Glasgow band Sons & Daughters have found a new sound on their poppy latest album. It's all thanks to the tough Spector/Gordy-style tactics of their producer, former Suede guitarist Bernard Butler. They talk studio hell with Brian Boyd.
AT a time when bands seem to come out of nowhere to achieve multi-platinum success in a matter of minutes, it's refreshing to report that the latest band predicted to "blow up" - Glasgow's Sons and Daughters - are almost scene veterans given that their new album is their third since they first formed seven years ago.
In the past, the band may have received many admiring glances (and support slots from fans such as Morrissey and Franz Ferdinand) for their folky, gothy blues punk, but on this new album they've come over all 1960s girl group pop and have produced a beguiling album that will probably soon bounce its way to the top of the charts.
The two main singers in the band - Scott Paterson and Adele Bethel - are sitting in a Dublin hotel struggling with a plate of unfeasibly large chunky chips, as they attempt to defuse some of the hype currently swirling around the band.
"We had to finance our first album, Love the Cup, ourselves," says Bethel, "and it was only 25 minutes long. Mind you we did get some money from the Scottish Arts Council to help record it. We seemed to get a lot of good reaction in the US to it, and we've toured there a good few times now, but it was only when Laurence Bell signed us to his Domino label in London that things really started happening for us."
The follow-up album, 2005's The Repulsion Box, attracted even more attention for the four-piece band, who came together when they all found themselves as touring musicians on an Arab Strap tour. There was still a sense of something missing from their sound, though, and as Peterson explains, they had yet to nail a "soul/pop/garage rock/60s girl group" sound.
When their label suggested they draft in ex-Suede guitarist, Bernard Butler, to produce the new album, This Gift, it came as something of a shock to Paterson, but only because when he was younger he used to have a picture of Butler on his bedroom wall. The band took themselves off to a remote area of Scotland to write the songs for the album and when they presented them to Butler, they were stunned by his reaction.
"He was just brutally honest about them," says Paterson. "Previous to this we had heard he was a hard taskmaster but I think the reason he had such strong opinions about the songs was that he saw there was real potential there but we just weren't hitting it."
"I found it odd because I had to totally change my singing style," says Bethel. "I had always admired singers like PJ Harvey and thought that was the way I should sound, but Bernard got me to sing in a higher key and it really changed the shape of the songs. It made a crucial difference to how the album ended up sounding. At first, singing a whole song so high almost made me vomit but I got there in the end."
The band had all grown up on a diet of The Smiths and The Cure but more recently have been influenced by early American folk music and Johnny Cash. "People always say our lyrics are really down, and maybe it is because of our influences," says Paterson. "A band such as Teenage Fanclub can write a happy sound and make it sound joyous but we simply can't. That folk influence has always seeped into our music but on this album it's very much in the background and the pop is really to the forefront, which suits us just fine."
The Giftdisplays a real feel for how to set about the straight-ahead pop tune - and the band do seem to be working against the prevailing trend of art-rock music. As Paterson points out: "Sometimes you just don't need guitar-effects pedals to be working all the time."
It was a bruising album to make, and Paterson says he was on the verge of walking out of the sessions more than once because of Butler's approach. "I remember him once telling me that he had actually hit people in the studio before and I did feel at times that his way of working with us was to create as much tension as possible. I think he was looking at how notoriously difficult producers such as Berry Gordy and Phil Spector had got their best out of their acts and was trying to replicate that. It did make us work a lot harder, maybe we had been boxed in to a certain sound before and we needed that sort of confrontational approach to bring the music to a different place," he says.
"I was shocked by how immediately he wanted everything done," says Bethel. "I would be doing my vocals and he wouldn't be happy with how the song was going and he'd say to me, 'I want four completely different vocal harmonies over the chorus and I want them now', and then he'd press the record button and you'd be there thinking: 'What am I going to do?' And sometimes you'd arrive in to the studio and you'd be wondering who wasn't talking to who - it really was that difficult. We're all very good friends now and I think what happened was that he was daring us to go different places - something we never would have done on our own."
Ultimately, what The Gifthas done for the band, says Bethel, is not to make the band so scared about going after mainstream approval. "A lot of the bands we loved, such as The Cure, had big hit singles. I think this is a really singles-friendly album and I hope we can start bothering the charts and mixing it with all those X Factor acts!"
