‘It’s about disappointment – which everyone can relate to’: Shed Seven on Chasing Rainbows
Chasing Rainbows was written on tour, which was unusual for us because we weren’t the kind of band who spent downtime on a tour bus writing new material. We much preferred to be out exploring a city. But we’d just done a big tour of Europe, had been away for weeks, and were feeling really homesick.
We’d ended in Germany: it was the last show of the tour, about four in the afternoon, and it was pissing down with rain. Paul came up with the riff from nowhere, and immediately I started humming the verse. It was weird – this has only happened two or three times in our whole career – but within 20 minutes we’d got the arrangement and most of the lyrics. I remember that when we played around with it in the soundcheck, our crew stopped what they were doing and just listened. We knew it was a winner.
We recorded it quickly and made a pretty ropey video. The original idea was to film on a real train, but in the end they built a wooden carriage in a warehouse. It looks as if I’m walking through all these different carriages – in reality I was just walking through the same one over and over. Someone stood outside spinning a light round on a pole to make it look as if the train was moving, passing places.
We rush-released the single at the end of the year, which meant we were the only act in 1996 to have five Top 40 singles. The downside was that it got a bit lost in the Christmas rush and only went to No 17. If we’d have released it even a couple of weeks earlier, I think it would have been Top 5, but over the years it’s become the song that people most connect with. It’s about disappointment and wanting what you can’t have – “I’ve been chasing rainbows all my life” – which obviously everyone can relate to. Now it ends all our gigs. It’s such a great feeling when people leave and are still singing it down the street.
Paul Banks, guitar, songwriter
I’m pretty sure we were playing the Luxor in Cologne. That clip in the recent film Get Back, where Paul McCartney spontaneously comes up with the title song in a few minutes, to