Known for their relentless touring schedule, Band Of Skulls recently stepped off the stage and into the studio to record their fourth LP,By Default.
According to guitarist and vocalist Russell Marsden, the title – taken from the track ‘In Love By Default’ – isn’t a description of the album’s content. “By no means is it the Band Of Skulls on their default setting,” he says. “By no means is it us just doing the basic thing. It’s definitely the opposite.”
It took Band Of Skulls roughly 12 months off the road to record the album, in what was an extensive process that Marsden isstill trying to wrap his head around. “It’s our fourth album – that’s amazing to me,” he says. “We wrote 100 songs and we are only releasing 12 of those. So I really think what we are putting out is the most exciting things we have right now and almost the signpost to all the places we want to explore in the future as a band. If people get into this record, it’s going to be the beginning of a new journey for us. There are definitely elements of Band Of Skulls that everyone knows already, but there are a few more layers that we let people into that perhaps we haven’t before.”
The UK power trio are now back on tour and have regained their onstage power. Marsden admits that removing themselves from the live circuit last year was an almost impossible task – it’s the longest off-stage stint they’ve experienced thus far, but it was exactly what they needed to make their fourth album a creative success.
“We had to be convinced – we definitely got talked into stopping,” Marsden laughs. “Initially, we were an independent band and friends from our hometown, so getting out there and getting our name out there was the way we got our fan base. It was just our day-to-day existence. There’s a limit to everything, but we love it too much – we just want to get out there and play our songs. We just did a few shows here in London; I think people are really excited to have us back. It was mental. It was in a really small venue and there wasn’t much clearance from the audience to the ceiling, so the crowd-surfers could have just crawled onto it.”
Given the extensive creative preparation, selecting the correct tracks to include on By Default was a difficult process. The three band members didn’t always agree with each other’s choices, but they were eventually able to settle.
“We were writing a song every couple of days and we just didn’t stop,” says Marsden. “We put everything we had on this huge list. It became the never-ending shopping list – we had all these pieces of paper stuck together and we just got a kick out of having lots of ideas. But we are very diplomatic. There’s nothing on the record that we don’t all love. It just takes some time to get people into it, and we have all these underhand ways of influencing each other. For instance, if I’ve got an idea I’ll play it for a couple of weeks around the band on my guitar, so that when I present it to them, they feel like they know it already. They’ve fathomed it now; they’re too savvy.”
The majority of By Default was written in the Southampton Baptist Church and recorded at the legendary Rockfield Studios in Wales. Producer Gil Norton joined the trio in the studio, a collaboration that brought the best out of Band Of Skulls.
“We got a call from Gil Norton and he said, ‘Do you want to have a beer?’” Marsden explains. “We said yes and two weeks later we were in Rockfield making the record. It was like a speed date that got really out of hand. Gil really works you hard. He destroyed us. He takes a lot from you in the recording process, but he just brings out the best performance. He’s super experienced and he’s got really high standards. The biggest names you can think of, he’s made them cry. I think we were too tired to cry – we’d sweated out all of the tears, they were gone, there was no liquid left. Gil was always going for that better take and that perfection, and that’s the sort of standard you have to step up to.”
Having been hidden away in the Welsh countryside, Marsden says the trip home from the studio was almost as extensive as the recording process itself.
“The first thing we did afterwards was tried to get back to England, which takes all day,” he says. “You have to get a taxi to this small train station, that train to Cardiff or wherever, then a train to Bristol and another train back to where we live. We just travelled, so you do feel like you’re in this other world. When I got home I went to my local pub and had a beer on my own and the guy there said, ‘Where the hell have you been? We’ve been worried about you!’ I think they get used to it now – they thought I’d been on tour and I was like, ‘No, I’ve just been emotionally drained by Gil Norton,’” he laughs.
Also raising the bar for the new record was drummer Matt Hayward. After a special request from Marsden, he learnt some exotic techniques for the song ‘Tropical Disease’.
“I said to Matt, ‘Can you do samba?’ And he looked at me and didn’t say anything. So I was like, ‘Can you do mambo? Can you do South American beats?’ We spent some time researching it and released it’s completely different to the way drum beats are put together in a Western or rock’n’roll way. We got obsessed with it and did ‘Tropical Disease’ as a moment of that. We were in this cold church in England playing this really loud samba music with the Band Of Skulls filling in the gaps. I didn’t know if Matt was going to say, ‘I’d love to learn the samba,’ or punch me in the face. Luckily he learnt it,” Marsden laughs.
Hayward and Marsden, who met back in school, have the type of relationship that allows them to push each other to the limit musically.
“We were at school with decreasing frequency as we slowly got into music,” Marsden recalls. “Our teachers would say, ‘Where’s your homework?’ – problem was, we’d had a gig the night before in London [laughs]. We met Emma [Richardson, bass/vocals] when we were a little older, college sort of time, but Matt and I have been playing music together since then.
“It was very natural, how bands should be put together, not like an audition process that seems to happen more now. We meet people in the industry and they think it’s just a gag and really we met at music school or whatever, and it’s like, ‘No, no, we were hanging out smoking cigarettes, that was it’ – like how it happens in movies. We’re thankful for that, and when something amazing happens for the band, we tend to look at each other and think, ‘Holy shit, what happened? How did we get here?’”
[Band Of Skulls photo by Andy Cotterill]
