Track by track with Daniel Hunt
Black Cat
“This album is cut from similar cloth to [2005’s] Witching Hour, but it is harder, much denser, darker in general, which is unsurprising after you’ve just come back from two years straight on the road. Plus, we were making it during the financial crisis.
“I love this track, though. And starting shows with it was so exciting. This is one of the ones where Mira raps in her native Bulgarian. By this track she had really perfected it.
“She prefers to sing in English, though, and this was the last time she did a vocal like that. Maybe in the future there’ll be more.”
Ghosts
“This one has something special, it still gets me. It was the first tune we had ready for the album, and had been played with a little on the
Witching Hour tour in soundchecks, but never performed.
“This has an improbably long held organ chord at the beginning – I can’t remember what we were even thinking with that.
“I guess Ghosts is a little different to what we’d done before. When writing it, it always reminded me of ['60s psych rockers] Sharon Tandy with the Fleur De Lys, but then the end result doesn’t sound too similar…
“I’d also like it on the historical record that this came out years before any of that ‘sorry, not sorry’ business.”
I’m Not Scared
“This might be my favourite song on the record. Michael Patterson did a wonderful job with the mix.
“We worked on it first in this wonderful studio in Paris. Obviously there’s a strong argument for making records in unspectacular places with as little distraction as possible, and we have done that too, but there’s also nothing like taking a break from comping vocals and going across the street for oysters, or finishing a session and heading straight for Le Baron or wherever. We made the most of our time there, certainly.
“The recording itself was sometimes a little difficult, though, and we ultimately had to take the session away from the producer, who was having some problems in his personal life, and finish the mix in Los Angeles with Michael Patterson.”
Runaway
“This was supposed to be the hit. Listening back now, it should’ve been. When we were recording this it felt like a hit. It wasn’t gonna be the first single, but it felt like the one that was gonna crossover. Other people thought that too. For whatever reason, it didn’t really happen. It was a popular song among our audience, but it wasn’t like it became a proper smash hit or anything.
“I don’t think it’s underrated within our audience, but I think it’s something that we could have done a lot more with. Every band has this story, though.”
Season of Illusions
“Most of the tracks were in decent shape from our own studios before we went to Paris, but a few, like Ghosts
“Since our last record Gravity The
Seducer was released back in 2011, Helen has made some solo records, I’ve been collaborating with other artists and working on movie scores, Mira has been in film and TV, Reuben is also now a very famous photographer. We never stopped, as people tend to assume when anyone from a group makes a solo record, we’ve all just been living in different places and doing our own thing, waiting for the right moment to start writing and recording together again.”
and Season of Illusions really took off once we were working there.
“Mira’s songwriting was really coming into its own by the third and fourth albums, too, and this might be my favourite of hers.
“When we first started, I was the only one who really had any experience. And then, album by album, everyone was putting in more songs and getting better and better.
“By then Mira was getting really good at writing and Season Of
Illusions is one of our favourite things we’ve done. She’d done other stuff before that, but at that moment this was up there with the best we’d got.
“Normally she was doing these kind of rap-y vocals in Bulgarian. Then at some point she started writing in English and writing more and more melodic songs.
“She was a little bit in a pigeonhole of just doing these really unique rapping tracks on each album, so by the fourth one she had an urge to do something beyond that. She’s lived in England most of her life.”
Burning Up
“This was one of many ‘not quite’ singles on Velocifero. It ended up having a new lease of life on the [housing market crash movie] Big
Short soundtrack – which I suppose is pleasing symmetry, given my earlier comment about making this during the financial crisis.
“When we were recording it, in 2007, it was the last summer of calm before the neoliberal bubble burst. To think back to that feels eerily nostalgic now; it was the last moment when things seemed ‘normal’ (they obviously never were).
“Listening back, the record sounds of its time, but also sticks out a mile in some respects.”
Kletva
“This is a cover of a Bulgarian singer songwriter from the 1970s who Mira’s family knew [Kiril Marichkov]. He actually met us at our first show in Sofia in 2003.
“It’s a great song. He remarked that Mira’s accent on the track made