Classic Album: Utah Saints, Two

Echo, 2000

You’re only as good as your last album, and the Utah Saints’ debut set the bar pretty high. Three top ten hits, success in America, and a six-album deal with London Records. How do you follow that? For Tim Garbutt and Jez Willis the obvious choice was to hand in an album of anti-hits and ultra-fast techno bangers so radio-unfriendly that they were promptly dropped from a label expecting more pop hooks and effortlessly marketable stadium dance beats.

“Everyone at the label was excited about the album they thought that we would be working on,” says Jez. “It was all big studio time, and they had imagined that it was going to be full of hits. But, instead, we had a track that sampled Nick Cave saying the line ‘Hands up! Who wants to die?’, over a gabba beat! The label were absolutely terrified of the direction we were going, and so we were quietly let go.”

Adrift and alone, the duo scrapped that and returned to where they belonged – a tiny studio, surrounded by gear. Locked off from a label at a loss as to what to do with such challenging electronic music. “We binned off that project,” says Tim. “We just had to psychologically draw a line under it.”

Liberated, an unhurried process of songwriting unfolded and an Indie record label, sensitive to their needs, offered to put it out. Pressure off, they laboured over the tracks, and as the arrangements took shape, a raft of star collaborators climbed aboard. Rap firebrand Chuck D joins soul legend Edwin Starr in the album credits, while everyone from Chrissie Hynde to Iggy Pop popped up into the sampler.

The most ‘self-sabotaging-but-love-em-for-it’ addition has to go to their use of REM frontman, Michael Stipe, who holds the album together via a curious series of spoken word interludes. “Yeah, he was actually up for doing a proper song,” chuckles Jez. “But instead we just recorded some conversations down the phone, which we then soundtracked.

“If we were on a different label they’d just see dollar signs! But we’ve never been brilliant business people.” [Laughs].

Well, it’s not all about the business, is it?