The New Cue #324 October 6: The Bees, Molly Burch, English Teacher, UNIVERSITY, Sufjan Stevens, A.S.O, Sonic Cathedral, John Grant & Midlake, deary

"I never understand popcorn."

Boom boom boom let me hear you say way-oh way-oh!

Have we started an edition of The New Cue like that before? It’s possible. It’s hard to keep track really, I can’t tell if that withering look you’re giving me is because we’ve done that before or because you know that we’re about to tell you how this edition is for paying subscribers only, you know, those absolute heroes who pay £5 a month to validate this whole insane operation. Go on, be a hero. Did that sound sarcastic? OK, don’t be a hero. Now I’ve double-bluffed you and you’ll have to subscribe.

In today’s edition that you’ve just subscribed to without realizing: a Guest Recommender from Sonic Cathedral’s Nat Cramp, a Story Behind The Song from the Isle Of Wight’s biggest export until Wet Leg came along and ruined everything The Bees, a mind-blower pick from Molly Burch, and lots of recommending. It really is a golden age of recommending, this edition. Oh look here’s a playlist, is there no end to our talents?:

See you on Monday, enjoy the edition,

Ted, still absent but here in our hearts, Niall and Chris

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The Story Behind The Song

How we birthed a classic

A Minha Menina by The Bees, 2002

Paul Butler, who co-founded the Isle Of Wight psychedelic-pop collective, tells us about the making of their breakthrough 2002 hit A Minha Menina.

“I was living a very monastic life at the time, just in my little shed studio in the Isle Of Wight making music. I’d known Aaron [Fletcher, bandmate] since the first day of school. We practically said on that first day that we would do something creative together. There was never any question about it. We’d done all sorts of things, playing together, DJ-ing, all sorts of overlapping projects. We’d recorded some stuff, but it wasn’t until we made Punchbag together that we realised, Hang on, we’ve got an actual song here, not just a piece of music. We played it to our mate, who played it to his mate who had just started at Wall Of Sound and they immediately offered us a five album record deal. Aaron is an avid vinyl collector, and a lot of my friends would go crate digging so we had a really good musical understanding. One of the advantages of growing up in the Isle Of Wight is that, for quite an isolated community, it has a demographic that massively shifted after the Isle Of Wight Festival in 1970, people who decided to stay after what was essentially Europe’s Woodstock, so it was incredibly well resourced for that. It educated us to all these different genres of music.

Once we’d recorded the album [debut LP Sunshine Hit Me] the label called and were like, ‘There’s not enough songs on the album, do a cover.’ We were like, ‘A cover!? Thanks for the vote of confidence!’. I turned around and pressed play on our CD player and A Minha Menina by Os Mutantes came on. We decided to cover it almost out of spite, but as soon as we started we were like, ‘This is great!’ We wrapped it up in a day.

What that song led on to for us was astounding. It led us to recreating Tropicalia Our Panis Et Circensis, which is this classic Tropicalia album from the 60s on stage at the Barbican with Gruff Rhys and Os Mutantes and all these incredible Brazilian musicians. It also led on to a number of syncs, which we were really against. We didn’t want to be associated with any brands and at that point people still sold records, so it was considered selling out. But because it wasn’t our song we didn’t get a say-so. I think it was used in a Citroen ad, so I thought, ‘Well, at least [Brazilian musician] Jorge Ben, who wrote the song might be getting a bit of money out of this’. It did lead to a lot of people discovering us and not long after that Os Mutantes came back, so it was nice to be part of that, spreading this amazing music to people.

I know it’s looked like The Bees disappeared off the planet a few years ago [the band’s last album, Every Step’s A Yes came out in 2010]. I moved out to LA and got into production and it just ran out of steam, but listening back to the debut album it made me want to make music with Aaron again. There’s a lot going on, but The Bees are going to go out and gig again and pick what to do next, it will be like how we made Sunshine Hit Me with me and Aaron working remotely, which is how we started right at the beginning.”

The remastered edition of Sunshine Hit Me is out now via We Love You.