Starsailor in NME - 8th December.
'Love
Is Here' - number 5 in Nme's 'Top 50 Albums of 2001'
Starsailor are four gentle lads from Chorley, Lancashire who arrived at the start
of the year with acoustic guitars, keyboards, decent record collections and a
mission to write skyscraping torch songs about love, hope and joy. 'Love Is Here'
renders that mission accomplished. In doing so it reveals the full-throttle voice
of singer James Walsh alongside colleagues who beautifully shade the areas left
unscorched by his powerful bellow. An immense debut.
James Walsh: "We recorded it at Rockfield studios in Wales,
and we basically spent six weeks up there, starting in late April. I think it's
important for an LP to capture where you're at at the time, especially if you're
always on it and writing new material. You want it to be like, 'This is where
the band's at now, and these are the songs that we've got and we like, let's
get them down now as quickly as possible.' If we spent six months recording them,
we'd probably have another ten tracks, and been a bit confused about the sort
of album we wanted to make.
"Because
of the praise we'd had for the live show, we don't want to detract from that
by coming up with this grand 'studio-based-masterwork'. We wanted to keep that
sort of raw energy. The whole theme of the album, ant the theme of the lyrics
is the whole journey from being a confused teenager in education, then leaving
education and having to work out who you are and where you fit in society. Particularly,
it's about feeling confused and strange when you still single-mindedly want to
be a successful musician writing your own material. There's not a lot of people
encouraging you to take that path.
"It's a positive record. We never wanted to get angry and make some huge
impact on society or anything. We can still be a tremendously important band
without being THE most important band, because at the end of the day, there are
going to be people who aren't going to like it. The stuff that gets really big,
like Mariah Carey or whatever, is really manufactured and trimmed down. I find
it stupid when bands say, 'We're going to be the best band in the world', because
you think, 'Well, if you want to be that, you're gonna have to compromise your
art and your soul to mould into what people expect from a band.'
"To reach the people we wanted to with the songs felt incredible. It was
always our intention to speak to kids and to people who weren't that confident
and self assured. Music had become so overtly masculine and misogynistic with
Blink-182 and Limp Bizkit. People accuse us of being a bit moany, but it's these
rock bands that are the real moaners, because there anti-everything. I think
passion, and passion about a situation you've been through is a bit overwrought,
but I think that's what it's all about."
John Robinson
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