Blood Red Shoes: “There's less disco-y stuff on this album”

Blood Red Shoes release their anticipated second album Fire Like This on March 1 via V2. Starting from today, the band will be streaming one song a week from the new record as a taster for eager fans – head over to bloodredshoes.co.uk to listen!

We caught up with the duo to find out what exactly we can expect from the follow up to 2008′s acclaimed debut Box Of Secrets.

So the new album is called Fire Like This… How did you come to agree on the title?

The name – well, I don’t really know, we just thought of it. I think it had references to Twin Peaks and stuff, we watched a lot of that, a lot of David Lynch stuff. We thought that fire is talked about a lot in his films. Also, we thought of it because – what a fire is, it’s really hard, it’s an energy basically, and we thought that it had a good… we work really hard and I think it’s something to do with a reference to us! I think it’s a mixture of things, but basically a fire is quite hard to put out, Fire Like This, like an energy – yeah.

Can you tell me a little about the recording process?

We recorded it in Liverpool at the Motor Museum with Mike Crossey who we did our first one with. It took quite long, but we took our time – we did festivals at the weekends and stuff. It probably took about two months with mixing and mastering. We were there during the week and went off to Europe and did festivals and gigs to keep us from going out of our minds being stuck in the same place! The studio’s really nice, Mike owns it.

Would you say that A Fire Like This is a departure from your last record (Box Of Secrets)?

Yeah, I reckon it definitely is a change from Box Of Secrets – the first album was like, “this is us” – each song was quite fast, to the point, and that’s what I guess a debut album should be. Since that time, we’ve played so much and some of the songs on that album were quite old, we’d written them when we first got together. The songwriting’s definitely developed, it’s got better, and the sound of it is more like our live show – it’s really captured what we sound like live, and we tried to do live takes, to make it sound as live as possible.

Also, I think it’s got more depth to it, even though we’ve done less to it than the first one, it sounds more spacey, there’s more depth to it. It’s a bit darker. We definitely just got better at playing our instruments and writing together! So in my head, I think it’s definitely a step up from the first album.

What has the reaction from your fans been like to the new material… ‘Colours Fade’ for example?

It’s been really good actually, quite surprising the amount of downloads that we had! We were really shocked – yesterday we put it up on Myspace and got like 14,000 plays. For us, that’s a lot of plays! The response has been really good, I thought people would be more freaked out by it – we intentionally put up ‘Colours Fade’ because I think it’s my favourite song on the album. All the songs are different to that – the whole album doesn’t sound like that, it’s quite varied. There’s some typical Blood Red Shoes stuff and then some stuff that people might be quite shocked by.

I think we put that song up because we thought it set the album up with something a bit darker sounding, a bit longer at seven minutes. It’s been a really good reaction – obviously a few people have been like, “what the hell is this, it sounds really weird…”, but I think the production sounds great. It’s exactly how we wanted it, live-sounding, spacey-sounding.

Can you talk us through the songs you think might shock listeners?

There’s one that’s quite different to anything we’ve done, it’s quite sparse and stripped back. It’s quite personal and slow, and sweetly sung. There’s less disco-y stuff on this album – there’s not anything like on the first album, it’s not really like that, it’s more of a rock album. This song is like nothing we’ve done before, and when we wrote it, we were like “wow”, it’d come out of nowhere.

Where did you write the record?

Most of it was written before we went into the studio, but we were writing over a year, on the road, writing new songs and trying them out. Half the record was written just before we went into the studio and we finished lyrics and little bits of it actually in the studio, which we’ve never done before – before we’d had all the songs and been rehearsing them for ages.

There are some really new songs on there that we’ve never even played live – obviously we can play them, but we haven’t even started rehearsing anything yet, which is what we’re going to be doing now.We wrote together because that’s how we write, but that’s really new to us, to have never played a song at a gig or anything before. It’s quite exciting really, we’ve got these songs that no-one’s heard and we did a gig recently in London, but we didn’t play all of the new songs. We’ve kept some back for when we go on tour, which’ll be exciting, playing them for the first time!