Everyone's A Superstar

Making our new song with IAN SWEET!

Hello, in case you missed it, we released a song on Tuesday. It’s a collaboration with IAN SWEET and it’s the first song we’ve released in 2 years. I wanted to give a bit of background to it, so here we are. Hope you love it as much as I do.

In November last year we played Pitchfork’s London festival. A few months before the show, we got an email asking us if we’d like to be part of a project Pitchfork had put together in collaboration with Abbey Road Studios where they would bring two different artists together to write and record a song in one day. I didn’t really think too much about it, just said fuck it yes ok. As we always say, could be fun. We’d also been really enjoying not getting bogged down in the details. Just playing music for the sake of feeling it in the room, not overthinking the process.

They asked if we wanted to collaborate with IAN SWEET for the session and we said yes could be fun to that too. I love IAN SWEET. In 2019 Georgie and I went on a Porridge Radio duo tour together supporting Jilian and her band. We drove ourselves, slept on floors and got into arguments with each other. I was excited to hang out with Jilian again, meet her current band and do something low stakes and fun. If it was bad we wouldn’t have to put it out, and we’d never been invited to Abbey Road Studios before. It felt special.

It was decided in the group chat a few months later that the artwork would be star emoji painted by me

Unfortunately, I did not foresee that the day of the session I would be an emotional mess (I kept being dumped). I woke up that morning in a state and realised I couldn’t do it. I messaged the band to bail. I called up Sam and tried to cancel. But they were already on the train up from Brighton with Dan, and they were both excited to play music all day in an iconic studio for a once in a lifetime opportunity. Sam said I should just come and it would be fine, which is hard to argue with. And I love to go to work when I am incapable of doing anything else. So I came along, nearly bailed at the front door, and said I wouldn’t be interviewed for the mini-documentary they were making.

I got there 20 minutes late and everyone was there, chatting, getting instruments out, having a nice time. Jilian started playing a chord sequence with this little vocal melody line ‘let’s get down, let’s get right down to business’ which I thought was really good, but I had to leave the room to sit on my own for ten minutes. When I came back Georgie had written an insanely catchy riff. We went into the main studio to figure out the rest of it and everyone just kept adding really cool parts, pushing the song forward and forward. The engineers, Freddie and Tommy just set everything up around us and captured it as we went, not interfering but just being great, making sure everything was in place and ready to go, setting the tone that everything was chill and anything was possible. We came up with the structure within a few hours, all seven of us contributing (I played lead guitar, Jilian was playing rhythm, Georgie and Nate on keys, Sam on drums and Dan and Scott playing bass, locking in with each other in a way I have never seen two bassists play together in a seven-piece indie band, it was amazing). Then Jilian and I sat down and wrote the lyrics and melodies together. We made it dramatic. I was already feeling dramatic. She would write something like ‘I’ve been living just to die’ and ask ‘is this too dramatic?’ and I would say ‘no it’s perfect, it should be more dramatic’.

The whole day was collaboratively kind of perfect, everyone just adding in what they thought should happen in an ego-less way.

And then we put it all together, played the whole song through a few times, and somehow just got the take in one go after a few tries. I really wanted a backing vocal choir so we added one in. And that was it. It took a day to make. I felt a million times better by the end. I went to meet some visiting friends for dinner in Soho and ended the day glad I’d gone outside, and so proud of this song. I’m so proud to share it now, a very honest snapshot of a day in November made better by just hanging out with friends and making something. Here’s the documentary:

Thanks xx x