Ben Walker - Bahaudin

The Making Of 'Bahaudin'

The record eventually called Bahaudin started life as a handful of acoustic songs recorded in a voice and instrument setting by Daniel Simmons at the end of October 1998.

The style of music was something of a contrast to the cassette entitled The Higher the Fewer, which was recorded in July 1998. THTF contained only one acoustic instrument, that being a pair of maracas. It consisted of technology-based songs recorded in an atmosphere of compromise and frustration. The album was flawed in its execution, though it has some promising arrangements and some half-decent melodies. Perhaps the fact that, for whatever reason, it was not a satisfying 45 minutes of listening prompted me to try and produce something more complete next time.

In January 1999, I met the producer, singer-songwriter and musician Nigel Stonier. Nigel had received a copy of the five-song tape and was interested in recording and producing the songs with a fuller arrangement and a more polished sound. Most of the recording I had done previously had been either using just voice and instrument or with synthetic backing. Except for some songs that appeared on Warm And Normal in 1993, this was usually done in somebody's bedroom, living room or music room. I believed it was possible to create a work of art in this way and I never had any money to do otherwise. But the music had only reached a small audience, and that was unlikely to change unless I could come up with a presentable and durable product.

Recording began in September 1999 with Paul Burgess of 10cc on drums, Rod Clements of Lindisfarne on bass, Nigel Stonier on guitar and myself on guitar and vocals. My friends Buffy Ashton and Richard Sample, who had both played on Warm And Normal, kindly came up to Frog Recording Studios in Warrington to contribute, and Thea Gilmore, Mark Walker (who engineered the sessions), Steve Millington (who owns the studio), and Gareth Darlington all helped make the record become whatever it is.

There was a break of seven months in the midst of the recording, during which I had intended to come up with some concise, catchy rock and pop songs to add to the songs already recorded. What I ended up with was a selection containing a twelve-bar blues, a country waltz, a tango, a Mexican hotch-potch and an attempted calypso. It might go down okay at a WOMAD festival but how could you do it justice with white English soft-rockers like us?

I had also written a bluegrass ballad in the style of Bill Monroe but the three-part close harmony was not something any of us could convincingly pull off, and it was left off the final selection.

This unintended mixing of styles made the song sequencing pretty crucial, and I ended up treating the album as if it were a vinyl LP with two distinct sides. This is what I had always done when making cassettes and it is still my preferred way of listening to an album. Nigel made a helpful suggestion and I ended up putting the more eclectic material on 'side two'.

The title 'Bahaudin' came about while I was reading a book of Sufi fables by Idries Shah, entitled 'The Dermis Probe'. The cover of the book showed a close up of a section of elephant's skin, which looked like a dense mass of grey creases and wrinkles, not part of an animal at all. It was only by seeing the whole picture that the viewer would realise what they were actually looking at.

I decided to use the most attractive word in the book as the album title and came across the name Bahaudin, who had been the founder of a particular school of Sufism.

When it came to making a cover for the record, I had to admit that no one would be able to pronounce the title, let alone know what it meant, so I made an attempt to portray Bahaudin himself on the front. It may have been incongruous to have what looked like a photo of the grim reaper on the front of an album of mellow music, but I wanted an image that would, in some way, explain the title.

In February 2001, a full year since the last song on the album had been written, I spent a day at Sunnybank Studios near Halifax and sat with Matt Bernard mastering the record. In years gone by, I used to use a double cassette deck to do this job and keep the gaps between the songs brutally short. This would sometimes result in accidentally erasing parts of the master cassette. In 1996, 'The Novelty Age' had silences so long that the listener had time to forget the previous song altogether. This time we tailored the length of the gap according to the nature of the song. For example, the six-minute ballad in the middle of the record had a long gap after it so that the listener could take a deep breath and freshen up a little before the next track.

Another interminable gap of five months followed, during which I was unable to devote the necessary attention to the final stage of the project. After some photographs had been taken (by Lee Wright), I set about designing a cover booklet. I saw no point in using the latest techniques in graphic design just to show the listener the song lyrics and a few pictures, so the mock-up I made, with limited technical facilities, was scanned as it was into a computer at RRS Music in Leeds.

The finished CDs were collected in October 2001, the night before I set off with my mandolin for New Brunswick, New Jersey.

Ben Walker
23 August 2002

The Music of Ben Walker

The Making Of 'Bahaudin'