Bonking donkeys! There, that got your attention. Now hands up whose been receiving phone calls from American men with mucho hunko voices. Amazon, Liverpool's liveliest recording barn, recently got tinkled by one of the above variety inquiring as to studio rates. Upon finding the rates favourable he said that he would bring a mega-Stateside band over to record on the condition that he could book all three studios simultaneously and that nobody be allowed in the studio for the duration of the recording.

"We get a lot of calls saying that they want to book a band in anonymously," said an Amazon spokesperson," but they never make conditions like that. But it goes to show that our rates are lower than all the dead flash New York studios."

Good point that man.

The day to day lives of the super folk at Amazon have been kept busy by the like of New Order who are still working on the soundtrack for their forthcoming video. Pete Coleman is engineering. Bup showaddywaddy Bill Shankly, one hundred per cent Scallywags, Icicle Works have been working both as a band and as solo projectists. Bit early for that sort of thing, one would have thought. Irish collective, In Tua Nua have finished mixing their first LP with up and coming local lad Ian Brodie who has also been working with Pete Townshend mixing an album of the recent anti-heroin concert in Liverpool which features all the celebs who have subscribed to the worthy cause. Other notables to have crossed the noble threshold are Pallas who finished their Mick Glossop produced LP for EMI. Red Rhino Records have also started to do serious business with Amazon. The results are beginning to show in the independent charts as we speak.

Top middle of the road band, Bucks Fizz, are back in business and back in the studio with Andy Hill. They've been spotted at both Clock studios and CBS studios producing a sound that has been described as anything but pedestrian.

Larry Steinbachek, the bespectacled portion of Bronski Beat, has struggled through the heartbreak, the agony and the tears of working with Marc Almond and has taken over the leather chair in Abbey Road One to produce aspiring chanteuse Sheila Smith. Alan Parsons has been "doing things with a little orchestra", Depeche Mode remixed a single with Daniel Miller and Vicious Pink (whose bastard pet alligator recently bit me) singled with the near legendary Burt Bevan. The entire Abbey Road staff were forced to wear star-spangled stack-heeled boots and play imaginary guitars to make Joe Cocker feel at home. Joe is in recording his latest meisterwerk with a little help from Terry Manning.

The great Frankie sampling debate goes on. The latest twist in the tale is that the Ambiance Studios' chief engineer provided the bass sample. Fact is no-one really gives a bugger who it was now. But who is it who plays steel guitar on those Shaky records?

The thoroughly marvellous Prefab Sprout album 'Steve McQueen' should be out now. They've been seen lately in CBS Studios with the seminal Muff Winwood. What could they have been up to? Other clients have included Toyah with producer Terry Docherty, Circus Circus Circus (yes, yes you heard me the first time, etc), Big Sound Authority and the RAH Band. The Beach Boys also surfaced to lay some sounds down with Malcolm Eade.

ABC who've been augmented by an odd looking woman and a very short geezer materialised in full jet-trash chic at Maison Rouge for the recording of a self-produced long player engineered by Martin Webster. CBS boy-child Owen Paul has been dragged around the capital's top studios by his ever-loving record company. Lucky establishments thus far have been the rather delightful Clock and Maison Rouge. Lucky producer in search of the elusive beauty that is a hit single.

But as Salvador Dooley, the surrealist Irish football hooligan put it, "Beauty is a finger in the eye of the beholder."