This is a sad song with sad beginnings. I started writing it on my Grandmothers piano when I went to keep her company just after my auntie had lost her battle with cancer. I think I finished it at four in the morning at Soulsville SE5, slightly the worse for wear on a really miserable New Years Eve shivering and snivelling in gloves.
It’s not really about death, just general feelings of loss and abandonment.
I wanted to capture that feeling of when you’re feeling down and things get on top of you to an almost surreal level and you have a shower and it feels like you’re in there for ever, you just drift away. Either that or when you totally submerge yourself in the bath and you can only hear your own thoughts.
So feelings of distance, dislocation, disenchantment and all those other happy emotions. I wanted the guitars to sound like waves lapping, and the strings to sound like clouds gathering, but the whole thing to have a sunset quality.
This one owes a big debt to my hero, Burt Bacharch, and Q magazine said already that it’s “the best song Carole King never wrote”. Which I suppose is a polite way of a saying it’s a big Carole King rip-off, which is probably true! Tapestry is the Carole King album to get if you like things like this, very warm and beautiful, melancholic but still uplifting, like being in a log cabin on an evening at the end of the summer.
I don’t want you to think I sit around the mixing desk blubbing all the time, but the tears were rolling again when Ali sang it and my my chest was bursting when the strings went down but like I say, it’s a sad song.
There’s a great bit I found at end of the recording which has the rhythm section sounding like two old timers, “That was the one.” “Yep, that was the one for me” “Yep.” “Yep.”It feels like it’s been around for a long time though. We get criticised for not sounding modern enough, but the way I see it, I’d rather be unfashionable now and still be listened to for a long time, than this weeks darlings that no one wants to hear about come next week. We’re in it for the long run and the big prize.
I don’t know how often we’ll play it live, but we did it at the album launch and you could hear a pin drop.
Warm water, how can you turn to me and say “It’s over”?
I’ve been a bit lax in your track-by-tracks over the last couple of days. The tour took a bit of a manic turn in Manchester, one of those nights where you can sense something might kick off at any moment. I won’t go into detail but no soundcheck, an indifferent crowd, off-their-face lunatics (including second guitarist for a well known Manchester band) getting into the dressing room and harassing Ali (eventually being forcibly ejected by The Primitives burly drummer) all made for a unenjoyable night. It happens.
We high-tailed it over to Yorkshire as quick as we could, stopping only for some questioning by a bored copper, who we feared was going to ask for a full search of the van until I pulled out my best accent. “Is this your van?” “No, we’re hiring it.” “Do you have any documentation to prove that?” “Errrr….no” “Where are you going?” “We’ve just played a gig in Manchester and now we’re off to stay with me family” “Oh you’re in a band are you? Are you any good?” “Grand” I said.” “Have a safe journey then sir.”
York was much better, almost a hometown gig for me, although it got off to bad start when my guitar strap snapped on the first chord of ‘Woah Billy!’. I tried playing on one leg for a bit, then settled for kneeling on the floor, which I was just about getting away with, until Ali thought my mike stand had fallen down and unhelpfully put it back up, leaving me stranded. A quick change and all was cool though.
So… ‘A Coming of Age’
Usually in this band Ivor is the Riffmeister General but I’ve had the riff for this since the proto-Lucky Soul days in Glasgow although I could never find a suitable song to fit it in.
It contains a discordant sounding flat 5 chord or ‘The Devil’s Interval’ as it better known. It was banned by the Roman Catholic Church in the middle ages for basically sounding a bit evil amongst other more technical/nonsensical things.You’ll probably know it best from Jimmy Hendrix’s ‘Purple Haze’ and also the start of ‘The Simpsons’ theme tune. It’s a great chord to use if you want something to sound really dark.
We tried it with me and Ivor playing the riff at the same time but it just kept sounding like Black Sabbath, so it’s just me and a couple of pedals.
Apart from the obvious James Bond/John Barry reference points, for me this is wall to wall Scott Walker, particular the Scott 4 album and a little bit of his ultra dark meat slapping side. Probably the song ‘The Seventh Seal’, which deals with a knight playing chess with death, was the biggest influence and also his classic ‘The Old Man’s Back Again (Dedicated To The Neo-Stalinist Regime)’ which has my favourite bass line of all time. If you haven’t heard much Scott Walker then you have many treats ahead of you, and although he maybe a bit dark for some, his fatalist humour does it for me. If you were a fan of The Last Shadow Puppets album, it’s fair to say you will like (and recognize) Scott 4.
As well as Scott, this song is haunted by the ghost of Serge Gainsbourg and his pièce de résistance ‘Histoire De Melody Nelson’. This is an album you must own, if only because it probably doesn’t sound like anything else you have. Rubbery funk bass lines, moody arrangements and dark choral backing mixed with cantankerous narration en Français, all combine to make something very cinematic but also intimate in such a way that the listener can feel voyeuristic at times.
Anyway enough with the classics and back to us, which is why we’re here. I’m really proud of the strings on this one, the best arrangement I’ve done I think and the way they play off Stephen Large’s manic hammond organ. It’s all very intense.
The title refers to a loss of innocence or a rude awakening rather than the triumphant statement of the the album title when taken out of context. This theme of innocence lost runs right through the album. I’m an optimistic and excitable person with very high hopes and that can lead to a lot of anticlimaxes and I guess that most of the lyrics for this record were written in a period of change and inactivity after the full-on excitement of ‘The Great Unwanted’. Inactivity breeds self doubt, at least for me, I’m only truly happy when I’m being creative.
I think were still battling through the lyrics to this right up to the deadline and we really struggled as to whether the line ‘And where fools rush in, well I run hell for leather -too late to make it better, too late’ fitted. Now when I listen back I can’t hear anything wrong, in fact it’s my favourite line. The amount of times that happens over a record is astounding. At the time you can get really wrapped up in minute detail but with a bit of perspective it’s all fine.
I hope you like the song, I honestly don’t think many bands would have the ambition to try and pull something like this off these days.
"This is the sound of a band switching from black-and-white to colour. One of the albums of the year, hands down."Simon Price – Independent on Sunday 5/5
And who are we to disagree? You can get it here, here or here or from all your usual physical and digital retailers.
Secondly a big thank you to everyone who came down to Cargo on Thursday and made our album launch a fantastic night to remember. It was the most fun we’ve had at a show for a long time, the new songs went down really well and it was great to meet old faces and new afterwards. So, thank you, you’re amazing.
If you missed us, then never fear, we’re back in Club NME at Koko in Camden at the end of the month. Tickets are available here. We kicked off our jaunt round England supporting The Primitives yesterday in Bristol, which continues tonight in Nottingham. Dates are below.
19 Apr The Bodega Social, Nottingham*
20 Apr Moho Live, Manchester*
21 Apr Fibbers, York*
24 Apr Flapper and Firkin, Birmingham Tickets 30th Apr Club NME, Koko, London Tickets 13 May Firebug, Leicester Tickets 14 May The Great Escape, Brighton
19 June Sala Caracol, Madrid
*Supporting The Primitives
If you’d like to know a bit more about the album and listen to each track in full, then Andrew’s rambling track by track preview is here
Come and say hello if you’re planning to see us on tour and do tell us what you think of the album.
Hilly Fields is a small oasis of calm in between Brockley, Greenwich and Lewisham in South London. It’s one of those places that’s great to watch the sun go down, in this case over the Crystal Palace. Sometimes you just need to sit on hill and think about stuff.
I was listening to a lot of Neil Young’s ‘After The Gold Rush’ when I wrote this. He’s got an amazing way of saying nothing and everything at the same time. Totally loading insignificant words with the listeners hopes and fears. It’s an amazing and difficult skill.
So a bit of Neil Young and a bit of ‘Dirty Old Town’ By the Pogues and a sizeable chunk of ‘Wichita Lineman’.
The first line “Ride a blue eyed horse” came from a photo that Ali took of a friends horse – a horse with blue eyes. And a horse with blue eyes is pretty freaky thing let me tell you. It’s like the horse can see into your very soul and know’s every bad decision you’ve ever made. All the other lines are romantic wistful notions really.
The only real anecdote I’ve go about this song, apart from every member of the band getting the chords wrong every time we practice, is when we recorded the vocals. Ali sang it through just a few times. By the third go she said “that was a bit boring wasn’t it? Shall we try something else?” I was in-front of the computer with tears streaming down my face. It was a performance of complete subtlety and tenderness and it really got to me. It’s a wonderful moment when someone can sing a song that you’ve written and transcend it so completely. And when the tears come, it’s time to stop and realise you’ve got something good.
I’m really happy with it. It’s a romantic song, laced with pain and loss…But without getting too maudlin here’s what the band have to say about it after a night out in Nottingham
Art says: Every country, every culture has a Hilly Fields. This song’s poetic vision is beyond one man’’s experiences. It translates into any raised ground that is not made of concrete…. Actually, there was this girl…
Ivor: I used to live near there. The End.
Rust:Don’t Fear the Country.
Paul: It got the best response at the album launch from all the songs we did. It’s a timeless song.
I’m writing this one in the back of the van (Get in the back of the van!) coming back from our first date supporting The Primitives. Tonight’s gig was, I kid you not ,on a boat in a canal in Bristol. The gentle rocking was good and we resisted the temptation to do Bontempi covers of ‘I Just Called to Say I Love You’ and ‘Wind Beneath My Wings’ but I think we went down very well anyway.
So onto today’s album preview.
Love³ or Love3 or Love, Love, Love is damn good fun for starters. It’s based around a descending piano line that I ripped off was influenced by Bobbie Gentry’s ‘I Wouldn’t Be Surprised’ (amazing singer, amazing song). This descending piano theme appears several times across the album and in the B side to ‘WRD’, ‘Cryin’ in The Morning’. I think it’s good to have a theme, as it helps gel things together however subtle it may be.
This track seems quite breezy but it was a real pain to get right. First we had a bit of an ongoing problem with the bass which Russell solved in a eureka moment on Denmark street in London.”Quick come in here” he said dragging me into Wunjo’s guitar shop (admittedly I didn’t take much convincing). I was surprised though,when he asked to try out a bass and proceeded to play the whole song, note perfect with the perfect funky bass line that the song was crying out for. Ivor’s guitar part was originally a kind of ska-chop which never sat right until he started absent-mindedly playing Jean Knight’s Mr Big Stuff in rehearsal.
Let’s not talk about the vocals. Alright, lets. 230 takes. Two Hundred and Thirty Takes!!! Yes, there were tears shed, yes, there were walkouts, yes, the were objects thrown. Nailed it in the end though. It has to be right. You can imagine just how tired I was saying “It has to be right 230 times” and all Ali had to do was sing it and it’s only 2 minutes long! I’m only joking, sometimes they just take a fair bit of feeling through and it is a really hard song to sing. In the end we went for pretending to be Dolly Parton to get the feel right.
The lyrics on this make me laugh. I was going for an old spiritual/gospel feeling, then the ‘I got love tattooed across one hand and mo’ love on the other’ line came into my head and after that, I tried to fit in as many puns in as I could. I’m dead pleased that I managed to fit the word ‘ennui’ into it and my favourite line is ‘I’m not superstitious but I’ll curse you if you leave’.
Basically it’s an old school ‘take your hands off my man’ style jealousy number. And not just happy clappy, you naughty, naughty NME writer.
Oh, and Dan the engineer called it ‘country Jacksons’, which just about sums it up.
I am the Resurection by The Stone Roses, Pounding by Doves, Keep on Running by The Spencer Davis Group, Be My Baby by Vanessa Paradis. Snare, Snare, Snare-Kick, Snare-Kick. Every band should have a song with this rhythm and I wanted one for a long, long time. It just makes you want to jump up and down, it’s instantly danceable.
This one started with a few Johnny Marr major seventh chords on the guitar and the Earl Van Dyke piano riff came swiftly after. It probably sounds very Motown on first listen, especially with the multi layered Temptations backing vocals but to me it’s Dexy’s Midnight Runners all the way.
This was one of those tracks in rehearsal that went “Paul can you play this drum beat, Russell here’s the chords play something on top of that, the piano starts up, in comes Ivor and away we go. It really didn’t change much from there on in. I think it was the first or second song we wrote for this album and for me, it could easily be on ‘The Great Unwanted’, it’s a transitional one.
I aimed for a smooth Phillie soul feel with the strings and there’s a few shiny Rhodes keyboards in there but quite consciously didn’t put the horns in to avoid pastiche. Whether that worked or not, I’m not sure, it still sounds pretty 6T’s but it’s all good fun anyhow. It’s not far off the magic 3 minute mark and it’s very poppy lyrically with the usual miserable overtones. It’s really stomping live.
I think this was Art’s first recording for lucky soul. Art came to tune Barbara, my rattly old piano and we hit it off instantly talking about The Staple Singers and Glen Campbell. He has his own band- Art Terry and The Fairies and his music is a wonderful half way point between Curtis Mayfield and Van Dyke Parks. Needless to say he’s an amazing piano player and is almost unbearably cool, and we hope this rubs off on us a little. You can quite often find him entertaining in The Gladstone in Borough which is one of the best little pubs in London.
Oh my I nearly forgot the best thing about this song! When we were in Britannia Row recording this, I think on the 3rd take, Russell’s (I’m gonna call him Rusty from now on) bass amp caught fire. Literally went up in flames! How weird is that? It was a beautiful vintage Fender head as well, such a shame. I had a bit of a wobbly Brian Wilson moment, having only very recently been criticised by our Japanese label for my depressing lyrics, thinking that I’d cursed the entire band with this song. I stopped short of making everyone wear fire helmets though and thought twice before asking if we could bring a horse in the studio for the song ‘Upon Hilly Fields’ which you will find out in a couple of episodes time but for now..
What you gonna do when it all goes up in flames? When your luck’s gone running and your dream’s gone sour and you’ve only got yourself to blame?
White Russian Doll or WRD was mostly recorded at our initial sessions at Britannia Row in Fulham where we laid down the basics for five tracks. In the end we weren’t happy with the drum sound and re-recorded the rhythm tracks in a frantic last couple of hours at Brendan Lynch’s place which we’ll speak more of later.
This track started with the chorus and I wanted to make the main melody quite jazzy and have that Stereolab block harmony thing going on. I’ve loved Stereolab since I got an NME VHS video from a carboot sale when I was 16 and it had hypnotic track called Super Electric on it. It was another Stereolab song (Pop Quiz, from the album Music for the Amorphus Body Study Centre) that really got me interested in string sections on pop records.
When first started listening to music, back when indie music didn’t really go near the mainstream charts, there was a general feeling that, if you had a string section on your records, you had sold out. I think this was still a hangover from punk’s year zero obliteration of prog rock. Then Oasis came along and it was deemed OK to be ruthlessly ambitious and spending enormous amounts of money on a full orchestra to play a few chords behind your track became a badge of success. This is of course simplifying things a bit but when Lucky Soul was forming, I knew I wanted to bring back the old romance of carefully arranged strings. When I finally got to hear The Stockholm Strings playing the new songs in a Swedish studio, well I can’t begin to tell what an amazing feeling that was… it was a ‘this is what I’m truly meant to do’ moment. I felt so lucky and honoured.
Anyway back to the song and for me, Ivor’s riff makes it. I would describe it as ‘needley’, which I’m not sure is an actual word or even an understandable phrase, but that’s how it feels to me and it just gets in your head from the off. Something we were looking for across the record and particularly on this track was an insistent beat, never letting up but still with enough dynamics in it to be far away from Snow Patrol loudness sludge. We played ‘Heatwave’ by Martha and The Vandellas live for a while and that’s the most obvious touch-point, with a fair helping of ‘This Charming Man’ and a bit of the Style Council too.
Lyrically it’s pretty vague, it’s a love song of sorts I suppose but more of a protective song. We played Russia two years ago so that was influential and I was definitely after a repetitive lyric to match the title, like a lyrical interpretation of the The White Stripes Seven Nation Army video where there’s always something inside something else.
So there you go, a good upbeat song for track two, and for me a good example of the difference in feel between this album and the last; compare ‘Add your Light To Mine, Baby’ to ‘WRD’ and I think you’ll see the underlying darkness to this record, next to the youthful exuberance of the first.
Below is the video shot by our friend and amazing video director James Slater on a fun weekend in Berlin. Next up, a song most of you won’t have heard.
So here we are just a week away from the release of our new album A Coming Of Age, 3 years to the month since The Great Unwanted hit the shops and 4 years since our first single My Brittle Heart. A long time. I think the writing for this recod started late 2007 and we first hit the studio in December 2008 with a punishing 10 months of recording, editing, mixing and mastering until it was finally finished 6 months ago. Without boring you with too much record label promotional guff, you have to wait at least 3 months if you want the big glossy magazines to review you. Add in Christmas and here we are at last.
So I thought I’d give you a track by track run down of the album to get you geared up for the release. We’re really proud of the album, particularly the way it runs together as an album should. Some great tracks got left off, but we felt it was really important that the album felt good a whole. It clocks in at 36 minutes which is pretty short and sweet (although one minute longer that The Beatles’ Revolver). We set out to make a warm, direct album with a timeless feel and I believe we’ve achieved that and I hope sincerely hope you enjoy the fruits of our, sometimes hard labour.
So here goes…
1. Woah Billy!
This one came about after I watched a TV show featuring Billy Bragg. I was really struck by his demeanour and by the fact that he always seems to be fighting for a cause and doing something worthy. Plenty of people do that of course but not that many marry a pop career with it and that’s what he is to me, a pop singer. I’m always a bit in awe of supreme confidence and I started off this conversation with him in my head where I was saying basically “You always seems to be doing the right thing and juggling that with making making mostly great and very soulful music. How do you do it? and not end up making a complete Bono of yourself?”
So for me the crux line of this song is “You seem so sure about yourself. What’s your secret?” Basically it’s a song about insecurity and frustration.
I met Billy Bragg himself recently but I was far to shy to say anything about the song. He was incredibly confident and a towering presence and maybe slightly overbearing with it. It was definitely a public persona though and I never did find out if inside he’s a secret worrier like the song says.
It’s a weird song and doesn’t really have a traditional verse/chorus structure, but I new I wanted it to say ‘Woah Billy!’ as many times as possible. I think it came together pretty quickly in rehearsal and the big glam riff was there pretty much from the start and I’m pretty sure that the disco break down felt like a really obvious thing to do. We’ve been opening shows with it for a while, so it felt right as the big introduction to the album and a statement of intent for a more powerful sound that we were after on this album, partly due to the arrival of a new rhythm section. Paul (Mr. Atkins) and Russell (Rusty) immediately clicked together when Rusty came to audition. I remember Paul saying it was like his kick drum had a remote control for the bass on it and we’ve become a much more solid outfit since they came along.
Here it is, in the slightly surreal context of our new video which was made entirely by Lucky Soul (see news section). Stay tuned for the rest of the album…
Woah Billy! will be available from Monday 12th April as a digital download, backed with new soaring, country ballad ‘Why Can’t Everyone Be Nice For A Change?’ A limited edition 7″ will be available on 26th April, back with the BBC Radio 2 Record of the Week, ‘White Russian Doll’
Written, shot and cut by Lucky Soul.
Here’s what Andrew has to say about it…
“After blowing our video budget on one too many string sections, we decided to embrace our DIY ethic and shoot one ourselves. Everything from storyboards to sets, lights to animation we did ourselves and the film was shot on a long Saturday in Ali’s front room by guitarist Ivor Sims (who also directed the video for our first single) The video uses some really old Pelham marionette puppets that bassist Russell used to play with when he was a kid. They’re very macabre and have that disturbing Punch and Judy feel so we went for a Grimm-esque narrative with a distinctly non-Grimm disco breakdown.
The plot features the story of our puppet heroine ‘Dot’ and search for her abducted beau ‘Billy’ from her rough cut paper house, through cardboard forests to a ‘Watch With Mother’ style Studio 54, running into a host of weird and sinister characters along the way.
Shooting almost literally on a shoe string was challenging but probably the most enjoyable time we’ve had? a video and despite its low budget we achieved what we set out to do which was to make something very watchable, a little bit silly and a lot of fun.”
