Slaughterhouse Road is an album 20 years in the making, that was its gestation, the birth was an intense 10 days. Fours days to do the initial tracking on Alex Bennets 1969 Ampex half inch 4 track tape machine, which he so generously hired and transported to my Gravel Road Studio on the outer edge of Melbourne, Australia. Alex had salvaged this magnificent machine a number of years ago. It had been a mainstay of ABC studios in Melbourne for many years,but now it was cast off as a casualty of the digital war on sound. I think something appealed to him, something in our crazy plan that made him say yeah I'll go along with that. We were doing a full moon recording, something my Producer and Engineer Greg O'Shea had told me about years ago. He said, in response to one of my ramshackle attempts at a demo, whereby my 1969 Akai M8 tape recorder developed an oceanic sound in one of its channels, this sound would come and go but as the session progressed it became more present until the two track machine became a 1 track machine, and still, there was something far more appealing about this piece of analogue hardware than the thought of going digital, an option literally at our fingertips. At the end of the session Greg remarked I reminded him of stuff he had read about Neil Young. I took that as a huge compliment but truth is I was still not that familiar with NY, so I had no idea what he was talking about. Greg went on to say next you'll only want to record on a full moon like Neil does, my immediate reaction was to say what a brilliant idea, lets do that! In the pre production phase I didn't actually think we would be able to include this celestial monthy event, but when I started booking dates, everything lined up for the weekend of the full moon, it was truly magnificent timing...
