The first Future By Design album was funded by The Prices Youth Business Trust, as it was called at that time. I bought the equipment myself after leaving university and worked on an album over the course of 2 years. It was an interesting project which saw me trying to cover all the bases, recording, artwork direction, mastering direction, pressing CD’s, promotion, distribution, accounts. It took a lot of work.
At this time I was just into music, and had no direction about life, too at ease to realise the important things going on around me.
Music can’t break down barriers except all but superficially. Music draws on catharsis, empathy, experience, it paints wonderful and sometimes not so wonderful pictures. It can inspire change, but without action, it means nothing.
The original track listing is shown above on a blurred out image of, myself, not an alien, in the background! Perhaps I too wasn’t seeing things to clearly back then.
Mark Marcus deserves a special credit for adding the missing touch to “Mr Pleasure” a couple of octave notes at the ending was the icing on the cake. Incidentally, Springvale studios post production never made it onto the final release as their master CD they gave me had an error on it. Thanks to Key Production for getting the release out on time after DAT tapes were supplied.
Only 1,000 copies of this album were produced, the majority sold from The Virgin Megastore on Oxford Street in London, where I managed to get placed on a listening post. There was some airplay on John Peel (Radio 1), SGR FM (Ipswich) and some other local pirate radio stations played it quite a bit.
Crossrhythms review: https://crossrhythms.co.uk/products/Future_By_Design/Long_Journey_Home/528/
A newer version of this album is available on Apple Music, Itunes, Spotify etc.