Kill It Kid were a British four-piece blues-rock band, fronted by vocalist and guitarist Chris Turpin and keyboardist Stephanie Ward. The band took its name from a song by blues musician Blind Willie McTell, whose music heavily influenced their sound. Formed at Bath Spa University in 2008, they signed to One Little Indian Records within months and later moved to Sire, the Warner imprint behind The Ramones and Madonna. Kill It Kid disbanded in 2015, not long after this session; Turpin and Ward went on to form the duo Ida Mae.
We caught the band midway through their “You Owe Nothing” European tour, named for their 2014 album, to record a version of the track “Tired Of The Way You Want To Live” at Miloco’s The Pool Studios in South London. The Pool is built inside a former TV soundstage in Bermondsey and is known for its unusually open live room, with the control room looking directly onto the tracking space rather than sitting behind a separating wall.
The session was mixed and produced by John Mitchell, whose credits include Enter Shikari, Young Guns, and Lower Than Atlantis, and engineered by Will Kent. Recording ran through Focusrite’s Clarett 8PreX, a rack-mount Thunderbolt interface built for permanently installed studio setups, with an OctoPre MkII added over ADAT to bring in the extra microphones a full band session needs — the same category of interface we covered when reviewing the Focusrite Saffire PRO 26.
The 8PreX has since been discontinued and replaced by Focusrite’s Clarett+ range, which carries over the same Air preamp modeling and low-latency conversion the original was built around. Focusrite has kept using working sessions like this one to show its interfaces in real conditions, more recently featuring artists like Wolf Alice’s Joel Amey on the newer Clarett+ line.
