By 2007, we’d had a nerve-racking couple of years. We were on the V2 label for our first three albums but they were slowly folding. We signed with Fiction without them having heard a note of our fourth album, Seldom Seen Kid. As the money was running out, it was looking like “proper job” time. I would have been behind a nightclub till. Mark Potter would have been a chef and his brother Craig would have been an auxiliary nurse. But thankfully we got an advance and we were over the bloody moon.
It had been an eventful time. Our friend Bryan Glancy, the real Seldom Seen Kid, had died, and I’d just got together withEmma Jane Unsworth, who I was then with for almost a decade.
I got a call from David Joseph, who was head of Universal Music. He said: “Congratulations on the album but have you got anything else, to help us out on radio?” I said: “Given that it’s taken us two and a half years to write the 10 tracks that you have, I doubt it. But by all means, I’ll give it a go.”
We had just over two weeks to come up with something before the final mastering for the album had to be complete. Over the next couple of days, I started kicking ideas around, recording some simple voice notes at home. The first idea I had was in the bath. I’m literally saying the words: “Blinking in the morning sun.” It had like a weird da-da-da thing about it. I went down to the studio with Craig and we said: “Let’s just take a run at this.”
I’d had that lyric – “Throw those curtains wide” – for years. I’d tried the idea once before on anElbowsong called Ribcage, where I sing: “Pull my ribs apart and let the sun inside.” I left home at 17 and was absolutely skint for years but, no matter how dark or miserable I got, if I saw the dawn, it was all right.
At Blueprint Studios in Salford, Craig fleshed out the chords. I had the idea of every line being echoed by a string section. You throw strings at a track and the listener feels ennobled, catered for and looked after. I recall analysing Bitter Sweet Symphony by the Verve and Unfinished Sympathy by Massive Attack, as well as Up With People by Lambchop, Loaded by Primal Scream and Spiritualized’s Ladies and Gentlemen. The song exploded into what can only be described as Lion King-esque euphoria.
I knew the track was going to be a singalong of some proportions. I was freshly in love and Manchester was looking fantastic. The future was rosy. It was a feeling of, this is too joyous to keep to ourselves.
The loveliest legacy of the song is that at least twice a week, somebody approaches me in the street and tells me that they walked down the aisle to it. And somebody once sent me footage of a few hundred people on either side of a tube track singing it to each other. That is kind of magic.
Seldom Seen Kid was the first album I produced and mixed for Elbow. There were a lot of the influences that we always came back to – bands such as Beastie Boys, but particularly around that time Rufus Wainwright’s album Want One, specifically a track calledBeautiful Child. It is probably the shortest song we’ve written. We often spend months on them, and sometimes revisit them years later, but we turned around One Day Like This in a couple of weeks.
Guy had the very basic, rising notes which I formed the chords from. Once the chords at the end were written, we realised that it had that this Hey Jude feel to it. There was no head-scratching to try and mould something that wasn’t quite right. It was pretty immediate from the beginning.
People assume we had a big string section or even an orchestra. In fact, as we were short on time, it was actually just our three touring musicians from that period – Stella Page, Jote Osahn and Ian Burdge. We got them into the big room at Blueprint. I sat them up on three chairs with stereo mics and then for each different take moved the players around the room, either one over or one back, as if they were in different positions within an orchestra. With that, you get different resonances coming off the walls depending where they are sat. It’s a great way to blend strings when you’ve only got a few. It gives a much more classic sound.
I also got them to bring in spare or older instruments of theirs to swap them around giving varying textures and asked them to play it perhaps not exactly as they normally would, imagining they are a different player for one take.
At the end of the song, and this usually happens once on every album where there are some claps needed, we all just stood around one mic and started clapping. It’s then that we realise what we do for a job, and feel very lucky because it’s fun.
Elbow’s new EP, Audio Vertigo Echo, is out on 6 June.Their UK tourbegins in Cardiff on 13 June.