Space Goddess is the first Album in twenty Five years from Punk Pop legends Bad Dream Fancy Dress. Having gone though a long term arthritic illness and a number of operation to her back, spine and hips, Cat Rees joined forces with partner Jeff and friend Joe , writing new material. The end product was ten original songs that now feature as the Space Goddess Album.
The above links take you to individual pages on each song. Lyrics and both English and Klingon for that outer space experience.
Space Goddess : The idea of a new Bad Dream Fancy Dress Album had been muted about for some years. And Cat had traditionally released a Christmas cover song for fun on her Bad Dream Fancy Dress facebook community site year on year. But it wasn't until Cat and Jeff accidently met with Joe that the idea of an Album was discussed seriously.
Choirs Boys Gas, had been recorded in a burst of creative energy, some songs like Curry Crazy were well defined and penned while others like ‘Kick in the Teeth’ were jammed and scribbled on the fly in the recording session itself and that lasted no more than a week, all very organic. There was a certain amount of Kitsch bubble Gum contradicted by dark almost sinister musical moments, the nursery rhymes from el. A professional drummer was bought in from the States for Curry Crazy but Cat always felt there was a lack of bass guitar, what would that sound like? Clearly the album also took on a ‘camp’ cult status and any new recordings had to capture some of the essence of Bad Dream Fancy Dress while acknowledging Cat had grown-up and moved on from ‘the little girl’ from Leigh-on-sea persona, and the home county naughty school girls myth that had sold the original project.
The popularity of the album was its underlying British post card humour and even back in the 80’s Cat had already been inspired by 50’s film stars, Hollywood glamour Then sporting the now famous retro headscarf’s. The album connected to an unexpected Gay audience and the new team was determined to keep that connection on the new project. We still wanted the Punk pop themes but determined to take the sound in a new direction. As writers Cat, Jeff and Joe make an unlikely combination, two dyslexics, a Bipolar and sometimes three Divas (Jeff and Joe having the odd creative tantrum together) so might not seem like a good choice, but it soon developed into a highly creative combination. The project was slowed down more by Cats ill health than the flow of ideas, which came at an ever faster rate.
Cat was pretty certain that this was to be an album about female empowerment but sometimes its not until you get down to actually laying the tracks that it can develop in the right direction. The songs therefore came about in very different ways. One line on ‘the longing’ must have taken almost three weeks to get right, while other vocals on Morpheus were literally jammed down in the first take and kept in serendipity. Choirs Boys Gas had often left in ‘out takes’ so we tried to capture that also while sometimes spending a lot of time multi-tracking, layering and effecting vocals.