Boy-girl act Slow Club return with an exciting new album Tim Hughes finds out more

Sassy, stylish and seductive, boy-girl duo Slow Club are a class act whose style more than matches their substance.

Marrying lush indie-pop with soaring vocals, catchy melodies and wide-screen cinematic scope, the partnership of Rebecca Taylor and Charles Watson sounds as good as they look. And they look amazing. All of which makes them the perfect band to play that fiesta of free-range forest frolics, Wilderness.

The Sheffield pair’s date at Cornbury Park, near Charlbury, next weekend, finds them at the top of their game, following the release of their critically acclaimed third album Complete Surrender.

The album, recorded away from temptation and distraction in an isolated house in Stroud, Gloucestershire, is a marked departure for the band who have moved from the rootsy folk-pop of their 2009 debut Yeah So, through the experimental sounds of 2011’s Paradise to today’s Phil Spector-esque polished pop.

“We're at an age now where we want our music to sound more expansive and for life to be more fabulous,” smiles Rebecca. “That's all it was really. I don't find there’s anything more beautiful than that sound.”

“We just kept it to bass, guitar, drums, strings and brass,” says Charles. “It’s really classic and to the point. As you grow up you can get impatient with music and want it to make sense.”

The album was produced by Colin Elliot, who has previously worked his magic with fellow Steel City artist Richard Hawley. Musically it references Motown and Stax soul, 70s classic bands and modern chart pop.

“I was listening to a lot of Michael Jackson, Marvin Gaye, and other 70s stuff,” says Charles.

Rebecca, meanwhile, admits to indulging her love of Katy Perry and Taylor Swift, as well as earlier female icons such as Dolly Parton, Linda Ronstadt and Fleetwood Mac’s Stevie Nicks.

“The way these women would tell a story and open their hearts and be simple and truthful in their lyrics really inspired me,” she says.

“For some bizarre, magical reason Charles and I were both on the same page with this album,” she goes on. “I remember the first time we spoke about what we wanted it to sound like and we were both agreeing and it was like ‘wow, gosh!’”

The result is honest and immediate, but while it sounds altogether fresh, Charles insists it was more by accident than design. “As with most things in Slow Club world, the shift in sound wasn’t some massively pre-planned decision, more just a natural evolution,” he says.

“A lot of these songs are just us playing them live as opposed to on the last record where we didn’t really do it like that,” he goes on.

“It was fun at the time but we’ve had two more people in the band now so having more people play the songs on stage definitely changes your perception of how the band could be better. It felt like we were more of a gang doing it.”

And while it took three years from the previous album to get down to it, once they started, things moved quickly, the whole thing being wrapped up in four months.

“We knew that this record was going to be a lot more straight. It’s more about the songs than anything,” says Charles. “We spent a lot more time on the songs rather than the production or pre-production. We just wanted that to speak for itself, really.”

Rebecca agrees. “It’s more about the emotion in the lyrics and then the music would complement that,” she says. “On the last record we wanted to be obscure and push things to sound strange, whereas this one was completely the opposite.”

And while it doffs its cap to the past, the pair avoided wallowing in it.

“We really didn’t want it to sound ‘retro’, but we wanted it to have that grace and sort of respect for itself,” says Charles. “I think it’s in the playing really. A lot of those old records are not coated in reverb and that’s what people tend to go for. It tends to just be really amazing players who have practised and locked-in. We just tried to practise the best we could.”

And while both share songwriting duties, they admit there were no hard and fast rules.

Rebecca recalls: “We’d start writing a song separately and then finish it together, or one person would start it and the other would figure out what they were going on about and then help.

“The freedom of me being able to sing about some things that were happening to me, and for Charles to sing about something that’s happened to him just made it quite a lot easier really.

“I started to worry that I’d have to say ‘we’ and I couldn’t say ‘he’ or something, so now we don’t worry about that.

“Fleetwood Mac is an example of how you can all be in a band and you can all sing but it can be one person’s emotion.”

And, as Wilderness-goers will soon discover, it’s a sound which is going down well with audiences.

“You can tell from a crowd what’s working and what isn’t,” says Rebecca. “And these songs are connecting so quickly with people.”

CHECK IT OUT
Wilderness runs from August 7-10. Weekend tickets are £143.50 plus booking fee from
wildernessfestival.com 

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