Songwriting

Being in a band filled with multi-instrumentalists, how does the songwriting process work?

“There are three of us that write music in the band, so the three of us tend to write and demo in our own houses,” Stuart says, talking about the band’s initial demo process. “It usually takes us about six months or so depending how much time we’ve got. We’ll share the demos around, people will write different parts and Martin, our drummer, will come up with ideas from people’s demos. For this record, we actually did a second full studio demo as well. So we got together, just seeing how everything’s sounding, whether something’s working, not working, and then we went and rehearsed some more and then went and made the record.”

Barry continues: “It’s usually me and Stuart, and Dom Aitchison. I’ve got my little studio in a building quite far away from my house which is important, with very shit internet and I go in there for between two and six hours a day. Anything more than that I just come away with nothing good. I try and just sit and do like 20 minutes really concentrated. I think that’s enough – 20 minutes – and then have a little five-minute break and then go back to it.”

“I write on guitar sometimes, but it’s usually mostly on synths, plugins and stuff, and I just make up little melodies at first. Occasionally, I get a couple of noises to get me going. I think that’s really important for the way that I do stuff. It’s even like a whitenoise guitar with some sidechaining on it to get things going. I don’t ever think about what I’m doing.”