BIg Day Out's 'Simplicity' was probably the closest I ever got to writing anything funky or sexy.
(Phwoar. Funky, sexy David.)
Like the majority of our demos, the studio version didn’t quite do the material justice, as a lot of the energy was lost. It didn’t help that in this instance, we mixed down everything bar the drum tracks in one session, and then overlaid a separate mix of the drums again later. God knows why we did this; we must have been off our heads on disco biscuits.
It revolved around a riff we had already used in a different song, Sensible Shoes, which was scrapped when our lead guitarist left and the group became a three-piece. Sensible Shoes - like a lot of our earlier incarnation’s material - was more of a novelty song than anything, but when we slowed the original riff down, we started to get a bit of a groove on.
(I just said that in all seriousness.)
The song was about being left hanging by a girl that you liked, who wasn’t convinced that she liked you back; such is the teenage experience. I had The Beatles’ 'Drive My Car' and Stevie Wonder’s 'Signed, Sealed, Delivered I’m Yours' loosely in mind when I wrote it, but thankfully, the results sounded nothing like this; I didn’t want to end up in the midst of a lawsuit.
Like the majority of our demos, the studio version didn’t quite do the material justice, as a lot of the energy was lost. It didn’t help that in this instance, we mixed down everything bar the drum tracks in one session, and then overlaid a separate mix of the drums again later. God knows why we did this; we must have been off our heads on disco biscuits.
It revolved around a riff we had already used in a different song, Sensible Shoes, which was scrapped when our lead guitarist left and the group became a three-piece. Sensible Shoes - like a lot of our earlier incarnation’s material - was more of a novelty song than anything, but when we slowed the original riff down, we started to get a bit of a groove on.
(I just said that in all seriousness.)
The song was about being left hanging by a girl that you liked, who wasn’t convinced that she liked you back; such is the teenage experience. I had The Beatles’ 'Drive My Car' and Stevie Wonder’s 'Signed, Sealed, Delivered I’m Yours' loosely in mind when I wrote it, but thankfully, the results sounded nothing like this; I didn’t want to end up in the midst of a lawsuit.
The drums were recorded at The Square in Harlow, and all the other parts were recorded in my flat (though this wasn’t the reason for our eccentric approach to mixing it). I played guitar and sang, Mark played bass and joined me on backing vocals and Chris played the drums. The neighbours didn’t complain, even when we got to the shouty bits. “Good on ‘em,” I say.