Quiff Boy wrote:see mr marx's post
here
i asked him to clarify his comment about a demo of "9 while 9" that he made on the above-mentioned thread... i thought his reply was worth a thread of its own as it might start a little discussion
it appears there is
another FALAA-era demo track that has
yet to see the light of day entitled 'Child Of Light'
I wasn't been deliberately provocative - I have often wondered how the 'Red Skies' song leaked out on bootleg and naturally assumed if it was doing the rounds then the Nine while Nine version recorded at the same time was out there too.
It had the working title 'Child Of Light' and contained a line which mentions 'the children of the dust..' When we were deciding on a title for FALAA I pitched that one in even though it didn't seem likely the lyric would surface on the finished version. Quite reasonably the Von pointed out that we were over egging the 'something of something' being called the Sisters of Mercy after all.
I think I mentioned nabbing some of the words for a later Ghost dance song (A Deeper Blue) on the
www.ghostdance.co.uk recording diaries.
lordy

Mr. Marx was so kind to reply to my question over at Ghostdance.co.uk -
Posted: Sun Aug 29, 2010 2:17 pm
"In his recording diaries Mr. Marx didn't mention the 7" b side 'Where Spirits Fly'. My question is: had this song a different working title when it was written for The Sisters (like 'Yesterday Again') ? Plus, the first versions of 'Marianne' and 'Nine While 9' with Marx's vocals, were
they demos from Parkside Studios with Tim Allen or Album outtakes from
Strawberry ? Did they ever record a demo of 'Where Spirits Fly' ?"
Posted: Thu Sep 02, 2010 9:18 am
"The tune was always known as 'Surfing Glam' - I'm sure we assumed it was a descriptive name for the guitar style. It was fairly typical to name tunes ahead of any lyrical content being added and a definitive title emerging. ' Amphetamine Logic' was always known as 'Horned One Stabs', I think 'Valentine' may have been called 'Clock' or 'Bell'. The tune which became 'Where Spirits Fly' was never more than an instrumental we would play around with in soundcheck and we certainly wouldn't have bothered to demo it.
The other demo versions you refer to were from the original FALAA album sessions at Strawberry, completed pretty early on - if memory serves me correctly we'd tackled the song which was to become 'First and Last and Always' (previously called 'The Scottish One') at around the time 'Body and Soul' emerged as the first Warners single. We did a much slower version of it and the lyric may well have been partly the one which was later used on 'Body and Soul' - such was the methodology back then. This is further evidenced by the use of the 'Marianne' idea on a completely separate track. I'd drafted a lyric and hastily recorded a guide vocal largely out of frustration that the previous version hadn't built on the potential of the musical idea.
Several positives came from it - the album's title track, the new and spellbinding 'Marian' and way down the line I used a snippet of the lyric for the chorus of 'When I Call' and of course the proposed lyric for 'Nine While Nine, was trimmed and re-surfaced as 'A Deeper Blue'. Waste not want not."