement for Just for a moment, and once they have gone through and checked that all the notes can a) be played and b) be found within the correct key we force Neil into the booth to stand in the tiny gap between the amplifiers and assorted rubbish and shut the door.

A couple of hours later and it's all done, surely no worse than if we'd hired a horn section from some Philharmonic. We abandon the proposed trumpet part on On top of the world for today because Neil's 'lip is giving out'. Sounds painful. Bloody amateurs.

Wednesday 21st July
I looked in the mirror this morning and there, staring back at me, was Al Jardine. Well, it makes you stop and think.

Today we begin mixing Sundial. I know I said there couldn't be anything else to go on it, but we do one more vocal and Matt has procured a vocoder to redo the ABBA synth idea in a more interesting way. It sounds really cool. It's just becoming a party track, even more so when we put the handclaps on it…

Tony arrives and we begin in earnest; super shiny pop please. A bit Duran Duran? Why not.

Thursday 22nd July
More mixing. I could go into the whys and wherefores, the mutes and the rides, the pots and the pans, but would you really be any the wiser? Better to just wait until you can hear the record and figure out for yourself what we did. Father Stephen and MVB come and spend their two pen'orths and we press on till we're finished. Sort of.

Friday 23rd July
The main problem is the 'I'll come round on my bike bit' and what to do with it. Having finished the whole mix we feed it to the computer and painfully add 'Paperback Writer' style echoes to the end of the 'Sundial' section so it goes "Sundial, sundiiiiiiiiiiiiial-ll-ll-ll-ll-ll". End up putting a kind of wah wah effect on the bike section and making it a bit quieter. And then The Simpsons was on and so we watched that. It was the one where they get an elephant.

Monday 26th July
Have cold AGAIN, nose running like tap. If only snot were moisturising like Nivea cream then you wouldn't have to get a sandpapered nose. I guess you're not meant to LIKE it. I wonder what colds are for? "It's your body's way of telling you to slow down" they say. Then my body must be particularly lazy. It tells me to slow down every six weeks.

We still have the fancy compressors on loan so we've decided to do a quick mix of Give my heart just in case it's any good.

Well, it isn't.

Tuesday 27th July
Saw Star Wars last night. I enjoyed it. Matt and Kim are going off to Venice today, very nice I'm sure, and we're taking the opportunity to record more drums while they are away. I'm a little bit nervous because no one's actually ever told me how to do it, and although I've set it all up lots of times it's never had to be me who says "yes, that bass drum sound is acceptable" before. Worst that can happen is that we'll have to do it again, I spose. Anyway, MVB isn't coming down till tomorrow so I prepare some guide tracks for him to listen to.

I've decided that the bike section in Sundial doesn't make any sense any more, so I lose the wah wah, turn it back up and graft the long-forgotten piano onto it (flanging it first so it sounds like "SOS") and it sounds a bit more like it. There are now three different versions to choose from. Plus ca change, comme on dit, vive la difference, ou est votre chemise?

Lug all gear into hall or "control room" and set up as much drum kit as I can without any stands. Plug everything in, eat M&K's leftover doughnuts, easily as happy as Larry, if not more happy.

Wednesday 28th July
MVB arrives with rest of kit and sets it up. Sounds are coming through all of the mics and going onto the tape, so that's a good start. We're doing The biggest star in heaven (one of my favourites) and On top of the world. Worried about fucking up the sound so do very little to it. It sounds reassuringly like all the other drums sessions (and so it should - everything else is the same) and so the other boys won't laugh at me too much.

I could into the hows and howevers, the monitor sends and the limiting, the overheads and the inverted phase, the beat fours and the flams, the drop-ins, the tuning, the top skin, the rattling snare, the headroom on track four, the peaking, the joy, the tears, the boredom and the heat. But I won't for your sake

Monday 2nd August- Friday 6th August
Nobody really thinks I write this up at the end of every day, do they? So I shall spare you the tedium of a daily breakdown of this week since I was just doing guitar parts and also getting up later and later every day. Ended up doing the main guitar part on Got to tell her three times because it wasn't really sounding right - had to try out all the combinations of guitar and amp to discover the right thin-but-not-too-scratchy blend. Put various guitars on Thinking it over - a very Fender-y song if you ask me (although I also made great use of my FRET KING ESPRIT V thanks for asking). Discovered that combination of Vox amp and Neumann mic makes for a very pleasing sound so used that a lot for I thought you'd never ask. Created a very Beatles sound for the solo track, glassy and thin and very piercing. Do the riff from 'Getting Better' for Matt but I'm dubious since you don't want to make it absolutely plain how much this song owes to that one… It must nearly be time to hire a Hammond again and spice everything up.

I bought some little sleigh bells from the Early Learning Centre (an inexpensive source of percussion) and we did lots of percussion things. Mercifully ITYNA does not require a maraca track, making it one of the very few without it. Mind you, you don't mind hearing guitar all the time so I spose it doesn't matter too much.

In search of little bongo/temple block sounds me and Matt scour the kitchen tapping on pots and cups and jugs before settling on one of Kim's homemade pottery pots and the thin end of the guaro. Oh, and we did some more clapping.

We must try and keep up the pace. Maybe next week will be more interesting, with singing and so forth.

Andy! Kerry! Get back to work.

Tuesday 10th August
It's time to work out what we need to do and when we're going to do it by. Turns out there are only three or four more tracks that we haven't started yet, so the album could all be finished within two months. More pressing is the need to choose the next single, so we decide to finish off and mix Got to tell her and I thought you'd never ask over the next two weeks. Arrange to hire Hammond for Thursday and kill a bit of time doing the backing vocals on Time is the enemy which is very tiring and less fun than when we did them on the demo because, once again, we have forgotten what we did that was so excellent the first time.

Wednesday 11th August
A trip into town to play for Xfm and then to the studio shop to exchange our twochannelsofanalogueeq (rarely used) for twochannelsofvalvecompression (will use a lot) and rush home to use it. First though, must rearrange everything in the racks in a fit of tremendous anality. Do piano for Biggest star through it mono and overdriven for a slightly 20's sound. Or reminiscent of the piano we used to have when we were growing up, which is no bad thing.

You'll suddenly be fascinated by this when the album comes out, I'm sure of it. Thursday 12th August
Arrive too late to meet Tiny the Hammond man, [or Hammond the tiny man] who is one of those men who is called Tiny because they are so very huge. This would have been similar to the time a man called Bernard J Spearpoint III paid for our meal because he 'loved to see the young people enjoying themselves', in that it is only supposed to happen in films. ("Could we have the bill?" "Er… the gentleman over there has already paid it, sir").

Hiring the hammond is so expensive we've decided to record all the possible tracks that might need it, so it's your first sight of Walk round the corner, I am doomed to love her forever and Everything changed, and that's more or less it for the album. Otherwise there are parts on ITYNA, Thinking it over, Got to tell her, Time ITE. And very good it all sounds, too. Do guitar solo on ITYNA with wobbly Leslie (a friend of mine) and there's nothing left to do but sing, sing, sing.

Tuesday 18th January:
What's that, a five month delay? "Five month delay", a rarely used preset on the MPX100. It's tempting to attribute this to The Millennium Bug or something equally unconvincing, but no, it's more that when you don't have to pay for studio time you find it much more easy to put off going to work. That's not to say that we haven't done anything since August, we have. But believe me, if you're struggling to get up the energy to set up the mics, you're really not going to come home and write a pithy little piece about it.

So where were we? Ah yes. We mixed Got to tell her and I thought you'd never ask with Tony (although I was more busy moving and painting and decorating to be honest). They came out very well. It's nice to hear there's some coherence in the quality of the sound between all the mixes. It's lo-fi and punchy, but there's plenty to listen to as well. I always felt that Harrison had no character - it sounds more like a demo-in-a-proper-studio with the occasional big shiny pop production courtesy of Alan Winstanley. These recordings have something of the 4-track demo but put in a nicer frame; you only need to hear the things that are there for the song to work. There's a particular tone to it all as well, quite middle-y and hard. I suspect that that's something to do with the frequencies that Tony can still hear. Sounds like most of the important ones.

Then we were beset by illnesses and family trauma and Other Projects and Going to Switzerland Again and time passed. The leaf withered on the bough; the sunlight faltered at midday and we put the clocks back. In RUTHLand all was silent as a crypt... waiting...

I had a brief burst of enthusiasm and did lots of stuff on a couple of my own songs, Save your life and Don't you worry. I got Kerry to come over with her double bass and play it on Save your life and Anaesthetic, then I did lots of guitars on Biggest Star, then Matt did piano and wailing synths on Anaesthetic, and I put on a little Django Reinhart-inspired solo (the concept, that is, not the three-fingered virtuosity). I think that that little section is one of my finest moments - I always wondered what I would do there. MVB was playing guitar on the demo, so I took his idea (which was really nice) and embellished it a bit. The next great mystery is the guitar solo in Walk round the corner, but that will have to wait.

Then we had gigs to do and we decided to free Matt from the keyboards. We couldn't afford an extra keyboard player so we put lots of his parts on tape and played along with that, which was a bit funny. However the effect on the RUTH live experience was immediate, and the 100 Club and the Delirious gigs were certainly the best we've played. Matt would never call himself a natural frontman in the traditional sense, but he rose mightily to the challenge. It just seems easier to get people's attention that way. If you're not going to be Elton and carry a grand piano everywhere then there's no other elegant solution. Just ask Roachford.

So now it's the New Era, the noughties (or "the nothings" as I have heard it called) and there's a few months set aside for us to finish our work. Matt and Matt did drum tracks for Walk round the corner and Doomed last week, and Father Stephen will be coming up soon to twang himself for us.

Even if this album is RUTH's epitaph, we might as well make it wonderful.