Premier single “Under Control Talk “
EN TOURNEE EN FRANCE
27 janvier – PARIS – POINT EPHEMERE
29 janvier – STRASBOURG – LA LAITERIE
30 janvier – TOURCOING – GRAND MIX
NO HOPE, NO FUTURE
2007: the Chinese year of the art band. The Maccabees storm out of the student galleries and into the charts. The Horrors launch their Rocky Horror rumbles out of the basements of Southend. And, in London, only two years after their first gigs at Eel Pie Island, Artrocker club nights and In The City, Good Shoes are stealing hearts with their jerky jubilations, home-made videos and produced-in-a-shed charm. They record a critically acclaimed debut album in Malmo, Sweden; hit the Top Forty with ‘Never Meant To Hurt You’; headline the Astoria and release a limited edition live album of the event; earn Metronomy remixes; kick Reading & Leeds into touch and put ‘Morden’ well and truly on the map.
“We tried to keep a certain credibility the whole time and stay true to our original ethos,” says singer Rhys Jones. “Everything we produced around it I was really happy with, all our videos and the artwork, all the gigs, I was really happy. Our music was [arty] but at the same time I think we had catchy pop songs. We’ve got to a certain point and I really liked where we got to and hopefully we’ll recreate that with the second album.”
Two years on from superb debut album ‘Think Before You Speak’ with its jagged tales of love shattered (‘Small Town Girl’, ‘Never Meant To Hurt You’) and home towns wrecked (‘Morden’), where does the fine, upstanding art band want to end up? As an entirely DIY concern obviously, and that’s where Good Shoes find themselves today. Having ended the first album tour on a frayed high, having supported Maximo Park, The Rakes and The Kaiser Chiefs and played their own incendiary headline gigs (“The best gigs were Reading and Leeds when we played on the NME stage, to play in front of that many people was amazing”), last summer saw them step back and reassess. They parted company with their management company, who didn’t share their vision of “not trying to be commercial but if it ends up that way then it’s a bonus”, and with bassist Joel Cox, who was keen to explore his own musical avenues (he was replaced by band-pal Bob Matthews for recording and ex Vincent Vincent & The Villains bassist Will Church for the forthcoming tour). Their record label, Brille, lost its funding from EMI, leaving it without the contractually minimum funds to resign Good Shoes for album two. So the band took the opportunity to remodel themselves into a far sleeker machine.
“We had a complete shake up of how we operated as a band,” says Rhys. “With this album we’re taking a completely different approach to how we’re releasing it. You obviously have to play the game a bit but we’re doing as much as we can to do whatever we want and do things how we want them. We wanted to record the second album ourselves and license it to record labels. We wanted Good Shoes to be a thing where all our friends get involved and we just create and everyone that works on it we are comfortable with and is part of the family.”
“It was very frustrating when you realise you’re spending hundreds of thousands of pounds and you have a lot of staff, and decisions are getting made that you don’t necessarily agree with and money’s going down the toilet,” adds guitarist Steve Leach. “We thought if we can just make the record ourselves then we’ll have the product, the raw materials and if we wanted to put it out for free on the internet we could or if we wanted to print it up ourselves we could.”
As the band played a few shows across 2008, including a handful of club gigs to try out new material and an insane set in the tiny upstairs room of legendary club Push on the closing night of the Astoria (“It was crazy, crowd-surfing during the songs, people were going nuts, Steve ended up playing on the bar because he didn’t have any space”), they set about putting the pieces in place. They renegotiated a new deal with the now independent Brille and lined up a producer, their old schoolfriend Jonathan Tams of Gold Teeth – a one-time engineer at Olympic Studios who’d worked with Stephen Street on Madonna and Babyshambles sessions. He had a studio in his house in – oh yes – Morden and by recording there they figured they could knock out album two in under five grand.
“I was working as a sandwich delivery guy at the time,” says Steve, “and I used to get a load of free sandwiches after work, BLTs, chicken ceaser salads, samosas. I’d fill my bag with it, pop round and we’d all pig out on all this crappy junk food. Johnny would never have any food in his house so he was very grateful, he actually got to eat sometimes.”
Motley Crue it most certainly wasn’t, although the Good Shoes sound was perhaps inching in a harder rock direction. “It was maybe a bit more intricate and heavier sounding,” Rhys explains, “but at the same time I write the melodies and the lyrics and I’m into pop music so the catchiness of the first album has remained. I’d bought a lot of effects pedals on the last album but they were mainly just distortion ones. We were messing about with sounds like that. It sounded good heavier, the songs worked.”
And the songs, as they chundered into life when recording began last October, grew a running theme too. The best songs Rhys was coming up with were all about the drawn-out ending of his relationship with a particular ex. Good Shoes, it turned out, were making their first break-up record.
“The majority of it is about this one girl,” Rhys explains. “It was a long break-up so I guess that has dictated how it feels lyrically because it’s quite bleak in that sense. But then I guess that’s what all my songs have ever been about. If you’re writing lyrics, I’d have to force myself to write something really positive because if I’m happy I don’t think about writing it down. It’s life isn’t it, you don’t realise what you’ve got until it’s gone. You think about that all the time, you focus on the negative in something and just because it was on my mind and I wanted to get back with this girl and it wasn’t working out and it was messy. It’s almost like therapy in a way for me, lyrics. It gets out all of the negative feelings, writing about it is therapeutic.”
So the effervescent first single ‘The Way My Heart Beats’ concerns the struggles of keeping a relationship together and the slow-burning torch song ‘City By The Sea’ the enforced break-up of leaving to go on tour. They’re sincerely personal songs, but with a universal story. “At the same time I’m writing about one person in many cases, it’s meant to be generalised. It’s about a feeling in a relationship.”
The disco-flecked ‘Under Control’, meanwhile, has a rather more earthy, um, thrust. “I read this thing about Bloc Party writing ‘Banquet’ saying that they tried to write really dirty lyrics about sex that aren’t overt but if you read them you’d go ‘that’s definitely about sex’. I read them and thought ‘this isn’t dirty at all, I can do much better than this’. We were in a studio in Wood Green or somewhere doing demos and I sat down and all these lyrics came out in five minutes and fit perfectly over the music to this song. They’re a lot more overt than the Bloc Party lyrics. There’s no subtlety. I literally tried to write the dirtiest song I could and wanted it be sung-along too, so it’s catchy. If people could sing along and afterwards go ‘man, that’s filthy’.”
After eight tracks were completed with Tams, Good Shoes shifted to Dalston’s Surpine Studios to complete the record they’d decided to call, with trademark optimism, ‘No Hope, No Future’ with ex-Vincent Vincent & The Villains guitarist Tom Bailey at the production helm, and emerged with a thumping great art-rock record which It has moments of funksome dancefloor abandon (‘I Know’; imagine Pixies spouting revolutionary rhetoric), moody sleaze (‘Everything You Do’), wistful romance (the quasi-prog ‘Mother’) and chart-frotting brilliance.
“It’s music you can get down to in any way you like,” says Steve. “You can put it on at a party, you can listen to it when you’re cycling. Live it’s always about riling people up, and I hope the record will give people forty minutes of interesting listening. There’s plenty going on.”
It is, ultimately, Good Shoes: resized.
Mark Beaumont 2009.