Track By Track: Gomez Take Us Back 20 Years Through 'Liquid Skin'

Gomez are returning to Australia to celebrate the re-issue of their breakthrough 1999 release Liquid Skin, where they will be performing the album in full along with some of their other faves. Here, Ben Ottewell, Ian Ball, Tom Gray, Paul Blackburn and Olly Peacock give a track-by-track guide to its songs.

Hangover

BO: Hangover was written in Ilkley and was very collaborative. Tom sung over the riff, Ian wrote the end bit.

IB: We wanted to build the song around the sound of the house, the strange swamp racket we’d made in the house. So we piled in over the top and there’s an orchestra on there too. We took it from Ilkley and tried to recreate that madness at Abbey Road.

Revolutionary Kind

TG: I’d probably started writing Revolutionary Kind in my digs at uni in Leeds, so it was among the handful of things that had been written with the Bring It On stuff but was unfinished. It was originally called 'Dancing', a song we didn’t like, but we really liked the basics of it, so we came up with a new chorus.

BO: I always think this should have started the record. That is probably my favourite Gomez song. It’s fantastic to play live. It helped us comes to terms with playing along with samples. It was an important stepping stone.

Bring It On

IB: This was a song we had tried on the four-track, but because it was three or four ideas that were chopped up and forged together it was so much easier once we had all the tracks in the studio to work with. Hearing it coming to life was a satisfying experience after trying to do it before and failing. There was a sense that we’d progressed.

TG: That’s a proper three-way between Ben, Ian and me which doesn’t always happen, all three of us composing at the same time. I don’t even know what that song is about. I never had a real inkling, it’s a perfect nonsense song. I did the verse, then the chorus is Bally and Ben, and Bally definitely did the reggae bit, not that he’ll admit to it any more. The things you do when you’re young!

Blue Moon Rising

IB: That started out around the first album. I think Tom wrote that around the crazy time Princess Diana died: the reaction of the English press, the tabloid madness. We were staying in a hotel across the street from where people were laying flowers and could see it all. The song was all written in one go, but we tried to record each section in a different fashion. I think Tom had a Leonard Cohen idea in mind, but I don’t think we got to that style by the end of it. A Leonard Cohen bossa nova perhaps?

PB: I seem to remember Tom talking about his symmetrical basslines at the time. I just remember him celebrating he’d come up with another symmetrically shaped bassline or something like that.

TG: Blue Moon Rising sounds like that because I am very deeply fascinated by that bossa nova sound.

Las Vegas Dealer

IB: That was a road song. We were playing roulette with a guy who claimed that Nuno Bettencourt from Extreme was his son. He was a croupier and may or may not have actually been his dad, it was pre-cell phone so there were no pictures, but it was an interesting place to find yourself.

BO: I think that was the only time I’ve enjoyed Vegas. Ian and I both left with more money than we walked in with which is rare.

OP: For me, this song captures the humour of recording with Ken Nelson. We were semi taking the piss out of ourselves at that point, we came up with this clapping part which we stuck on the record. It’s us clowning around really. I have that image of just the enormity of the studio, being in and out of the different rooms and just us trying to get a handle on the process. It’s funny thinking back, we just dived in.

We Haven't Turned Around

PB: Ask Ian, but I think the origin about it was being on a boat in the Seine in Paris and not being sure if the boat had turned around or not, but I don’t know if that was a joke or not.

IB: Yes, that was Paris! It was inspired by me discovering there was a version of the Statue Of Liberty in Paris. Growing up in the 1990s was so different, without mobiles or the internet you would get into situations you couldn’t figure out. ‘Why is the Statue Of Liberty on the Seine?’ Weird shit would happen... which isn’t weird shit at all now because you can just find out that the French gave it as a gift. I remember up until the final moment I sung the whole thing, and then at the last minute Ben did it, and boom! It was always loose with who took which part; no one had any ego about who did what.

Fill My Cup

TG: I sing this and the vocal is me trying to transplant my Pixies brain into my Gomez brain. I think that’s what it’s trying to do. I don’t know if it necessarily conveys that, it’s a seasick song.

BO: That’s great that song. I love it when Tom starts screaming, he doesn’t do it that often but that’s one where he screams his head off.

IB: This is the one which features the house burning down at Haremere Hall. We also raided the Abbey Road library for volcanoes and the sounds of as many other natural disasters as we could find. God knows why, the song doesn’t cry out for it, but that was what we decided was the way forward, so we created drums out of disasters.

Rhythm & Blues Alibi 

BO: This was about three years old when we recorded it. It’s about people using R&B in the wrong way, or so we thought, but it’s also very self-referential about people wearing their influences. It’s critical, but self-critical.

IB: That was a written-over-the-phone song. I wrote the verse and thought, ‘Ben this is in your Neil Young wheelhouse!’ So I called him up, played him the verse and then he phoned me back a few minutes later with the chorus.

Rosalita

BO: It’s a very personal song written by Tom that I ended up singing for some reason. Tom should have sung it. I sort of had to get into character to record it. Everyone’s had bad break-ups and stuff, so it’s not that hard, but there’s some quite harsh lines in there directed at someone... and I’m singing them! I think Tom had written it melodically with me in mind, but lyrically with someone else...

TG: That was my break-up song

California

IB: This was written in The Viper Room in LA. Ben had been writing lots of parts and we were sat backstage in this cheesy but classic scene and Ben bashed through the pieces he had on an acoustic guitar, then we forged them together into one song.

BO: It was just about missing my lady actually, or more her saying, ‘Why the hell am I not there too?' [Laughs]. A lot of the lyrics at that time were us writing what we were doing. We were in California for the first time, finally, so it became a song.

PB: On the first record, our then-manager Steve [Fellows] had come up with a couple of riffs, he’s a great musician in his own right and was in Comsat Angels, so that’s him ripping out on the solo.

Devil Will Ride

IB: That was one that came about because of a piece of equipment: a vocoder talking guitar-box. It’s not quite the Peter Frampton thing, but it’s cool. We wanted to end the album in some sort of preposterous, riding off into the sunset, singalong thing, so we morphed the vocoder thing into a lyric and that was it... Oh, and we added an orchestra, some brass and hundreds of backing vocals too!