Davis, Doug and I, the UK chapter of Coba Fynn, were over in Glasgow the other weekend to put the finishing touches to the album. This was to be a mastering session, where the final tracks are transferred as a unit to a master CD with some concomitant equalization and compression to give the record an identifiable “sound”. Our involvement in the process was limited to watching Nick (our engineer since we started recording back in May last year) twiddle faders and knobs and listening as he played back snippets of the recorded tracks to check the results.

For four and a half hours.

We knocked back a few beers, flicked through the pile of somewhat current music magazines abandoned by the control booth’s previous occupants, and blethered idly. Finally Nick held aloft an unlabelled CD.

“Here it is.”

He wrote “Coba Fynn” on the disk with a black marker pen and handed it to Davis. There was general enthusiasm.

“Let’s get a drink! Nick, have you got time for a drink with us?”

And so began a night out to which I really struggle to do justice. The four of us grabbed a pint in the chilly courtyard of a bar just off Buchanan Street (the fact that I don’t remember its name may give you some clue as to where the evening was headed), then we said goodbye to Nick and the three of us took the tube to the west end to meet up with Doug’s sister Jackie and the Captain.

The thing is, that despite living in Glasgow for more than a year, I didn’t really get to grips with the city until the very last minute. I can try to pin the blame on any number of factors — the drudgery of commuting to Edinburgh, living down in the south side when really we should have held out for a flat in the west end, or even the trauma of redecorating a bathroom (it really was that bad) — but it occurs to me now that I might just have been suffering from undiagnosed nostalgia.

Back before the advent of the Roquefort Files, before Chris & Leyla left for the land of Oz, I found myself over in the west end of Glasgow for a few nights out with the extended ‘Fynn family. In the same way that Josh, Jeff and I parlayed our dank, lightless East Preston Street flat of the time into a stone-cold party machine, everything ‘Fynnish seemed to revolve around the idiosyncratic flat just off Great Western Road shared by Charlie, Doug and the Captain. There was boozing just round the corner in the coincidentally-named Captain’s Rest; there were parties, where guests would peer down at the words adorning the fish tank in the living room:

Neon tetra
Neon tetra
Tu es mon raison d’être

there was watching of 2001: A Space Odyssey in the small hours, and of course there was waking up the morning after and peeling one’s drooling face off the sofa. My expectations of Glasgow were subtly fixed by a few such episodes all those years ago.

Finding myself out again in the west end with Jackie, the Captain and the ‘Fynn acted as some sort of catalyst to bring not the memories themselves to the fore, but instead the state of mind. We ate; we drank; we drank some more; we tried to play the mastered album on Jackie’s CD player only to find that it would not work; we threw our hands up in consternation and then kept on drinking until we could drink no more. It was a great night — brightened just the slightest bit by the rosy glow of nostalgia, maybe, but a great night nonetheless.

P.S. Nick emailed us the CD image later in the week. It is good.