A Coming Of Age Track by Track pt2 of 12

2. White Russian Doll

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.

White Russian Doll