As part of a T-mobile ad campaign last year there was a move to get loads of people recording a song to make a supergroup of sorts. There were video recording sessions in various places across the country including London, Manchester, Edinburgh and Bristol. I turned up to a session filming in a covered market area in an area of London whose name I now forget, wearing my coolest jacket accompanied by my dorkiest hat. Usually I am a slave to my own brand of fashion but the day was very cold and tuning the charango up to its standard pitch resulted in two broken strings by the end of the afternoon 🙁 However as I was placed next to the drums the delicate tonal quality of the charango was not going to be picked up by the microphones! One the right side of me was the ukulele section of the band, though the cameras failed to get our synchronised Status Quo imitation moves onto digitalulloid.

Musically though, the charango was resurrected! A week after going down for the filming in London, I was invited down to specially record a charango track for the song, which is the opening instrument on the track before getting mixed in with the 1000+ other contributors to the recording. It was quite cool being in one of the best studio’s I’ve ever visited, though it was a bit disconcerting having to put a happy-cheery-pop hat on after being told the room you are in is where Radiohead recorded the awesomeness that is The Bends!!!

Anyway the single comes out this month, but in the meanwhile see if you can spot the Rishi in the video! (UPDATE – Single can be downloaded as an mp3 from Amazon!!!)

Many thanks to Josh for getting the ball rolling on this – the recording was a fun day out on both occasions, and it must be pretty cool to have made this happen.