Blood In The Tracks

ome bands just can't get creative when they're on tour, but not Brighton-based duo Blood Red Shoes. In fact, it seems the songs fairly pour out of the pair – guitarist Laura-Mary Carter and drummer Steven Ansell – as they finish the year off with the release of a new EP, Water. It comes just nine months after the release of their third album, In Time To Voices (their fourth if you include a singles compilation album, I'll Be Your Eyes, released when they signed to V2 Records in 2008).

“We had an itch that we needed to scratch, I guess,” Ansell says of the new EP, fielding questions on the line from backstage after a Black Keys concert in London. “We were jamming stuff, really, on tour earlier in the year when we did the first tour around March for the album release. We were jamming stuff in soundchecks and when we hit festival season, 'cause you only play festivals on weekends, so we had a few spare days here and there, you know, in the week, and we just jammed out some songs and we had three that we thought fitted together quite well and would be quite cool for an EP.

“We found three, no four days spare when we were on our US tour, and we'd always wanted to record with John Congleton. He was free on those days, really luckily, so we just scheduled it in. So we actually finished the US tour, went straight into the studio, recorded, flew back to England, like had one day, and then started touring in Europe. We'd lost our only days off to making it,” he chuckles, “but I'm fucking glad that we did.”

Getting together in late 2004 after their respective bands had broken up, Carter and Ansell released their first single, Victory For The Magpie, the following July, ostensibly plying a punk vein, though there were all manner of other indie/alternative rock influences at work, as well as more successful acts such as Black Sabbath, Led Zeppelin and The Rolling Stones. Two further singles followed before Blood Red Shoes signed to V2 Records, having chalked up some 300 gigs around the UK alone. The international touring soon kicked in with tours through Europe and Japan and by the release of their second album, 2010's Fire Like This – their debut, Box Of Secrets, came out in 2008 – they'd become one of the most-travelled bands in the world, chalking up the miles in classic rock'n'roll fashion, by van.

While all that touring didn't exactly translate into massive sales, it did give the pair the experience and confidence to tackle their third album, In Time To Voices, in a very different way to the first two.

“We learnt a lot recording the third album, and writing the third album actually,” Ansell admits, “and I think it opened a lot of doors to us. There were a lot of things about it that we did in a different way and it helped us figure shit out and actually it's made it a lot easier to write since. I think it's actually just being more honest with each other – if we don't like something, instead of fucking around for weeks, kind of being polite about it, now, we know each other well enough and we're secure enough that I can say, 'You know what? I don't like that fucking riff,' and Laura's like, 'Alright cool, fuck it – let's do something else.'

“No one's ego gets bruised and no one gets weird and, like, bashful about that shit, so we can actually move faster than we used to because we don't have to be polite and tiptoe around. We can just really get down to work. It helps. It doesn't mean that you have more ideas but it's quicker to take your idea and turn it into a great song.”

Recording In Time To Voices, Blood Red Shoes once again turned to co-producer Mike Crossey, whose CV includes working with Arctic Monkeys and Foals among others.

“I think a really big difference for this record is that we've learnt how to make records, whereas before [Crossey] really steered the ship… You know, we really didn't know our way around a studio a great deal, a proper studio. We could record on basic equipment that we have ourselves, like our demos, but in making the first two records, and especially with Mike, he likes you to ask questions on a technical level.

“In writing the third record, we spent so much time demoing it with gear we'd built up over the previous four or five years buying recording gear that we'd actually learnt all the technical stuff, so we could explore sounds that we never had before and go to Mike and say, 'Okay, we wanna do this,' and we'd have demos that we'd recorded with quite a lot of detail, so we could explain it with actual recordings. And he'd go, 'Okay, I can do it even better.' So then the album became about taking the ideas we have for the sounds and augmenting everything, whereas in the past it was very much about capturing the feel of us playing together. This was really using the studio more as a tool, as an instrument in itself.”

And having done that, when the pair returned to the studio to record the Water EP, they went the complete opposite way. “I don't even remember recording the EP,” Ansell admits with a laugh. “It was so fast. I mean, we hadn't even finished writing the songs, and we wanted that, 'cause actually we thought In Time To Voices is a very considered, very layered, very detailed record, and actually, as a reaction against that, we completely wanted to record something that was totally spontaneous, really loose. We wanted it to sound like a band had just finished writing it and just played it, you know?

“So we didn't think about the songs too much, we didn't think about the lyrics and didn't put too many layers on it, we kept it, you know, just like a burst of energy – just make a decision and go with it, record it, done. Again, it was a kind of experiment, a risk actually, just to see what comes out if we don't think very much at all,” Ansell laughs.

“And the other thing we wanted to do with it, we had a vision for the guitar sounds that we felt like we were trying to get on In Time To Voices but we didn't get it. We wanted it to be really fucking nasty, you know, like guitars that sound almost like something broken. I wanted people to listen to it and go, 'I think their speakers have gone wrong; the guitar sound,' kind of thing. And not a lot of producers want to do that!”

Blood Red Shoes will be playing the following dates:

Saturday 29 December - Tuesday 1 January - Peats Ridge Festival, Glenworth Valley NSW
Saturday 29 December - Tuesday 1 January - Pyramid Rock Festival, Phillip Island, Melbourne VIC
Thursday 3 January - The Hi-Fi, Melbourne VIC
Friday 4 January - The Hi-Fi, Sydney NSW