City Of Tiny Lights

Not counting all the usual things that hold up an album, The City Lights had some real challenges to deal with in regards getting the band back together, before they could even start work on their third record. With something of a floating line-up, James Roden decided that it was time to strip things back to their bare bones minimum – three-piece rock'n'roll. With his brother Harry on bass, and Graeme Trewin (formerly of Sydney indie kings Peabody) on drums, the line-up was solidified and ready to go, so they headed into the studio. The problem was, what they came up with they hated, bar one track Without People You're Nothing which made the cut.

“We recorded exactly the same songs, in our view, badly!” Roden laughs. “I think we mistook a little bit of looseness and relaxedness, and a 'when it's finished it's finished' attitude, with just too much looseness in the studio. We didn't really know what we were doing. We didn't end songs on time together – we just hadn't rehearsed enough. You actually have to be a bit tight. You can't be quite so casual. We recorded in such a way that if one person made a mistake, the whole song had to be re-recorded because there was so much spill between the microphones. So with the first lot of recordings there were no good takes, except for the one that survived and then that became the benchmark for how the others should sound. We knew if we could get every song like that, when we know what we're doing, it will sound great.”

One of the first things that sticks out about the new album I Just Got To Believe is that only one song cracks through the three-minute mark – the whole album is over before you even notice. Roden says that far from this being a coincidence, he had somewhat of an epiphany when writing the new songs and decided that the old adage 'less is more' is often very true. It also reminded him a lot of some of the songs that first inspired his own love of rock'n'roll.   

“My impatience level has reverted to that of a teenager,” he says without laughing. “I looked at songwriting from a completely different perspective this time, and I realised it was kind of this weird habit of doing a verse, then a chorus, then another verse and put in some sort of instrumental part... maybe the verse is really boring the second time – or maybe the chorus should be in there again. It just became a lot more fun to use an emotional response rather than the imaginary rulebook in your head that says this is how songs are supposed to go.

“So much exciting music, if you look at '50s singles and '60s singles, they were a minute-and-a-half! I think that got lost somewhere around prog rock. They went to 12-minutes and then came back to a more reasonable three- or four-minutes, but that's still double some of my favourite songs. Most Kinks songs go for about one-minute and fifty-seconds, and I think a lot of people forget that.”

Roden says that when The City Lights first emerged, there were some disparaging comments made towards the band and some of their likeminded cohorts for jumping on board some kind of new rock explosion bandwagon.

“The bands didn't jump on it – the media did! Now that explosion has gone, but the bands haven't gone away. It's just that no one cares anymore,” he laughs.