Brighton bunch Orchards deal with everyday life via sunny hooks and plenty of side-eye. It’s heaps of fun, and their debut album ‘Lovecore’ is a real highlight for spring. The band tell us more.
We wrote most of the album in Will’s bedroom.
We all (like a lot of musicians) still all work full/part-time jobs, so most of the album was written after work in Wills bedroom with an electric kit, the guitar and bass through the same amp. It worked super well in the long run because it meant we were a little more critical of what we were creating. We made enough noise that Daniel’s girlfriend, who was in the room next door, was humming the songs after we’d finished. A good sign, we think.
‘Social Sobriety’, track 7, was written while Lucy did her vocal take.
This track was not written before we started recording. It was week three of recording with only a few days left when Lucy had written the vox and just jumped in the booth to record them while she was in the right headspace. Sam sat in the control room on the Yamaha Synth, Daniel on the bass and Will had the acoustic and wrote the track while she did her take. It was the fastest we have ever written a song. Ever.
We recorded drums on a boat.
We recorded all the drum tracks for ‘Lovecore’ aboard The Grand Cru moored at the St Katharine docks in central London; a 100-year-old Dutch barge that Pete Townshend had converted into a recording studio in the 1970s. We spent three super intense days recording nine drum tracks, taking very brief breaks to caffeinate, soak up the serene surroundings and catch a few rays of August sunshine on deck.
We clocked up some miles while we recorded this album.
We stayed with Lucy’s family while recording ‘Lovecore’, which meant that we had a commute of an hour each way to get to the studio and back. Tons of super early morning commutes, loads of Casefile True Crime Podcast, stops at M&S Chelmsford and coffee for the late-night drives home. If you happened to be doing your M&S or Aldi shop last August in Chelmsford, you probably saw us four in shorts and baggy t-shirts shouting ‘has anyone got bananas?’ across the shop to each other.
Good ol British Wildlife.
The studio in Braintree was right out in the countryside in a village called Great Bardfield. We spent a lot of time going out for walks when we needed to take breaks from the studio room and noise. We quickly realised we were right next to a huge partridge farm, they were everywhere, and there were so many of them! We managed to get a feel of this on the track ‘Social Sobriety’. Every evening at about 8pm all of the birds in the surrounding woods would fly over to roost in the nearby woods, and the noise from them was amazing – that’s what you can hear throughout the track.
Nettle bushes.
It must have been the best weather of 2019 for the whole time we recorded the album, it was roasting hot constantly. Those brief breaks outside would involve ‘nerf’ tournaments (between the lads, Lucy would sit on the only outside chair and umpire). We would have to clamber through nettle bushes when someone threw it a little too far, so we came back pale, tired, bruised and covered on nettle stings – normal, right?!
Taken from the March issue of Upset. Orchards’ album ‘Lovecore’ is out 13th March.
