One of Melbourne’s most respected rock acts British India are today releasing their fifth record Nothing Touches Me (out via Liberation). The four-piece who have built a devoted fanbase on such unglamorous concepts as quality songwriting and a rock-solid tour ethic –are releasing the best album of their 10-year career.
Nothing Touches Me, the follow-up to 2013’s ultimately triumphant but initially troubled Controller, bristles with all the energy and urgency of the band’s famed early singles while further exploring the expanded ambitions of its predecessor. A true studio album – as opposed to a collection of songs played live in a studio – it is set to elevate British India into the gang of great Australian rock’n’roll groups.
To celebrate this stunningly impressive release, the band have given us a track by tack run down of the making of Nothing Touches Me. Check it out below.
Spider Chords
“Despite being a hallmark of a lot of our favourite bands, Nirvana, The Pixies and Brand New, we’ve used quiet-loud-quiet-loud song structures really rarely, so this song was really exciting and fun to write. Nic had the repeating riff since we were working on Avalanche but it wasn’t until Matt added the heavy section towards the end that we really got anywhere with it, it was a real eureka moment in the studio.
Awesome production on this one, the Rhodes organ really hold the whole song together and Will’s harmony vocal is straight out of Music From The Big Pink. Wrote the lyrics really quickly and they’re surprisingly positive, it’s sort of about falling in love with the same person twice. Fans of The Shins will recognise the riff from the second verse, we couldn’t resist leaving it in. This album has lots of nice little touches and in-jokes like that so it’s a great song to start the album.”
Angela
“This was the last song we wrote for Nothing Touches Me, I wrote the opening riff that that whole song is based around while we were in Berlin but didn’t finish it until we got back. I had the song pretty much written when I showed it to the other guys and then it was just a matter of playing it in an exciting way, it’s quite simple and just us doing what we do best.
Matt’s drumming is particularly good on this song and I the version on the record is the first take we did of the song, it was perfect first time! I don’t know anyone called Angela but it’s a lovely name to sing. We haven’t named a song after a girl before so we thought it was time. The lyrics have a lot of imagery about storms and rain because it was written on a stormy day.”
Suddenly
“This is Will’s baby. When he first showed it to us I thought it seemed too complicated to become very catchy, usually our most successful songs are musically very simple so it was a challenge for us to write and took a couple of weeks to get it sounding right.
We used XTC’s General’s and Majors and Blur’s ‘Girls And Boys’ as a template and made sure it was easy to dance to. Everyone wrote great parts and musically it’s one of the songs we’re most proud of. Took a very long time writing the lyrics, it’s always easier for me to write about negative emotions rather than happy ones but Will helped a lot with the words. Took some direction from the James Blake song ‘Retrograde’ in which he sings “Suddenly I’m hit” about falling in love, I wanted to make a song about the feeling you get when it first hits you, like a punch in the chest, that’s what the songs about.”
Wrong Direction
“We wrote this sitting in a circle in the studio, looking at each other’s hands to see the changes so as not to break the spell, it came to us out of thin air right at the end of the day and it was written pretty much as it sounds now. Matt wrote great lyrics for the chorus and some of the verses and it’s about convincing yourself that everything was a mistake after the end of a relationship. Fast songs are always our favourites and this one is awesome to play live, people seem to love it.”
I’ll Let You Blame It All On Me
“This, like Angela, was written after we got back from Berlin. It was difficult to record because when it was written it didn’t have any drums and was missing the dramatic ending, all of that happened by happy accident in the studio.
Got really creative with the outro adding piano, backing vocals and strings and didn’t leave the studio until dawn, just fired by creativity and beer. It’s a great lyric, most of our songs don’t tell such a coherent story but this is a great break-up song. The music is quite uplifting but the lyrics are really very sad. It’s Nic’s favourite song on the album.”
Jay-Walker
“We wrote this one while I was obsessed with the music of Elliot Smith, in-fact I really wanted to call the song Jay Walker (For Elliot Smith). Nic and Will wrote the music together but it’s been through lots of changes and took a long time to write. Probably the saddest song we’ve ever done and the lyric is mainly concerned with the sin of life lived dispassionately.
This was one of the songs when I was really pushed by the producers to sing well, I hate singing in studios, you feel very exposed, your vocal flaws are really put on display for everyone to see, on the first few records I just screamed along to all the songs and I probably would have done the same on this record had Glenn and Simon not really pushed and encouraged me to sing well. I also play piano on the song which is pretty funny because I’m a fairly terrible piano player but the whole thing works pretty well. It would have been tempting to put such a ballad-y song towards the end of the record but we were so proud of this song it was important to us to have it on the first side. Anyway, this one’s for Elliot, wherever he may be.”
Nothing Touches Me
“This song is my favourite; I love the drama of the refrain and the strings. It was Nic’s chord sequence and they’re all minor chords which just lends itself to a real intensity, this song was recorded entirely by Will and the band at our rehearsal space, we just listened to the demo and decided it was perfect as it was and there was no point trying to replicate or improve it so we just remixed what we’d done.
With the lyric I was trying to write a updated version of the Rolling Stones ‘Play With Fire’ and I feel we got pretty close. Nic plays an awesome solo in the middle and the song builds to a really intense outro, there are lots of strings but it never sounds lush, we kept the drums and guitar very raw. And I scream my ass off, which is what I seem to do best. We decided to name the album for the song because it’s a very tough sounding phrase and we wanted to break our superstition with having one word album titles, this record is about us changing things up.”
Come Home
“This was the hardest song to record, we’d had the basic parts of the song for perhaps a year and everyone thought it had huge potential and we probably tried to record it four times. If you listen to the drumming it’s actually incredibly complex, Matt adds a different touch of percussion at every change but it still has real swing and it’s very easy to dance to.
It’s another love song about a long distance relationship which is pretty fertile ground for writing about, the bridge is particularly good and I pinched some of the lyrics from Bob Dylan, the whole thing is very uplifting and by the end of the song we’re really going for it, so fun to play this live, you can keep the groove going for hours.”
Lifeguard
“This is one of the few songs in which I only sing and don’t play any guitar. The other three guys were jamming away while I was reading or talking on the phone or some such, I could tell it was a good song and Nic liked it and was playing very interesting stuff, normally I would have offered some input as to the structure or the chord movements but they were doing such a good job of it I didn’t want to interfere. By the time I’d come back the song was pretty much finished and Nic and I wrote the lyrics together, the chorus lyric is quite beautiful and romantic.
I remember recording this in Berlin nursing what has to be my worse ever hangover, I very unprofessionally came straight to the studio from a night club but still managed to sing pretty well, it’s actually a really nice song to listen to when you’re hungover, the guitar is really pretty. This is probably our most Radiohead song which is something we’ve probably aimed for since we were seventeen.”
Right By Your Side
“This is a really strong song, it was one of the ones that was written almost entirely before we tried to record it and it sounds good with a full band or just guitar. It was a really daring move to make the rhythm guitar acoustic rather than electric it gives it all a really different dynamic.
This was one of the first songs we recorded when we got back from Berlin and our producer really did a great job and pushed us to play and record the song differently to how we usually would and it’s incredibly well produced, the solo and middle eight are particularly creative. This song doesn’t sound like anyone else.”
This Is How It Feels
“I read a review of the Arctic Monkey’s record AM and the journalist described the music as being “imperial rock” and the phrase really stuck with me. We started writing this song and I was really excited to give it a big chorus and a huge lyric. Will added a really cool bass line inspired by David Bowie’s ‘Ashes To Ashes’, which really took the track to a different place. It’s a really vicious breakup song about wanting to make someone else’s life hell, I’m particularly proud of the lyric “I hope you never see your dreams after waking”, which is so vicious, it sounds like a Shakespearean curse!”
The Departure Lounge
“This was the first song we wrote so it’s sort of the albums unofficial anthem. The chord sequence is just divine; the parts just tumble into each other really naturally. Have very fond memories of recording the song late at night here in Melbourne with everyone adding layer after layer of guitars, vocals and percussion and it builds to an awesome climax.
Great headphone music! You can hear each new instrument as it comes in. We built the whole song around Nic’s acoustic guitar which sounds simple but is actually very hard to play well. The images of the song are all to do with air travel and distance, which is also true of the entire album. We wrote and recorded this album almost entirely on the road touring Controller. Little snatches of writing and recording between plane trips and long drives. It’s an album about displacement the impossibility of living life in the right order. None of the songs are about being alone; they’re about people colliding violently with either fantastic or doomed futures.”
Nothing Touches Me is out now via Liberation
