From Bible John to Dario Argento: Sons & Daughters get “beautiful, creepy and quite seedy” with TLOBF

Three years on from their last album – 2008’s jam-packed, Bernard Butler-produced This Gift – one of Glasgow’s finest bands are back. Sons & Daughters’ fourth album Mirror Mirror may be their best yet – a back-to-basics dive into their dark side.

“It is positively balmy,” says David Gow. We are sat with the Sons & Daughters drummer outside a pub across the road from the Manchester venue of tonight’s sell-out show. When the weak evening sun dips behind a cloud, TLOBF becomes decidedly chilly, but as a hardened Glaswegian, Dow is not having our suggestion that we move inside.

So, we smooth away our goose-bumps and talk about Sons & Daughters’ sparkling new album, Mirror Mirror. It is a sinuous beast, displaying a darker and starker sound. It is perhaps their most adventurous album, and Gow concedes that “compared to the last album, we are much happier because it is much more where we wanted to end up.”

Mirror Mirror was written over a year-long period in a studio loaned from “our mates, Franz Ferdinand, while they were away on tour.” The initial idea was to camp out for two months, but David confesses that “it took a lot longer than we thought so we ended up there for 12.” The main reason for the extended period of creativity was nailing down the direction, fuelled by the band’s desire “to make a record that was different to the last, essentially.”

“It took us quite a while to figure that out,” David says. “Me and Scott spent the first summer driving around Glasgow with rock radio on, and everything we were writing sounded like fucking Led Zeppelin or Cheap Trick. We love all those bands, but it’s not going to be a Sons & Daughters’ record. But the thing that really kicked me and Scott in the ass when we started writing this was Portishead’s third record. It is quite confrontational, and they obviously spent a very long time making that record.”

“I have just been reading this book about why E=MC2 – it is a science book for luddites like me. The point that the guy who wrote the book is making is that you have to start simple when you are coming up with a theory for something, and you have to strip everything out and then back it up with experimentation. I think we ended up spending a lot of months doing that. We knew essentially where we wanted to be, but we didn’t know quite how we were going to get there.”

The previous Sons & Daughters album, This Gift, was a watershed moment for the band. Produced by Bernard Butler, it showcased a fuller sound and some big pop tunes. But the creation was a pretty tortuous affair, as Butler layered up tracks and fiddled ad infinitum. “I think it was brilliantly produced and he mixed it amazingly well,” David says when we ask him whether he likes the album. “Sonically, it is fantastic. But, I think we just sickened ourselves with the hyper-popness of it.”

If This Gift was a painful process, it ensured that the band went back to basics. Mirror Mirror was recorded over a 28-day period. “If we hadn’t got that out of our system, we would never have got to this point,” David says when asked about how the recording of This Gift shaped the band’s future approach. “Mirror Mirror draws on every record we have done in the past, but it has its own thing as well. It was made live, with us playing in the room. If we made a mistake, we’d stop and start the tape again.”

For the first time since their debut Love The Cup, the new album was recorded in their hometown of Glasgow. “With the last record, we spent ten weeks in London. That was a huge contrast to the record before [2005’s The Repulsion Box], which we made in a tiny village outside Cologne. That was just a few horses and no-one else around. It was idyllic and really productive, because there was nothing else to distract you. We did think that if we made a record in Glasgow again, we might be distracted by home – but that wasn’t the case.”

Another huge advantage of recording in Glasgow was that it allowed the band to work with JD Twitch (that’s Keith McIvor to his mum). The DJ, who was taking a break from the hugely influential Optimo nights at the city’s Sub Club, had long been a huge fan of Sons & Daughters work, “He has always been our biggest champion back from when we started playing shows back in Glasgow in 2002,” David confirms. “We played Optimo gigs early on and it was always great – the best shows we ever did.”

“We always wanted to work with Keith right from the start. Optimo finished up last year and that freed him up. He wanted to have a go at producing records and it seemed like an absolutely brilliant piece of serendipity.”

Indeed, McIvor brought a hunger (“this was his first record as a producer, so he was super-excited about doing it”) and a dance music sensibility to the making of Mirror Mirror. “That’s why we got him, you know,” David tells us when asked about the impact McIvor had on the finished sound. “He had all the songs and was quite adamant about which ones would send us down the right path. ‘Silver Spell’ started out as an Only Ones-New Wave rocker. On the day in the studio we did a few takes of it and we were like ‘this is pish – let’s do something else with it.’ We got rid of the guitar and Keith suggested we make it super-slow and more doom-laden.”

While the writing of Mirror Mirror took up to a year, it appears that the band found time to moonlight on their first ever soundtrack for a short film entitled Native Son, which was chosen to be featured at the 2010 Cannes Film Festival. “I forgot all about that,” David admits. “[The Mirror Mirror album track] ‘The Beach’ is actually from that. The director Scott Graham, who is from Aberdeenshire, got in contact with us and said he loved our band and wondered whether we had ever done a soundtrack. The film is really dark – it’s got the guy who plays Ian Curtis in Control [it is actually Sean Harris, who played Curtis in 24 Hour Party People].

Gow then proceeds to explain the plot to us. His description of Native Son as being ‘really dark’ is perhaps the biggest understatement of humankind. We won’t share the storyline as to not spoil the surprise but also because we are only just able to think about it without the need for counseling. It’s that dark.

But Sons & Daughters have always been fascinated by the macabre. Lyrically, a couple of tracks on Mirror Mirror allude to lead singer Adele Bethel’s fascination for serial killers. “Adele is obsessed with serial killers,” David confirms. “That informed a lot of her writing.” We discuss the supposition that secretly everyone is fascinated by serial killers and the concept of the darkest places of the human psyche. TLOBF enquires about famous Scottish serial killers, as none spring immediately to mind.

“There is Bible John, who is Peter Tobin,” says David. The murder of three women in the 1960’s was attributed to Bible John, while Tobin is serving a life sentence for similar crimes. “There is pretty convincing evidence but it has never properly come to light. But Peter Tobin was in Glasgow at the time of the Bible John killings.” We feel the need to add the word ‘allegedly’ at this point, just in case Tobin’s lawyers are reading.

Another key reference for Mirror Mirror was the 1970’s Italian horror film Suspiria, directed by the legendary Dario Argento. We ask David why the movie was such a source of inspiration. “It’s a really beautifully shot, sexually violent, creepy as hell and quite seedy.”

We wonder whether he has just described Mirror Mirror. “Ha ha – yeah, fuck it, why not?”

So there you have it – a Twitter-length description of the new Sons & Daughters album. An hour later, David takes to the stage at The Deaf Institute (“the venue is incredible”) with his band mates. Guitarist and co-vocalist Scott Paterson is handsomely quiffed, while bassist Ailidh Lennon is a cool-as-fuck ice queen as she spends the gig staring into the middle-distance. But the focal point of the band is Bethel. She’s tiny but commands a huge stage presence, and arrives wrapped in a red feather boa and a fedora she describes as “Tom Waits on a budget.”

The band starts with ‘Silver Spell’, the opening track from Mirror Mirror. It’s a difficult track to transfer into a live setting, as the recorded form contains a tension from the restrained instrumentation. But they nail it, before sprinting into a raucous version of ‘Gilt Complex’ from This Gift. A deeply menacing ‘Ink Free’ sits neatly alongside the garrulous crowd favourite ‘Johnny Cash’. In some ways, Sons & Daughters are masters of live performance, perfectly balancing an intimacy with their audience, with Bethel and Paterson’s straining star quality.

Earlier, we had asked Gow about Sons & Daughters’ career trajectory. There is a sense – to us – that the band is underrated and better than the sales curve suggests. Whether he truly believes it or not, David is sanguine about the situation. “Everything is relative. From where we are sitting, we know a lot of people like our band so it is difficult to say. Ultimately, what we enjoy the most is touring and playing, having good shows and entertaining folk. That’s what it boils down to. The recording process is brilliant and we love making records and all the rest of it, but the other part of it is you get to play places and for one night, people are really interested in what you are doing.”

That is all well and fine, but we’re interested as to whether this level of ambition has always been the case. Have Sons & Daughters ever tried to purposely write ‘hits’? “I think that time has gone,” he admits. “When it boils down to it, every song we write, we try to make different from every other song, and then the album becomes a collection of those experiments. We are not the most musically ground-breaking band ever, but we try to write big tunes and make them sound good. We do have an interesting band – two guys and two girls – and there are not a lot of bands out there like with that template. We’ve always been proud of that fact. We are ambitious, but the ambition really comes down to wanting to get out and be busy and play. We want folk to hear our music.”

As for any future direction, one thing is clear – the next Sons & Daughters album will sound different from the previous four. “That’s a natural thing for any band – they always react against the last one,” David explains. “Unless you are Snow Patrol and you have to do more of the same. We have never been a band like that – the four albums that we have made, none of them are much like the others.” As for album number five? “We have got a bit of an internal rule in that we will never do the same thing twice. So, all bets are off. We have to go away and procrastinate for a very long time.”

If the results are as good as Mirror Mirror, then over-procrastination can only be a good thing.

Mirror Mirror is out now via Domino.

Sons & Daughters – Silver Spell by DominoRecordCo