Volume One, and everything after
Sam is mid-fifties, Ricky is... older. Twenty-odd years ago, neither of our current ages seemed remotely close, and the two of us were writing and gigging together in Hampshire under the name Volume One. Mainly Southampton pubs (The Obelisk, The Malvern, etc.) and a few private gigs too. We were even the FIRST (maybe ONLY?) band to gig on the then very first brand spanking new Type 45 destroyer - HMS Daring - in Portsmouth Dockyard, raising £8500 on an all-night Help for Heroes gig.
We wrote all our own songs and recorded them ourselves, the way you did back then:
borrowed time in Ricky's dining room mainly, mixed on equipment Ricky's 8-track Roland
something-or-other. We uploaded to SoundClick because that
was where unsigned bands put their music in those days. Some of it was even good.
A lot of it never got properly finished. Then gigging got harder, life got fuller, and Volume One quietly
stopped without ever officially deciding to.
We kinda had a resurgence in 2016 and ended up releasing 'How Many Reasons' and 'St. George's Pride' via
EmuBands. You can find them on Spotify, iTunes and Amazon if you look hard enough.
Again, time, effort and a profound lack of music marketing knowledge, as well as a full time job beat us.
Why now, and why not Volume One
We're too old to gig the way we used to, but we're not too old to finish what we started. Sam's since moved to Lincolnshire, which put a couple of hundred miles between the two of us and might have been the end of it - instead it turned out to be exactly what got us talking about the old recordings again.
We're not calling ourselves Volume One this time. Search for that name today and you'll find a hundred other things before you find us - it's simply been swamped by the modern internet. Smith & Hazzard is just our own names, which has the advantage of actually being findable, and the advantage of being true.
How we actually work with AI
We're new to AI music tools, and we started using Suno the way anyone does - curious, a bit sceptical, fiddling to see what it could actually do. What we found is that it can do everything, if you let it: full compositions, full lyrics, a finished track from a one-line prompt in under a minute. We were never comfortable with that, and we can see exactly why it's a real problem for musicians and for the industry more broadly.
So we drew our own line, and we're sticking to it on every single release:
- Every song has 100% human-written lyrics, at the very least - ours, always, no exceptions.
- For the old Volume One material, the songs were fully composed and originally recorded by us, decades ago. What Suno does is re-perform those existing recordings - we upload our original tracks, and it renders them with a quality of mixing and mastering we could never manage at the time. The composition is ours; the performance is Suno's, doing the job a session player or a mastering engineer would once have done.
- For new material, we write the lyrics ourselves first, then we do one of two things. We either compose the music ourselves, like the old days, or we curate Suno - prompting, listening, tweaking, rejecting, starting again - until the music is something we'd actually put our name to. It's not instant. Some tracks take hours and hours of trial and error before we're happy. We will only ever take the compositional credit only for what we actually did.
We log exactly which of these applies, track by track, with the full lyrics and the actual backstory, in the log. If you want to know precisely what a human did and what a machine did on any given song, it's written down - nothing vaguer than that.