Issue 72 / November 2016

“Life is like a box of chocolates… you never know what you’re gonna get.”
We had Hooton Tennis Club tell us some of the quirks, characters, stories and sentiments behind each track on Big Box Of Chocolates – here’s what they came out with.
1 Growing Concerns
James: “I adlibbed the vocal bit,
the tannoy thing – Ryan
phoned me and said we’ve
got this…”
Ryan: “…gap of two bars – and
I didn’t tell him, I just
pressed record and he came
out with this story about
travelling around the Romanian mountains. We redid it
in the studio with Edwyn’s Tannoy that sounds like an
old BBC-backed speaker.”
2 Bootcut Jimmy The G
R: “We were invited
to a birthday
party for Jimmy
f r o m
T h e
Kazimier but we didn’t know who Jimmy was and didn’t find
out. There was this one guy in the middle of the room going
for it, throwing the moves, really such a groover and he was
wearing these bootcut jeans and like a shirt from Next, just
a really ordinary looking kind of dude who was completely
immersed in himself.”
J: “There was no one else dancing so we assumed he must be
Jimmy. He wasn’t!”
3 Bad Dream (Breakdown
On St George’s Mount)
J: “Bad Dream was written about
three years ago – I guess
maybe it’s about when you
have someone close to you
and you think would they be
better off without you because
you’re just not good enough.”
R: “It’s that relationship thing
and that’s why I really like it
because it’s not shy of that proper classic pop song – you
know, girl meets boy.”
4 Sit Like Ravi
Cal: “We were in South
Germany on a day off on
tour and we got really
high. It was the night of
that big red moon, the
supermoon, so we got
cosmic.”
Harry: “Ry started playing guitar
dead high up like it’s a
sitar, sitting on the floor
cross-legged.”
R: “Pretending to be psychedelic. We were out of our comfort
zone vocally but in the studio, Edwyn was like ‘let’s keep
the harmonies!’”
5 Katy-Anne Bellis
R: “Ah, Katy-Anne! She lived in the Garlic
Mansion – she’s such a good person,
just really creative and enthusiastic.
She’s one of those people who just
wants to help, doesn’t mind, she never
wants anything back and so when I got
to know her for a little bit and then she
left, I was like ‘ahh I wanted to know
more about her’ – her name worked
really well as a melody and the rest is just literal!”
6 O, Man Won’t You Melt Me
R: “Edwyn does the backing on this one.”
H: “He comes in and sounds like God
with this big, deep voice: ‘Oh it’s not
me!’”
J: “We were really scared about asking
him as well.”
H: “Yeah, we asked Grace first.”
R: “And he was just like ‘can you write it down for me?’ and
then he was holding it all day practicing it so he got it really
right.”
7 Statue Of The Greatest
Woman I Know
H: “It’s got one of my favourite bits on the
album, which is Ryan’s vocal when he
goes into a bit of a Scouse accent.”
R: “Gerrrreaat-est! That part ‘I painted the
kitchen, I painted the top of the stairs’ is
something I heard my dad say to my mum
in a silly argument: ‘I’ve bloody painted
the kitchen and painted the stairs, what
else do you want me to do? Cut the grass?’
It was a good little nugget of married life.”
8 Meet Me At The
Molly Bench
C: “It’s about a bench in
Mollington just outside
Chester.”
J: “It’s equidistant from mine
and Ry’s house and it’s
where we used to meet on our bikes.”
R: “The bike bell, why did we choose to put that in?”
H: “It was in the right key, we didn’t have to pitch shift it at all,
and it’s a song about bikes. In the studio, you couldn’t hold
it without muting it so you had to attach it to a drumstick.”
9 Lauren, I’m In Love!
C: “It could be taken in a certain way,
as like a lustful thing, but it’s not,
it’s about our appreciation of her
and what she [Lauren Laverne]
does for 6Music.”
H: “And about 6Music in general.
That sounds even more suck up-y
but we went in to do a session
and I just remember thinking ‘What are we doing? We’re
in 6Music doing a live session and we’re just four – four
dickheads is what we always say’.”
10 Frostbitten In Fen Ditton
H: “Originally it was just going to fade out with
the chords and Edwyn said try something
different and we came up with that ending
in the studio.”
R: “We were going for that country and
western, jangly kind of sound.”
C: “We were listening to like a lot of Americana
music like The Flying Burrito Brothers, Lee Hazlewood…”
J: “… And trying to get that atmosphere on the track with
Edywn’s lap steel.”
11 Lazers Linda
R: “We wrote the most throwaway lyrics we’ve ever tried to
write.”
J: “We fictionalised a character in
our heads didn’t we? Linda is a
reference to It’s Always Sunny In
Philadelphia, but we made her
this guru who can help you.”
C: “And we argued for ages about the track title – it should be
an ‘s’ instead of a ‘z’ but we just thought in the end ‘z’ looks
better, it’s cooler.”
12 Big Box Of Chocolates
J: “I think the greatest bit
in this one is where Ry
sums up what it’s like to
create something in front
of the ocean, cos we were overlooking Moray Firth.”
R: “To say, like, ‘I’m trying to make this art but I mean look at
that, I’m never gonna make anything better than that’.”
C: “It definitely influenced the album just being there and
having this view.”
R: “You were just pinching yourself all the time – here we are,
10 years down the line, we’ve been mates since high school,
we try to make music and suddenly we’re in Edwyn Collins’
studio and it’s just like ‘fuck, what?!’ So then you feel like
you’ve got to make something good of it or you might waste
the opportunity.”
H: “Or at least, if not make something good, appreciate what
you’re doing while you’re doing it.”
C: “But then realising that there are bigger things than what
you’re doing.”