The New Cue #320 September 22: Bill Ryder-Jones, Mitski, Fontaines D.C, Viji, Emma Anderson, Talk Show, Dolores Forever, Nas & Lil Wayne, Sleaford Mods

"I imagined them rolling around on a gravel drive"

Hello,

Welcome to another round of Recommender shenanigans! This is a limited-edition edition (quite pleasing to say actually) of The New Cue because today we are joined in the Recommender ranks by a world-famous writer and broadcaster. Let’s just say that if you’re a fan of Dorian Lynskey then you’re going to love today’s guest, because today’s guest is Dorian Lynskey. He’s this week’s super sub to cover Ted whilst he’s away.

Before we get to Recommender, we’ve got Henry from '00s indie faves Young Knives giving us the skinny behind one of their hits. Don’t forget to subscribe if you want to read the whole edition – we don’t give content this shit-hot away for free, you have to pay £5 a month and in return we’ll keep wheeling it out, shoving it in the face of Uncle Patsy for telling me that music journalism wasn’t a real job. If it wasn’t a real job how could I make this playlist, eh Uncle Patsy?!:

We’ll see you on Monday, and so will Devendra Banhart. We’ve got an interview with the American-Venezuelan singer-songwriter to get your week rolling.

Enjoy the edition,

Absent Ted, Niall, Chris and Dorian

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The Story Behind The Song

How we birthed a classic

She’s Attracted To by The Young Knives, 2006

Young Knives recently reissued their first two records, 2006’s Andy Gill-produced and Mercury-nominated Voices Of Animals And Men and 2008 follow-up Superabundance, which I actually prefer, mainly because of the driving, repetitive riff on Terra Firma and because they took me to Barcelona to do an interview at the time (hello, Niall here). The Oxford trio (they’re now a duo) were archetypal outsiders at a time when British indie was blowing up big, rogue librarians with a fine line in wiry riffs, clattering post-punk grooves and twisted tales from humdrum suburbia. All of these things seeped into their 2006 single She’s Attracted To and earlier this week Niall spoke to frontman Henry Dartnall about how it came together.

“This song was from right back at the beginning, when we all had proper jobs. I was working at a computer company near Didcot, it must have been 2004. We had a boss that was quite a sensible guy and seemed quite straight-edge but he came in one morning and… you know when you fall off your bike and you hit gravel? He had gravel all over the palms of his hands and his knuckles were bleeding.

It turned out he’d had an altercation, a fight with his next door neighbour on the drive of his house. I can’t remember what it was about, it was either about a boundary or a tree or something, one of those things, and I was really struck by how such a sensible person, or seemingly sensible person, with a real proper job and everything could get to a point where the anger had boiled up so much that there was actual physical violence, where you think, ‘how did you get to that point where you’re punching somebody in the street?’. 

We all sat around and speculated. The image I remember is the one about them rolling around, I imagined them rolling around on a gravel drive, next to a caravan under its winter cover with the security light going on and off as they beat each other up on the drive. I thought there was probably something quite funny in that. And then it was that the only people that ever made me that mad were that I had an old girlfriend whose parents were dysfunctional. I had quite a sensible family and then there were these people where a teenage girl was running the house because her parents were slightly alcoholic and not able to hold their own household together. I’d never really come across that. I mixed those two things together. I thought maybe those people would have probably pushed me to the point where I was having a physical fight with them in the street.

When we went to record it, Andy Gill wasn’t really into it because it was so stupid. That’s the one thing that I always think – it is the one that is obviously quite silly. I was slightly nervous of that, music that veered that line into comedy music and how it could lose its edge quite quickly if it was too funny. There was a few bands that were doing that, McClusky were always a bit like that, and Art Brut were always a bit like that. It very quickly becomes not cool if you’re not careful.

The way I thought about it at the time was ‘Is this too silly?’. I think the first time we demoed it we thought it was pretty silly as well. Andy Gill was reluctant at first because I think people were obsessed with the idea of whether it was cool or not. It was definitely very anti-cool. When we finished it, I remember him saying, ‘actually, that sounds really good’. When you’re making music, you’re analysing it a bit too much so I think he was about to sit down and do this track with us and I think he thought, ‘this is stupid, this is too stupid’. And once you’ve been working on it, you start to forget and get into the song. I always thought it was stupid and I had to pull it out at every gig for a long, long time. It’s one of the only tracks where we still get played in places like Australia, I get one of those bots from a radio station at five past three in the morning saying they played She’s Attracted To.

We couldn’t carry on doing stuff that was that silly, you have to find another way of doing stuff. That’s what we did, because you start to think, ‘If we had to spend night after night for the rest of our lives doing this over and over again, it would wear pretty thin.’”

ND

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Recommender

Guest Recommender: Dorian Lynskey

Author, critic, broadcaster and king of the pod Dorian snuggles into Ted’s empty side of the bed to whisper sweet musical nothings in your ear this week…