A good rehearsal on Sunday, if only because we finally got round to playing some new songs for a change, which was really nice. Pete was up in Oxford for the weekend and the stuff we still need to do for the demo can be done at home, so we thought we'd use the opportunity to play some new stuff - we dragged our melodic, indie-ish song without any lyrics from a few months ago back from the dead and played around it with it, and tried two of my new songs - Don't You and What it Means. Only the latter we did in any detail, but both sounded good.

For What it Means we started playing along to a pre-programmed tune on the laptop, but pretty much abandoned that once we had matched the sounds ourselves; it's got a fast, monotonous bassline which I thought may be better on keyboard, but it sounded pretty good with Andy playing it live, and everything else just seemed to form naturally around that. I played the little guitar riff and sang, alternately, while we get ourselves used to it, but think I'll probably use the Novation to play a synth line once we get Pete back. In the meantime, I wonder if I've invented a fairly rubbish vocal melody for this one? Hmm - I fear I have. Might have to work on it.

Don't You came out very different to how I imagined it. Ali had a good laugh at the crap drum beat I had programmed, and we tried to play along to the acoustic guitar line I'd programmed - Andy pointed out it sounded a bit 'folktronica', which was true, but I couldn't help feeling it lacked depth and pace. Only towards the end, when Andy and Ali played a bit more obtrusively, did it sound like it could go somewhere, but this soon gave way to their ritualistic and gleeful custom of rocking out to annoy me :-) Still, it could get somewhere, I think.

Lastly, we improvised a little tune around some synth stuff which Anne-Sophie had worked out; basically just a processed waveform with regular hiccups; we turned it into something quite dark and exciting, although I fear we only played it for five minutes and may have forgotten all by the next time we rehearse...