A Coming Of Age Track by Track pt4 of 12

4. Love³

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.

Enjoy!

Love³ by Ruffa Lane Records