Taking roughly 12 months off the road to record the album, it was an extensive process, which Marsden isstill trying to wrap his head around. “It’s our fourth album, that’s amazing to me,” he says. “We wrote 100 songs and we are only releasing 12 of those. So I really think what we are putting out is the most exciting things we have right now and almost the signpost to all the places we want to explore in the future as a band. If people get into this record, it’s going to be the beginning of a new journey for us. There are definitely elements of Band Of Skulls that everyone knows already, but there are a few more layers that we let people into that perhaps we haven’t before.”
Given the extensive creative preparation, selecting the correct tracks to include on By Default was a difficult process. The three members didn’t always agree with each other’s choices, but they were eventually able to settle.
“We are very diplomatic. There’s nothing on the record that we don’t all love. It just takes some time to get people into it and we have all these underhand ways of influencing each other,” says Marsden. “For instance, if I’ve got an idea I’ll play it for a couple of weeks around the band on my guitar, so that when I present it to them, they feel like they know it already. They’ve fathomed it now; they’re too savvy.”
The majority of By Default was written in the Southampton Baptist Church and recorded in the legendary Rockfield Studios in Wales. Producer Gil Norton joined the trio in the studio, a collaboration that brought the best out of Band Of Skulls.
“We got a call from Gil Norton and he said, ‘Do you want to have a beer?’ We said yes and two weeks later we were in Rockfield making the record. It was like a speed date that got really out of hand. Gil really works you hard. He destroyed us. He takes a lot from you in the recording process, but he just brings out the best performance. He’s super experienced and he’s got really high standards. The biggest names you can think of – he’s made them cry. Gil was always going for that better take and that perfection and that’s the sort of standard you have to step up to.”
Also raising the bar for the record was drummer, Matt Hayward. After a special request from Marsden, he learnt some exotic techniques for the track, Tropical Disease.
“I said to Matt, ‘Can you do samba?’ And he looked at me and didn’t say anything. So I was like, ‘Can you do mambo? Can you do South American beats?’ We spent some time researching it and released it’s completely different to the way drumbeats are put together in a western or rock’n’roll way. We got obsessed with it and did Tropical Disease as a moment of that. We were in this cold church in England playing this really loud samba music with the Band Of Skulls filling in the gaps. I didn’t know if Matt was going to say, ‘I’d love to learn the samba,’ or punch me in the face. Luckily he learnt it [laughs].”
BY PHOEBE ROBERTSON
