A Dream Of Making An Album

…just not in the way you think. I had a really vivid dream the other night, and when I woke up it was still so clear in my head that I scribbled down the gist of it before I forgot. This post is the result of those notes.

As the story starts, I was working on the Record Section at Woolworths, where I worked on and off while at school and college. We had some banners up to advertise a competition where the winner would have the chance to record an album in a top studio with some top engineers. Somehow, I won.

The engineers arrived, with some recording gear. They gave me a microphone, and I proceeded to make a series of strange and silly noises into it, because I realised I can’t sing or do anything musical. I felt embarassed, but the engineers seemed happy, and just took the recordings away.

I forgot all about it until the following week, when suddenly, the Record section at Woolworths is selling this album with my face on it. It had a really cheesy cover, along the lines of, “Matthew Petty sings the Greats”. I immediately grabbed a shrink-wrapped copy off the stands and played it on the shop’s knackered player. To my astonishment, the engineers had transformed my gurgles, yips and bleats into surprisingly cool ambient lounge music, reminiscent of Air, or the mellower end of Meat Beat Manifesto.

I woke from the dream before I knew whether it was a success or not.

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