Okay, so I guess the first song is the first song that everyone associates with Sway's version of 2.0.
Yeah.
Fun memories?
Very fun memories, yeah. It was quite a late one that we wrote for the album Sessions.
I think we were kind of like, we'd written a whole lot of songs that we were proud of,
but we were looking for this sort of definitive opening sort of statement,
and we wrote Trash and it sort of seemed to sort of just fit the bill really nicely.
It's a song about kind of being in the band and by extension it's a song about fans
and the whole kind of ethos of being Sway's person.
So it seems to fit the bill quite nicely.
It's the ultimate having a song back that you've sung, isn't it?
Yeah.
The ultimate...
Not having to sing it, so...
Exactly, yeah.
It's in the microphone, in the audience, you know, everyone loves that.
That must have studied the old nerves, Richard.
Yeah, it was kind of, it really was, because it was written at the end of the period of writing,
pretty much at the end, it was the last song we got together for the album.
And it went through a real evolution, it had a different verse and a different chorus.
To start with, it was a different song.
A completely different one, yeah.
He wrote a song and I said, I really like the chorus, let's keep that and write a different verse.
And he wrote a song for the verse and then I went,
I don't like the chorus anymore, let's write a new one instead.
Bored of the chorus.
Yeah, yeah.
But it ended up, it was kind of a hot potch, but it ended up sort of coming together,
as though it had been written in one sweep, you know.
Yeah, it was quite stonesy when we very first wrote it, wasn't it?
I always remember it as being a bit more kind of, almost like boobie-y or something,
and then it being kind of more four on the floor once we actually got to the boobie.
You can't remember any of this.
No, I remember only having a chorus, I don't remember the verse.
It has got a verse as well.
I remember writing the verse.
I remember you writing the verse.
And then we sat, in fact, when we were doing, we were in Westside.
Westside, that's it.
And I remember sitting there, and because we had this great chorus,
and we sort of knew that, and I remember sitting there with the acoustic guitar,
and just doing it like that.
It was like that, wasn't it?
Literally just sort of came out, sort of thing.
But it was a bit of an albatross, because we knew we had this great chorus that we were recording,
and then there was obviously a section of tape where there was just drums,
and various ideas came and went.
And it became like the problem song on the record.
And then, yeah, you fixed it in five, ten years.
Yeah, it's one of those sort of lucky bits of...
I think you wrote the lyrics at the same time as you came up with the chord progression.
Sort of.
I read that you weren't too happy with your vocals on it. Is that right?
No, I don't... To be honest, listening back to it, I don't really...
I don't like the very squeezy on the finish thing.
It's not my favourite thing.
In those days, you couldn't...
Yeah, you couldn't time stretch it, so if you wanted to...
It's not like we couldn't hide it, actually.
It's just a bit stuck, that's the way it was done.
Yeah.
Dave Baskin makes a record with it, so...
It was a bit of a burn of content to me, but I was pretty much only about one thing on that record,
and that was the speed of the song.
I think that's pretty much the only other thing.
But we did every song.
And you were still smoking them, weren't you?
Yeah.
My beef with Brett was that he actually filled...
He was filling up the verses with quite a lot of lyrics, and so...
I think I was just conscious of the fact that we were trying to make a dance record,
and yet these tempos were all slightly...
Trash was one of them.
And Trash gradually got faster and faster and faster,
and then when we recorded it, it still didn't fill the whole song.
When did we try and make a dance record?
That was the brief.
And where's the smoking thing coming to?
Well, if you smoke a lot...
What was in that sandwich?
If you smoke a lot, you can't...
Are you saying my judgement was skewed?
Well, I do think...
By a negative.
I do think by the time...
And anyway, the funny thing was, when that track was mixed,
without any comment from me or Saul or anybody else
I think that's when I got an insanity.
It's a strange one where...
It's one of those ones where people really like it,
and it's one of those ones where they like the fact that it's kind of flawed,
and I sort of think it could have been better.
There's something super poppy in that vocal there, in that variation.
There's something plastic, and...
It suits the mood of the idea of the song in a funny sort of way.
It's a throwaway idea.
It might be very difficult.
There's something very beautiful about the way the melody and the chords work in that song
that I don't think really comes across when you hear it in that form.
You can actually sit at the piano and play that song,
and the melody is so beautiful with the chords.
There's two melodies, aren't there?
Yeah, but you know, it's just...
There's something throwaway about it.
It could have taken on another form, that's what I mean.
Right.
I think it could have.
It could have had a different character.
So then, split in two in Resurgence, a film star.
Yeah.
That was written at my flat, probably sometime in late 95.
And Brett said, I think you said, it was an idea that you'd originally had for doing The Flashboy.
Yeah, it was.
I was singing a similar sort of thing I was doing in Flashboy, and I came to Richard's house.
I just sung him the melody, obviously, without the music.
And I just...
And Richard was sort of like...
We kind of wrote it quite quickly, didn't we?
It was one of those really nice afternoons where we sat and wrote a song, and it's like,
turned around like, oh my God, this is actually really good.
And we came up with kind of like the chorus bit.
Yeah, yeah.
Just a big section sort of thing.
There was a kind of slow, lumpy home demo of it, but it only came together properly when we did it once at the church,
and recorded it there with the whole band.
That was a really good demo, that we did.
Yeah, it was great.
That was an album trance, that demo.
In fact, we ended up taking the guitar set off, didn't we?
It was a shoo-shoo.
So the demos were... it was the first album that they'd actually demoed the tracks,
so they were pretty high standard before.
You know, the previous records, it was dictaphones and...
Richard, you seem to be giving the impression of someone who wasn't really sort of having too much trouble stepping up to the plate.
Well...
Yes and no.
I mean, the actual... the songwriting did come together really easily on coming up.
It was like after that that it got more difficult.
But I think I just had to sort of keep my head down and get on with it, and not think about the bigger picture.
Just, you know, basically work through it, you know, with the goal of having an album at the end of it that we're all proud of, you know.
Was there kind of rising relief among the rest of the band at this point?
Yeah, I think so. Yeah.
It was the first album, I think, that I remember everybody having a great time.
It was a lot of fun making that record.
There was a sense of total enjoyment.
We'd been on the road for, oh God, two years?
Yeah, pretty much.
It was a long time, yeah.
Since Richard joined.
Which in one way was great, because I think, you know, we were playing really well together,
and all those things that you need to do to be a better chemistry and stuff needed to be there.
But at the same time, it was such a fucking relief to not be playing kind of, you know, Dogman-style songs in Bangkok or whatever, you know.
It was just, you know, to actually get in there.
One of the things, we didn't really know whether it was going to work, you know.
Before we did the album, we'd done kind of like B-sides, and that's it.
So I think there was a kind of relief about halfway through.
It was just like, I thought this was going to work, you know what I mean?
And then by the end of it, it's kind of like, you know, now you've got this thing, and no one's really expecting it.
It was a great feeling.
So let's come to Lazy, which again extended your hit-making run with almost effortless aplomb.
This is a funny one. It's a song I wrote ages ago.
I think I wrote it, God, I might have even written it about 1993.
I was just sitting at a piano in my flat in Morehouse Road in Nottingham.
And it just didn't seem like anything.
I think when we were looking for songs, I brought it to Richard, and Richard sort of transformed it.
I like this really nice guitar. It's a quite 60s guitar part.
So it's kind of quite an old song that's just had a bit of a face in that sort of thing.
I remember us rehearsing it quite a lot.
It took shape actually in the studio, in the sound house.
That's when the guitar part was written, and that's when it really started to take off as something sounding like a single.
And we sort of played around with it quite a lot before that.
It was tricky. It might have been the sweetest pop song you've ever written.
Yeah, it's not my favourite song.
You've got a bit of a savage guitar part.
Yeah, it's quite hard to reign it in.
It's a bit too nice. It doesn't really have that kind of...
Yeah, it's definitely one of my favourites, yeah.
So The Beautiful Ones, is that the next single?
The Beautiful Ones was the second single after Trash.
Oh, right. We haven't spoken about that yet.
No, we should speak about musicals.
There's a musical called Dead Leg.
I still like the Dead Leg.
Part of the series of songs is named after playground torture.
It's a Chinese version.
It's all come from you.
If you don't write a hit tonight, I'm going to give you a Dead Leg.
So, perhaps a musical called Dead Leg.
So then we end up with a song called Wet Feet.
It's like one of those motivational speakers.
It works.
Did you turn it on, then?
Did you just turn it on?
I don't know.
That's mellowed since then.
It's quite scary.
The weird thing is that this is one of those things that took months to make it sound effortless.
It was very rinky-dinky at the beginning.
How many different ways did we try that?
Yeah, again, that was another one.
There was a recording on a video of the rehearsal, wasn't there?
And we all tried to emulate that guitar sound off that video.
I just think it's one of those cases where you overthink it.
Because the song was just so good.
It was such a great riff, such a great melody, such great lyrics.
It was tricky getting the groove right.
We eventually found a groove that worked really well.
But that did take a while.
I remember Simon struggling with finding a drum pattern that he was happy with.
It's not really very Simon-ish, is it?
It's not.
It's skippy, and Simon doesn't need it to be skippy.
It was a good groove that we found that we thought would work.
And it was very different for Simon, because Simon doesn't really put those drum beats there.
But once he was happy with it...
You had the guitar line on dobro originally, didn't you?
We did record it on that.
Yeah, but it wasn't live.
What we wanted to do, the trick with that song was...
The riff is really important.
The guitar riff is one of the best guitar riffs of all time.
But it has to fight with the vocal and then duck down until you hear the vocal.
So what we were trying to do was to come up with a way of having the guitar riff being really loud at the beginning.
And when Brett starts singing, find some space for it.
And that's why we ended up with the dobro, which got ditched.
We tried all these different ways of doing it.
And I think we actually had it sorted.
Because in the end, when Dave mixed it, it was about 2 minutes into all the guitar stuff.
And we were sort of stressing about what happened to the guitar just before the riff started.
I remember sitting in Mayfair Studios and recording that again and again and again.
And what we did was try and get it to sound as good as it could.
But yeah, it's a pretty good mix of that song.
It's really, really poppy.
Really poppy second single, you know.
There was a strange pressure on this record that we hadn't had before.
That we really needed to have a successful record.
I don't know if anybody else felt that.
But I did. I was very conscious of the fact that we had these great 5 really strong singles.
But we had to make sure that they turned out properly.
So maybe that was why we were a bit over cautious.
You were sort of trying to turn everything into singles.
Yeah, I was very careful about that.
It's not a bad thing to do, though, is it?
Well, it is if it's not a single.
There's something great about an album track.
Well, the writing stage, though, is sort of to have that kind of usage.
There's nothing harder to write than a single.
I think the thing that's great about all of those songs, the whole thing, is that there's no foul on any of the songs.
It's the complete opposite of...
I don't understand it from the other way.
It's kind of like...
It's a very streamlined record.
But you all wanted to do that.
But at the same time, the elephant in the room was that you actually had to do it.
You know, it was really important after Domo started to come up with the record.
I actually sold shit loads of copies of it.
Yes, it did mean that there were occasions, as Matt pointed out,
of songs that weren't really singles.
I probably tried to shoot sheets of those songs.
I tried to shoot all of them into paper.
Well, accurately speaking.
It did look, at one point, like they were singing something else.
Yeah, it was turning parallel lines or something.
Half the room.
It looked, yeah.
And then, so after that, then it was Saturday night.
Yeah.
Which again, you know, you hear it once and it kind of sticks in your head.
Yeah.
Presumably with the intention.
How did that start?
Where did that originate?
It started as a demo.
Which we changed the chorus to, didn't we?
Yeah, slightly changed it.
I really like the verse and the bridges.
And the chorus didn't do it for me, so I suggested doing it really simple.
D, E, A.
It's quite just that the verse and the bridges, they're quite sort of meandering.
And they take a while to get to the chorus.
And in a way, that's quite anti coming up.
All the songs are meant to kind of get to the point really quickly.
As you know, most of them do.
But because of that, it needed a sort of like simple chorus to hold it together.
And I think the original chorus it had was meandering still.
And it was like, you know, you needed the kind of like the dark and the light together to work, I think.
So I just wrote a really simple chorus to it, sort of thing.
It's quite a complicated song.
It's such a simple kind of melody, isn't it?
Exactly, like that next to Filmstar is kind of just dumb riffing.
I think that's really intricate.
There must be as many chords in that as three or four of the other tracks put together.
That was one of the first songs we finished.
I remember Brett did a vocal and then forced me to stay up all night doing a rough mix.
And this was, what, six weeks, two months into making the record.
And I think that was a big, big moment for you.
Because I remember you going over that and you were like so happy with that one song that you could almost...
Well, it was once I slowed it down.
It was one of those songs that was recorded too fast.
Was it?
Yeah.
And we actually very slowed it down and I re-sung it. I wasn't happy with the speed.
It must have been such a relief to be in the studio for this version of the band to finally get a chance to be in the studio together.
Yeah, it was because we did a lot of touring and it was kind of like we were touring Dogmanstar with a band that didn't make Dogmanstar.
And it felt kind of weird and it felt sort of fake and odd in a way.
And I think we were just desperate to get in the studio and try and be a band that made records.
I mean, for me it's the definition of a band. It's about the records you make, not really about the gigs you play, in a funny sort of way.
So we just wanted to do that. The whole Dogmanstar tour we were just sort of like plotting the record, I suppose, a little bit.
So, yeah, so this would be your first chance to sort of...
First extended period in the studio. We'd done a few B-sides with Dogmanstar, but I did need that year-long tour to kind of put myself into the idea of being in a band, a professional band.
Yeah, we couldn't have lasted if we'd made the records as soon as you joined.
Yeah, if I'd had to write an album as soon as, you know, in 1984 it would have been...
Six more books.
That was quite early, yeah. Again, that was really...
Yeah, but part of being in a band is that sitting around listening to records together.
Yeah, that's right.
I mean, it really is. It's that kind of, you know, listening to things and talking about, you know, the records you love and why you love them, you know, it's kind of...
Dare I say it's suddenly plagiarising them at times.
Well, yeah.
Well, dare.
Sorry?
You put it out there.
Just saying.
Well, then every band I've ever known is kind of...
Oh, yes.
It happens all the time.
That's how you learn to do things, is by, you know, the way you learn to play is by, you know, playing along to a record you really like.
The way you learn to write songs is to rip them off until you become so good at it you can't tell they've been ripped off, you know.
Also, you combine things that you shouldn't, you know, that shouldn't work.
Yeah, yeah.
Like what you were talking about, Ben, was that the Snoop Snoop song?
Yeah, yeah.
Whoever knew.
So, going back to the album, By the Sea.
Yeah, By the Sea is another old song that I wrote before Richard joined.
I can't remember exactly when, but I might have written it in 94 or something like that.
I kind of wrote...
It's a guitar song.
Huh?
It's a guitar song.
Is it?
Yeah, we decided to put it on piano.
Was it?
Yeah, it's the first demo I got to do with a guitar.
What would inform a decision like that to switch the instrument?
To give it a different feel, to give it a more appropriate feel.
And then it was all about getting the recording right, the right kind of just floating kind of woozy feel.
We put in the instrument there, wasn't there?
Because you were after that kind of Paul Tomorrow's Parties kind of genuinely short-form thing.
I think the key to that song was, because it was a piano ballad, it couldn't have sounded too sentimental.
And the chords are quite sort of cosy, aren't they?
Yeah, there's none of that darkness in the next line, because that's quite a sweet song.
But I think through combination A there wasn't much.
It would be the noises that you put on top of it.
We took out all the thirds out, so it became a bit more blank.
We were very conscious that it was quite a sweet song.
I love that song.
Again, Baskin did an amazing job on that mix, that was one of the mixes where
I knew what was on tape was good, but the transformation of that into the finished version, I was just blown away by that.
Was that quite late into the process, then, by this stage?
No, it was quite early, that one.
We played it in Phoenix, didn't we?
Yeah, with you on piano.
The end of the Dogman Stars, it was Phoenix Festival in Stratford in July 1995,
and we sort of premiered it live there as a potential next album track.
It went down really well.
So it was in the back from early on as an album track.
Was there a song on the album that was just shone the way forward?
For coming out?
Yeah, because I assumed it would be Trash, but you say Trash came out.
Yeah, it was quite late, really, I suppose. I think Filmstar was the first really great song we wrote for that album,
where it was suddenly, OK, we can really do this.
Or She.
Yeah, maybe She as well.
In Filmstar, it was quite a weird way round working for Swag, wasn't it?
Because it's very simple, but the rhythm track is made up of samples and loops and stuff.
Yeah, but the version that you had of that song that you recorded in the church
was a very good indicator of where it was going to sound.
But it's the first time we'd really worked in that way of layering up rhythms
and then having something more simple.
Sample claps, that was a big part of that rhythm.
Yeah, we got Ben Helios.
Boy George.
Yeah, exactly.
Boy George did the handclaps on Filmstar.
How come?
Because he was in the next studio, it was a Mayfair.
It was a handclaps party.
And we were chatting and I said, would you want to come and do some handclaps?
And so we did.
Handclaps are now Boy George's, even though he's not credited.
They're very distinctive.
Don't flex like George.
But he's always been, he was actually quite sweet because he was there when we played,
when we just met on the airplane and saw the pops as well, wasn't he?
That's right, yeah.
It was very complimentary.
What about the, was it Star Crazy?
Arguably the only pop song in history that has an allusion to a bomb bush.
I love Star Crazy, yeah.
I would have been very excited for that.
You wrote that online, didn't you?
No, I wrote that in Radical Gardens.
It's a tiny little flat in Crouch End.
There was no room for any possessions there at all.
I remember I had to write down the cause of the wreck.
I didn't have any papers on.
I ripped a piece of street furniture off a lamppost
and wrote on the back of this, do not park here.
I mean, brought it round to Britain, that's the first thing that I gave Spratt.
And so I just threw that to get it on and brought it back there.
I would imagine that would have been quite a nerve-wracking experience
to bring your song up with a possible rejection.
It's the kind of confidence in you, I think.
You just go, I want to come on this.
It was really a lot of fun to see this album coming together.
And it's just like, I discovered this album.
It was like nothing, I wasn't trying to muscle in on it,
but it was just really inspiring to be around.
And it just kind of came up with this music.
So I kind of turned up Brett's cassette.
I mean, I think there was something really nice.
The demos at the time were really rough.
They were kind of literally, you know,
I used to get demos from Brett and then some,
and they'd be like a guitar, quiet,
with him really loud on the guitar,
kind of like a huge echo.
Coughing and stuff.
But there's something really good about that,
because it means that you have to be able to hear a song through the demos.
It has to just hit, you know.
The demos are just so fucking loud.
Yeah, but I mean, that's nice,
because it would have been terrifying if you were coming in with a song for the first time
and all the demos had just come in.
But that's always been the point, demos.
It's like they've been artists,
the demos are just sketches, that's all they are.
You're not supposed to be the 100% of people
and they listen to it apart from the other members of the band,
that's the whole purpose of it.
The lesson is not the purpose of the demo.
That's the gripe of a lot of musicians.
I've spoken to a lot of them,
they have these record companies,
they just play the demos on the record,
so, well, that should be that.
It's a bit unclear there,
well, that's not what he can type.
And you wouldn't understand.
Yeah, but it is just a demo.
So, do you remember receiving the song from Newland?
I do, yeah.
I remember getting it when I was on the set,
I remember rehearsing it.
Yeah, it's a real favourite of mine, actually, that song.
It became a priority.
It was weird, when it arrived in the session,
I remember getting really excited about it,
because we didn't have every song live yet.
It felt like I was worried straight away,
I was quite nervous.
And we just recorded it very shortly,
which must have been an amazing gig for you.
Yeah, definitely,
because I was only really the keyboard player,
which meant I had to kind of press two things on the keyboard,
occasionally, in the middle age,
or in the chorus, or something.
Literally, that was it.
My first gig, I had to play piano on one song,
and that was it.
And you did a bit better, though.
Yeah, I didn't have much to do, really, at that point,
so it's been nice to sit down and play a bit of guitar.
Brilliant.
One of my favourite tracks in the album is
Piddly by the Motorways,
one of the slightly stranger songs on the record, as well.
Yeah, yeah.
That was quite an early one that you wrote, wasn't it?
I think it might have been the very first bit of music
I wrote on persuade,
back in...
I was kind of between houses at the time,
I remember doing a demo at the Greenhouse.
Yeah.
This must have been about October 94, November 94?
And I don't think the song was actually written until 95,
but the music came from right back then,
it was like really, really...
My first go on a full track, you know,
was to write Piddly by the Motorways.
Did you demo that at the church?
I don't remember a church coming out of that.
There was never a proper demo of it,
no, I don't think.
It was all just full track,
and then it was recorded at the townhouse.
So everything you submitted to Sway,
what was it?
Stuff that you wrote since knowing
that you would be in the band,
or was there anything from before?
Well, actually, Together was the only thing
that was left open before that.
There's a bit of Together that was a song from my old band
that I sort of rejigged and turned it into something else.
But yeah, no, everything else was written from scratch,
with a kind of,
I'm now writing for Sway type thing.
Right.
And what made you work lyrically?
Make my life work?
Yeah.
It's kind of an image that was inspired by
my kind of grandparents.
They used to sort of go on, you know,
notary holidays to sort of
Cromer or something like that.
And they'd sort of like get off on a,
you know, they'd get hungry
and sort of like park the car and lay by
and sort of like set up a kind of table and chairs
and have their kind of egg sandwich.
It was sort of like sitting by the
little lorries going by.
The best thing about it is it's such a thing that
you have to be British,
literally anyone who's British heard the title
and was kind of like, oh yeah,
I totally know what that's about.
And the rest of the world must be thinking,
wow, this is some kind of really trippy thing
going on here.
It is, it's a very, you know,
for a song that features a motorway,
it could be more different
into like, to like the Kraftwerk
conception of the second world.
Yeah, it's not surprising, is it?
I was always surprised in one sense
that the chemistry between us
wasn't a single, I guess the lyrical content
may have precluded it from doing so,
but again, it hugely captured the song.
This is an odd one because I had this
demo on a cassette
that I was really proud of,
and I gave it to Brett.
But what happened was,
it was halfway through the cassette
and he rewound it,
but he rewound it to the wrong side.
And what was this nicely crafted demo
with the thing that became Simon's later on
was actually this kind of half-baked idea
which is just me strumming an acoustic tongue
going, that's loaded,
and then going no further with it.
So it's just literally this incredibly quiet
set of chords.
And then Brett wrote this song.
That was mad funny.
So presumably the first you knew about it
was when you got it back.
I was very excited and impressed by it
and thought, I've never heard this before.
Easiest credit you've ever got.
You'd better never do that.
There was a really lovely moment
we did an interview with a blogger last month.
The first thing he said to us was,
you've maybe moved to Stratton.
And we were like, what?
And he'd moved to London for the first time.
He was a huge Swede fan.
He didn't know where to look for a flat.
And he heard the Stratton flashlight
and he just thought,
this is the kind of place the Swede hang out.
It's got to be quite good.
So we apologised to him.
Sorry about that.
We missed out She, by the way.
That's a quote.
Yes, of course.
She's another one like,
that film star, isn't it?
I remember coming round to your place
in Kensington Garden Square
and saying, I've got this idea.
And Richard, again, did a sort of
descending sort of thing
to woe this guitar part around
my very simple idea.
That's one of my favourite songs on the album.
It's such a dramatic song.
We play it live still and it's just
something great about it.
It's not a kind of single or anything.
It does a different job to
the soundtrack and all that sort of thing.
There's something really dark about it and compelling.
And the strings are great.
Craig Armstrong did the strings.
Yeah, I mean, it was very,
you know, not to knock Craig,
he did a great job,
but there was a real atmosphere already in the track.
Like a real John Barry kind of
suede take on all of that.
And he just
put these strings on
and just completely cemented it.
How far down the process
did it appear? The strings?
The song? Oh, it was quite early.
Very early.
We were demoing it
just when Neil was
kind of joining the band.
I think that first day I came down
you were working out how to do
that slowdown
at the end. As if you'd kind of
stopped a tape and it's
I do remember when we did the demo
that the engineer wiped the tape.
And then went and hid.
And what?
And then he went and hid. Basically
he managed to wipe out the first 30 seconds
of every
single instrument.
And then he was so worried
that even though we were getting the place
for free, he was so worried
that he just went and hid. And someone had to come down
and say, someone says wipe
the tape. We tried to re-record it
by turning the tape backwards
and then doing a canned
all the way back and it didn't work.
Dave Stewart used to
own the church studios
in Crouch End and for some
reason, very kind of him, he offered
us a load of free studio time to
demo there. Did you have a father
and a wife? No, he was just
a big fan of the band. You know, he liked
us and so we
took him up on it and we spent a whole
summer just kind of getting...
I don't know why the fuck we were playing there, why we
didn't actually do some proper recording there.
And did this, is this why the kind of
serendipitous thing of you joining
Exactly. Because you lived around the corner, didn't you?
Yeah. Just up the hill
in Crouch End
I came down
and borrowed a suit off Simon and just hung around
and that's how it...
So how much time elapsed between you borrowing
the suit?
It's that easy
to join a band.
I think I got a
demo tape of whatever
wherever the songs were at that stage
and then like two days later
I came down to a rehearsal at Backstreet
Was it in fact
by the same? Is that the first thing that you were playing?
Were you playing piano then? Yeah.
That's what I thought.
I think there was a real sense, apart from the fact that you
fitted in really well, that we didn't
want to be in the studio
with kind of
one person going off and kind of
recording the record. And none
of us are piano players
apart from Ed, obviously
and there's a piano on the record
and Neil came in and could actually play
which was a bit of a bonus
because the rest of us were too finger in the way
and there's a real sense
I think on the record that it sounds like a band
Everybody was in the studio
I think every day
for most of the day. And there were certain
rituals like Simpsons at 5 o'clock
and it was a very different
Yeah, it's a lovely record to make actually
It really was. We had
such good memories of it. It was a
really nice united
feeling about the band.
We kept changing the studio. It was kind of fun, wasn't it?
We'd go to a new studio and we'd be like
I like it! Let's find a new studio!
So Brett would go off and come up with an idea
and so we literally went all over London
We did Townhouse, Westside
Mayfair, Master Rock
in that order.
And they were all closed then?
Yeah, they were all closed.
The V-Sides as well were closed.
Protocol, Weston.
That's not a lot. And it did take a long time
It was an expensive record and it took a long time
It took 6 months
It would have been more expensive
if Dave
had made it for the studio
Well, none of the record
was recorded at Dave's place, it was just a demo
Although I think there was one
sound, was it She, the guitar sound?
Yeah, we couldn't better it.
It was one of those demo-itis things
There's a guitar stab
in the verses of She
that we did a demo of it and we just couldn't
get it to actually use the demo sound
and we sampled it.
Well, it was one of those situations where
you know, Brett was like
that couldn't sound like this, and kept describing it
and it was like
eventually I think the pay dropped
and me and Richard just turned around and said
well, you mean like the demo?
But that process took a week, two weeks
Well, I used to have a stereo
at my house, only one speaker worked
Well, you say that
in the past, but
that just leaps to your heart
Do you know what I mean?
The song's
the only important thing
Sounds very Mark E. Smith
Exactly
It's just stereo
So I missed out half of the guitar parts
So I just heard it
I heard it as this really
as this sort of thing where it's basically drums
Cabasa
And that stab, and that's what I thought it should be
So there was a whole other guitar part
that I wasn't hearing
So that's
just one of those things
This speaks of a very laid back approach
Lay back, yeah
We'll go with that
So, yeah
that's sort of coming up
Europe is up later
Yeah, it's a song that Matt wrote actually
He wrote the music
I wrote it on this kind of vague
Bon Tempi organ thing
It wasn't actually Bon Tempi
It was Samba Tango
Because it was written
to a kind of
What are they called?
You know the rhythm tracks
that you get on open
Oh, when you hold down a key
Yeah, so you've got military rhythm
or rumba
It's like John Shuffle
And it's literally just chords
Here's a chord
It doesn't sound
At the end of the demo
you wouldn't like that
It's a great song
I always sort of thought it was
It should have been used to
advertise inter-railing
Do you know what I mean?
It's a song about travelling
Yeah
It still exists
Does inter-railing still exist?
It does, yeah
So yeah, that was the last one
That was the last one
from that period
Have you ever been this low?
It was recorded in LA
In February 1995
We were out on tour and we needed B-sides
for what was going to be the fourth single
from Dog Man's Story
which was going to be The Power
And our record company put us in the studio
saying that we had to record B-sides
but secretly what they wanted
they wanted us to come up with a single
didn't they?
I think so, yeah
They told me that
Because we'd already done it with Together
and New Generation
You should have briefed me
if you had any idea
He just assumed that
if you put us in the studio at that time
you'd come up with something that was single-shaped
and it didn't happen
It was a safe studio at Michael Jackson
we called it Thriller
So he wanted a single
and he got Evan
Have you ever been this low?
Sam, and we worked on a very early version
of Money as well
Have you ever been this low?
So it's a very compositionally assured song
I think
Yeah
I really like it actually
It's dark as hell isn't it really?
It's about as far away from
California
Comeback
Californian single
When did you write it?
Music was late 94
Song was when we were on tour
It was about being on tour
It's about the drudgery and the depression
that can result
from tour fatigues
Another low one
is something that I wrote
Now this is one that really could
be in a musical
Yeah, I really like this one
I remember writing it
You call it a lame page I think
Because it was quite dramatic
It could be quite confusing
because people might think it was about
a lame page being
an abusive relationship
I don't think she ever featured in the lyrics
No, it's more of a stylistic thing
Like the you know her or something
I wrote it in my flat
in Chesterton Road
in W10
Sometime in 94 or 95
And we
I remember we recorded it in Wessex
We did, yeah
Electro version
Yeah, wasn't it?
There was a lot of moog on it
as I recall
There wasn't a lot of moog
Most of these sessions
basically involved Ed putting moog on things
and us going Ed it doesn't need
moog on this thing
Everything needed moog
And sometimes that trash kind of transformed us up
I remember we had
We were recording that at Wessex
There's this
There's a school next door to Wessex
And there was a playground there
We recorded some
The kids at playtime
And then kind of faded them out
Just before the vocal came
We had to fade the vocal quite quickly
Because the last thing you can hear one of the kids say
I want it
Just before Brett starts singing
We had to dip it
I was so excited
Why did we have to move it exactly?
It's still there, almost, in all the corners.
Young Men was a song, one of the early songs that Richard wrote.
That's a really good one.
That we debuted at Phoenix Festival.
Yeah, Young Men and By The Sea was the kind of two new songs that we debuted at the end of the Dominance album.
So Young Men, were they people you knew, the ones that you sing about?
No, it was a comedy band with a friend of mine called Bruiser.
It was this sort of parody Britpop band.
It was songs like Kisses For My Misses.
So it was supposed to be crossed between Bruiser and All The Young Dudes.
A story about all these fictional characters.
I suppose it was a sort of doll army kind of thing.
It's always good to have someone called Terry in a song.
Exactly, yeah.
Then Sound Of The Streets.
Yeah, that was one of mine, I think.
Which is a real fan favourite.
There's loads of them.
It was definitely, because we were into the third single by this point, it was definitely presented as here is a B-side sort of thing.
But it was really good.
Yeah.
And there's this character as well.
That's an actual guitar sound.
Sadie.
Yeah.
Yeah, I had Sadie in a couple of songs.
I had Sadie and there's Terry as well.
You mentioned Terry, but Terry was in a couple of really early Swede songs that never made it onto the record as well.
So I had this little kind of menagerie of characters that just wandered around the songs.
Sort of like a cast, like a regular cast in your head.
Well, exactly.
And I should have really carried it on, shouldn't I?
And had the scene, you know, their lives could have sort of developed and we could see what they're doing now.
You know, maybe I'll drag them out of retirement for the next album.
It was a fantastic song.
Sound of the Streets is one of those things that it was recorded really quickly.
Like, oh, we've got a B-side, blah, blah, blah.
And it's probably all the better for that because it just kind of rolls along.
There's no kind of, there's nothing clever about it, is there?
It's a real shame that we didn't put it on an album, because it's great.
Money is Forgettable, do we need to talk about that?
I quite like Money.
I always quite liked it.
I always quite liked that one.
It's a guitar part, but...
Exactly.
It seems to be inspired by a very specific situation or person.
Well, it's kind of just... I don't know.
I don't know, it's a huge story about it.
Okay.
Well, WSD, I don't know if this is a sort of, every suede fan knows what WSD, apart from me, knows what WSD stands for.
We're So Disco. That's what the original title of the song was, We're So Disco.
And then we kind of like, we sort of made it weird and sort of reggae-fied it and I don't know why we turned it to initials.
I don't know.
It just seemed appropriate.
Perhaps because it didn't fit, though. It would have been quite funny to have a song called We're So Disco.
Perhaps it was because the original one was called We're So Disco, but it was really spiky, kind of...
Like a Sid Barrett thing.
Yeah, it was, yeah.
Is that a protocol, that song?
Yes.
It was, wasn't it?
Oh, I thought we did it ourselves.
It's not fair.
No.
You sound like you're sort of channeling Joe Wobble or something on the bass.
Well, I think that was the whole thing, that we had this song and we really didn't know what to do with it.
Because it just didn't seem right. So we just whacked a whole load of loops on it.
Was it before or after? It was just before we did that Poor Little Rich Girl, wasn't it?
Yes.
And we were just...
No, it was like January 96.
Oh, was it?
Yeah, just a Saturday night beat.
It was just literally a really quick thing. How do we make this sound not like it was a Sid Barrett song?
Yeah.
So it's just got like one loop running through it.
It's quite... I mean, it's a really spooky vocal, isn't it?
Yeah, it is.
This brilliant video of it online, which is...
Oh, that Chinese thing.
Yeah, it's just that over North Korean marching.
Oh, that's huge.
Wow.
Yeah, I've seen that.
It fits so perfectly. It's great. It's quite trippy.
Well, hats off. When I think about jumble sale months, I sort of...
Yeah.
I think about, you know, you can take the cigarette out of Harry's teeth. Dot, dot, dot.
Yes, exactly. Yeah, it's just about kind of dead-end lives in small towns, really.
I used to go to lots of jumble sales when I was a little boy, and that's where we got most of our possessions from.
So I've very much invested into my bric-a-brac store and all that, you know, at the local church hall.
Yeah, jumble sale.
So you're just channeling those sorts of memories.
Yeah, exactly. Yeah, just sort of dead-end lives.
It's quite a nice part at the end of that, where it goes trippy with the harmonies and stuff, isn't it?
That's quite nice.
I'm quite proud of the music on that. I still play the chorus to myself sometimes.
Just for pleasure.
Just for kids.
This time, there's another one that's a real last one. That's a fantastic song.
That's up there with Eurozar Playground.
When did you write it?
It was one that was sort of knocking around for the coming up sessions, but...
This was Wedgie. This was another torture song.
Oh, God, that was Wedgie.
For some reason, it wasn't even a contender, was it? I don't really know why.
And then we needed a B-side, and suddenly we realised it was a really good song.
It was all realised afterwards.
Realised too late, yeah.
The quality is very high on that. It's just quite bewildering to come across that in the context of a load of B-sides.
Yeah, it's just got a really nice outro. All this mellotron comes in.
Yeah, it's a really lovely song.
We just kind of let it flow, and what came out was good. We didn't overthink it, I don't think.
Yeah, it's nice. And the piano part's really nice, as well.
Sadie's another favourite.
Sadie's a really accomplished piece of work, I think.
What was the genesis of that one?
It came from a home demo of mine when we were trying to write album tracks.
Which one was that? Hugo Buebel?
No, Hugo Buebel was... These are the sad songs. Sadie was called New Peter Stewart.
Peter Stewart's a guy we know. I don't know why it was called that.
I remember us rehearsing it quite a lot, but we didn't get it together for the album.
So we rehearsed it again when we needed a B-side at the beginning of 97.
And it came together like that. It does sound very focused. It's quite a focused recording.
It's a parallel world. It could almost be the epic centrepiece of the record, or at least...
You can imagine it being developed into something.
It's got some nice violin profanity.
Yeah, it's a nice piece of music.
That's another one that always goes down well, that we play live a couple of times, haven't we?
We did it at that B-side.
Have you ever done that?
Yeah, at the B-side gig.
Really?
I've only got two more, shall I?
What else is on there?
Is that it?
No, it's apparently not.
Graffiti Women and Duchess.
Graffiti Women was something that I wrote in about 97, using the chords to He's Dead, I think.
Very similar chords.
And that's about it, really.
We recorded that at Eastgate. Is that still there?
It's another studio that we did.
It's still there, I think.
And Duchess is something...
I don't know what to say about Duchess.
It was a whole band piece called Guatemala, that went on for quite a long time and changed key a lot.
And then we stripped it all back and turned it into a Hammond organ sort of ballad.
As you do.
As you do, yeah.
Break up the Hammond!
And we were on the fifth album, the fifth single by this point, and we'd put a lot of B-sides out, and we were kind of needing a rest, I think, by that point.
I remember speaking to a lot of bands around this time who were really sort of bewildered by the...
or, you know, run ragged by the sort of demands of record companies.
Because everything was coming out on as many formats as possible.
It's true, you start off with your first couple of singles with tracks that were almost good enough to be on the album,
and they were recorded in the album session, and by the time you get to single number five, it's, you know...
Stuff we could manage in the time.
Well, yeah, I mean, yes, a lot of the tail's wagging the dog.
Yeah, exactly.
I mean, sometimes it's really good, you know, there is the thing of, like, some sound restraints or something like that.
The recording of it's nice and simple because it's just a B-side.
But sometimes it is, you know, especially if I had music that was kind of like...
You've got the time booked.
Yes, it appears in the schedule.
Yeah, B-sides, and you think, when have you got them?
The schedule is never wrong!
Yeah, that's the thing about that, though, don't you?
Yeah, we've been very free here.
I mean, you know, it's like, you take a thing from Hamlet, High Rise, and you turn it up in the studio, and you record it as a song.
It's just, you know, it's a squeeze. One too many squeezes at the moment.
I think we found it quite difficult to kind of write on the road.
You either kind of have time at home, and then you get to write, or you're touring.
And so, a lot of these were kind of recorded in the week when we weren't on a European tour, or in between tours, and so it's like, it was our week off, really.
It was strange.
I lived in a flat from 96 to 97, I think I stayed there about 20 days, because we were on tour so much.
It would have been cheaper to stay in a hotel.
Yeah.
Hindsight is a beautiful thing.
Yeah.