Thanks sanvean for uploading the booklet. That interview is a fascinating read.

Thanks also Kuk91 for keeping us all up to speed with all the PJ news!

And thank goodness there's no mention of this devastating "early 2016" thing. I don't know those journalists' sources, I hope it was a speculation, and I think that official press-release is not going to be released until at least a couple of months after sessions end. And if some new songs "have second lives" as poems, it would make sense to release the album alongside the book (or, hopefully, earlier).

according to someone on twitter she's at the jaipur literary festival jan 2016, so the 2016 release date would make sense if she's going to be be promoting the book first.

Can I ask a really mundane question? Is there any restriction on taking bags into the event/recording session once they have been checked for mobile phones/cameras? Is there a cloakroom to check bags into as well as the 'secure boxes' for cameras etc?

After being fortunate enough to get a ticket and then travelling down to London, I don't want to run into problems at the final hurdle...

That's a survival mechanism, really - if I'm not able to go, I want to know as much as possible! )))

Just came back from Somerset House.

When I arrived, they were recording the bass line for "A Line In The Sand". Polly was dressed in black and stood very quiet in the first 10 minutes. I was surprised that Polly gives Flood a lot of freedom. I was surprised because I always assumed that she'd be super bossy and quite a control freak about her projects, but that is not the important thing here.

After the bass line, they started recording the backing vocals. For 30 minutes all you could hear was all the blokes singing "oh, oh oh oh oh, ohhh, oh oh oh oh ohhhhh" which is the chorus for that song. In the end they were singing the backing vocals for lyrics like: "enough is enough, a line in the sand, 7 or 8 thousand people killed by hand" and "I saw people kill each other just to get there first".

The subject is quite the same as LES. I feel this time things will be more "Universal" and even more ambiguous. The song was catchy but I was not hugely surprised or amused by it, tbh. It is as catchy as TWTMM but with a jazzie, slightly heavier sound and the song ends in an abrupt way. Her voice was in her upper range again and I am convinced that she has been working in her upper register quite a lot. Her voice sounds much stronger in the high notes and, despite not being a fan of her "church-singing-voice", I reckon that what I heard, vocally, sounds better than LES.

Another thing from LES are the male backing vocals, a trick to give the songs that sense of community that we got in the last record. Polly must be completely allergic now to low voices. The blokes tried to sing the stuff in a lower register, as suggested by Flood. That was the only time I saw Polly interfering with the process: "No, stop, it's just too low" . I thought it sounded way better that way, but, she's the one in charge!

I'll be back there on the 4th of Feb.

Edit: John Parish, minutes before the end suggested that they should move to another song, he seemed quite unimpressed with it, lol.