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The story behind the story

Behind the Band.

How two old friends, a lot of musical memories and a collection of AI tools turned into The Fireflies.

Colin and Rick in Harpoon Studios
Colin and Rick — Harpoon Studios.
Who?

My name is Richard — Rick or Ricky are fine too. When the world was young, my friend Colin and I met up pretty regularly at his home and subjected his poor Mum to our singing and playing various songs and tunes; both covers and songs written by us (but mostly by Colin). Good times, indulging the hubris of youth!

Fast forward some 50 years later, Colin is in Scotland and I am in the USA. We are both retired and reminiscing about our “glory days”, or specifically the musical influences that inspired us in such a profound way all those years ago. It really was a good time for popular music.

Around the same time, we both discovered that AI apps could help us create music in a way we would have sold our souls for back in the seventies. Colin took a couple of his old songs, which we had recorded on reel-to-reel tape (!) back in the day, and recreated them using AI. The results were surprisingly good, so much so that it got Colin thinking...

Rick and Dougie in the studio
In the studio.
Colin and Dougie in the studio
Making music the old-fashioned way.
Why?

Enter the “Cunning Plan”. Could we create a fictional musical group, write original songs, perform them with AI, and even generate images and videos of this band?

The simple answer is that we can in 2026. But it's more than just capability; it allows that same creative “juice” to flow again after all these years. Creating things — even by the proxy of AI — is still fun and exciting. We don't know how many others will share our excitement, but we are having a blast.

We started by making some random songs and videos, to get our feet wet as it were. Colin wrote a whimsical song about his wife Eileen, and I made an Anime-style cartoon video to go with it. All the parties involved liked it. So we had the foundation, the proof of concept.

Meeting in Cyberspace

Two old friends. One new medium.

Recording Today magazine cover featuring Colin and Rick
Recording Today — Inside Harpoon Studios.
How?

Colin and I both quickly discovered that using AI tools can be a lot like herding cats; the cats have their own agenda, and you often must trick them into doing what you want. It can be incredibly rewarding, frustrating, and time-consuming all at once.

Our primary tools include ChatGPT, Claude, and Gemini for phrasing and rhymes. Suno is our main AI song generation platform, though Colin occasionally uses others to pin down a specific sound or “vibe.”

For visuals, we use ChatGPT and Gemini for reference images and backgrounds (finding them easier to prompt consistently than Flux). Kling is our primary video creation tool, chosen because of my prior experience with YouTube. I've also started using MiniMax H3 for local video creation, though my hardware limits me there.

The Fireflies together in the studio
The Fireflies.
The Goal

We are two old duffers who should be “winding down” by society's reckoning, and we just thought “What the heck, let's have a last musical hurrah!” As enthusiastic amateurs, we are creating music in a way that wasn't available to us in our youth. A last fling via the Fireflies — a fictional group who plays the kind of music we loved and respected all those years ago. Now brought back virtually for us and possibly others to enjoy.

In our fevered brains, the Fireflies essentially comprises the remnants of two other groups in our alternate reality — “Flying Saucer” and “2x4”, which are in turn our versions “ELO” and “10cc” respectively. We are aiming for “A band combining the studio brilliance of 2x4, the orchestral imagination of Flying Saucer and the melodic instincts of both.” Flying Saucer evolved from “The Sidestep” (The Move, in the real world).

Colin created a history and timeline for The Fireflies, allowing us to maintain our fiction with some degree of integrity. This led us to design a seven-member band. Some members are based on real people; “Seejay” is perhaps the most obvious reference, as Colin's initials are CJ. All the members play at least one instrument, and all sing in some capacity. The thinking was that they have a big sound and need to recreate it pretty faithfully in concert (like ELO in the 70s). We also have an incongruous android lady because — why not? It's an alternate reality, remember?

So that's it. We hope some more of you “get it” and play along. It's fun, believe me!

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