Me and God in the Studio

As the recording date loomed closer, and I began to make preparations with my first call being to my old friend and fellow recording expert Pete Kelly. Pete is a gifted musician and producer in his own right and has an eye for detail that I could only dream of. We had worked together over the years on a number of projects and it was Pete who in less that ten minutes convinced me that the future of recording was in using computers rather than tape.

If you have ever worked or recorded in a studio, you will know that regardless of the most careful planning, the final result is ultimately down to the ability for the artist to perform on any given day. I found myself wondering just how well Frank would at 73 years old be able to cope with the thirty-seven chapters, consisting of 37,000 words.

On the first day as Pete called for the very first take, we both looked at each other, hoping that Frank would quickly find his pace and relax into delivering his story.

We soon realised that we needn’t have worried. Frank is like the Ernest Shackleton of therapy, in that once he sets his mind on achieving something, there really is no stopping him!

I had allowed a total of eight days for the project and had anticipated that the entire recording would be around six hours once edited. Previous experience had taught me to allow a minimum of one full day for each fully edited hours work. I had also considered best and worst case scenarios from this session. The absolute best-case scenario would be that we completed the entire project including artwork in the allotted time. The worst-case scenario would be that Frank would need to return to the studio in November prior to presenting his workshop in Leeds.

Our normal recording day would consist of starting the session at 10.30am and recording until around 2pm. We would then usually break for lunch after which Pete would return to his own studio to edit the morning session. Back at Clara studios Frank and my wife Sue would then listen to the previous day’s edits. In the evening we would usually go out for dinner to mostly Italian restaurants and discuss Provocative therapy, movies and all manner of other subjects. When we returned to the house, we would then watch a movie of choice on our home cinema set-up until around 2pm! Fortunately our taste in movies was very similar and I was pleased to find a number of  films Frank had not seen. These included Luc Besson’s “Joan of Arc” and “Open Range” with Robert Duvall and Kevin Costner and Tombstone.

For a few moments one evening, I pondered upon the concept of a Frank Farrelly audio commentary for a series of westerns! Of course it should be no surprise that such a superb teller of stories would also be an admirer of other people’s excellent tales.

During a break on the third day I recorded an interview with Frank for www.nlpmp3.com on various aspects of his work including his interactions with Carl Rogers and the history of Provocative Therapy dating from the early 1960s. Frank commented that Carl’s view was that Frank would “never make a dent on the old guard” but rather would have a better response from new up and coming therapists.

On day 5 we organised the artwork for the project and we contrasted the Farrelly family picture from 1937 with one of Frank and myself in the studio. My good friends Karl and Darren at RRS Music in Leeds worked tirelessly to produce some initial copies of the CD set before Frank departed to Germany. Both of them remarked on how good the audio quality is, which is the highest compliment you can get from sound engineers. We recorded all the speech in 32bit resolution using SE tube microphones, which produce really superb fidelity. The recording was done mostly in single takes with no additional reverb or effects added to the audio material.

“Me and God” is a fascinating book of stories from Frank’s early life up to the age of sixteen. My view is that the book is an excellent treatise on all human relationships from the personal to the cosmological and divine. The book also gives a good insight into how Frank’s family life was undoubtedly a major influence on the creation of Provocative Therapy. Frank’s unique humour is evident throughout this work and this humour is also reflected in the choice of chapter titles, my favourite being “How I almost lost my immortal soul with a protestant heretic girl one night at a drive-in movie” and “The Crucifixion and the burning at the stake”