RAPHAEL MANN, recording session at The Umpire, 2004 (Photo by Nick Richards (?))

In the late ’90s and early 2000s, when I put the group August together and first played with Art Terry, I was living in a rented flat on Amhurst Road near to Hackney Downs. Nowadays Hackney is full of fashionable clubs & gig venues, but in those days most of the nightlife in the area you only found out about through word of mouth; and one evening a friend took me to an industrial estate just up from Stoke Newington station, and knocked on the door of an abandoned looking warehouse building, which is how I discovered The Umpire (as it was called when this photo was taken; it went through several names), home to Marc Shearer AKA Marc Meon, formerly of ill-fated Britpop group Octopus, and host of the now legendary Mentasm parties, which became a regular fix for myself and the other members of the early August incarnations. Marc had a little studio set-up in the warehouse too, and in fact he was the person that helped me set up my own first computer-based home studio, running Cubase VST on an Apple G4. I first recorded at Marc’s when I was playing bass in the group The Disco Bomber, and when August first seemed ready to do some recordings we did a session at The Umpire, in early 2004, with myself on bass, Clean Cut Mark on drums and Earl Grey (aka Nick Richards) on guitar. I think Nick took this photo, of me recording some bass. I remember he had one of those cheap little Lomo cameras that were popular before smartphones appeared, and this looks like one of his intentionally blurred motion captures… It captures the memory for me…