KISSY SELL OUT 'YOUTH' - TRACK BY TRACK GUIDE
Through The Leaves
"If you asked me of my fondest memory,
I'd say don't just stand outside you can come and see"
This is actually the last track I wrote for the album and one of the most personal. It's also one of the only songs on the album that uses metaphors in the lyrics rather than more objectively describing my childhood memories as the other songs do. I'm sure I'll explain more inside secrets in these descriptions but working on this album was one of the hardest years of my life for many reasons. I wrote this track as a way of explaining directly to the listener what I had been doing for the last year and why I had lost touch with a lot of the people I cared about most in the world. I imagined taking my loved ones by the hand and walking them through a forest (a metaphor for the album) like a tour guide and explaining "Youth" to them as we walked through the leaves.
As I'll go on to explain I'm sure, this album covers many themes such as post-adolescent alienation, peer-pressure/bullying and nostalgic memories of childhood innocence/dependence/naivety over 11 tracks. I was well aware it was impossible to say everything I intended to in one song so I included the line "If you asked me what these sounds are meant to mean, I'd say don't you try and take in this whole scene" to try and will the listener into making it through the whole 35 minutes before analysing the music they've heard.
Garden Friends
"Awake in the garden 7am, our clothes have been soaked in dew,
Just as the summer's on its way out, I know you'll be leaving too"
If anyone has ever heard the reason why I came up with the name "Kissy" they'll know it had a lot to do with mixing many wild alcoholic drinks together at the big birthday parties I used to have in my back garden and having disturbing dreams when I went to sleep as a result! This track is about a few memories of those parties starting with one of my friends falling asleep in the grass over night and waking up at 7am with his clothes soaked in dew and walking through my house avoiding the vomit and smashed glass and stepping over the people sleeping on the floor.
I think something tragic about the last days of our youth is how aware we become of it ending. I remember when we were all lectured in my first year of sixth form college about choosing universities and deciding what we wanted to do with the rest of our lives and feeling terrified that instead of being free to enjoy the last moments of our childhood, we were being constantly reminded that it was about to end. I was pretty confident at the time that I was going to be a graphic designer or a painter as my profession so my main concern was losing touch with my dearest school friends - hence the second line of this song.
Essex Boy
"Sitting on her bed and watching dirty dancing, Swayze's getting freaky while we're getting off,
Someone's at her door I've got a nasty feeling, I can hear her boy friend and I bet he's tough"
Although there are a lot of themes and concepts weaved into the songs and melodies on "Youth", it's not all deep and meaningful - some of it is simply silly memories of some of the situations I got myself into when I was young. On this occasion I touched on 2 specific memories I have.
One is of pulling this girl I barely knew from the year below at a local night club (I used to sneak in there from the age of 15) and going round to her house thinking I was well in there only for her to put on her VHS of Dirty Dancing and make me watch it all the way through with no action and the distinct feeling I wasn't the only boy in her life.
The second anecdote is about my mates smoking weed in the car park of a local park. We'd sit in my mate Gav's car and listen to "Speed Garage Anthems Volume 2" - hence the speed garage vibe of the track. I was the only one who didn't smoke so they'd arm me with a football and if the police came down to the park they would send me outside the car to do keepy-uppies to make it look like we were there to play football - as the second verse suggests I didn't always convince them hehe!
Apple Jelly
"When I got out of school you didn't like me, that look on your face was plain to see,
I heard you laughing behind my back, just because my jeans were black"
This is essentially an anti-suicide song written from the perspective of 2 popular girls talking about a boy who recently jumped off the roof at my sixth form college. It's also the only song when you can hear me singing acapella!
The concept is of course based on some real events which I heard about when I was at secondary school but I don't want to explain too much for fear of offending anyone's families - after all the song isn't really about someone topping themselves but more about the response of the other students which highlights what a waste of life it would of been if I - or any of my friends had allowed such short term problems such a peer-pressure to get to us.
It took me ages to get the "body hitting floor noise" right, and I spent the best part of a day diving up and down on different surfaces in the studio to get what I wanted. Lots of people think it sounds like a gunshot noise and I think I thought that too when the track was finished but I like that's a bit ambiguous.
This Kiss
The track was originally supposed to be about how frustrating it is to make small talk with people at special occasions instead of talking about stuff that really mattered. I realised quite quickly that I needed to include something a bit more specific to write the song around so I used a story for my early teenage years about when I snogged my mate's girlfriend on several different occasions.
It seemed a strange idea to me to include my spoken parts showing off my delightful Essex accent, but after I recorded them in that style for the original demo everyone I played it too liked my bits best so I kept them in. In the first shows with my live band Dan used to say "this is as poppy as kissy sell out will ever get" before we did the song and I still stand by that comment with regards to my own material I think.
Bubs & Bizzle
Or as the hardcore ravers will probably refer to it - "finally an instrumental!" haha! I wrote this when I was doing my second tour of Australia as a DJ. I think there was even a YouTube video up for a while of me DJing in New Zealand playing the original demo of this track that I made in my hotel room! This is first example of me fiddling with the BPM so much that it's almost unmixable in most people's DJ sets (as I've done on a few subsequent remixes) - but I kinda like that!
Someone once suggested to me that I should put this out on a vinyl where the outer music part and the centre label are in opposite places to make it unplayable on most record players - a bit pretentious but most 12" records are for nailing to walls now anyway so I still like the idea.
Go Explode
"Surprise all the suits grab the first thing in sight"
Very hard to explain what this is one is "about". Mainly because the anecdote about setting fire to a girl's hair in a failed attempt to impress her was penned more to cover up the extreme hatred me and my cousin felt for all the "suits" who kept invading my studio to tell me "how to make a hit" than as a funny memory. Most of the song featured completely different lyrics about how much we hated working with a major label on the album up until the final submission date when we realised it would never get released unless we changed the lyrics. Of course a few lines where left in there like the line above and the chorus is the same too but takes on a new meaning with the new lyrics.
I'm really happy with the tempo changes and synth work on this track. I was listening to a lot of live Gary Numan tracks at the time and I think that shows in the notes I played. I also like the way I mixed the live drums with the crunchy full stereo percussion - even if I say so myself!
This is also one of our most effective tracks when my live band perform which I think is interesting since most people feel this is the least strongest track on the album.
Pop Bottle
This is one of my favourite vocal tracks on the album I reckon and probably the only "indie" track I've done. I had to get Steve Osborne to play the bass on this track because I can't play bass well enough. Another geeky fact for you is that Sarah Sausages from New Young Pony Club (who performed some of the live drums and backing vocals on the album) was supposed to be featured in the harmonies but me and Dan rewrote the verses last minute and Dan had to sing the high bits himself hehe!
Harriet
At long last - I have been sitting on this track for about 3 years now!?! I've written about this many times before but basically when all my friends had gone to university and I was still in Essex doing my art foundation course, my younger cousin Harriet became my dancing partner at the local indie/electro nights in town. We used to mosh on the dancefloor all the time during that period in music history around 2004 or something when "electro" first started hitting dancefloors, mashing up rock and dance music. Those were really exciting times and it was nights out with Harriet that made me want to start making electro tracks of my own.
Then Harriet went to university herself and I suddenly had to fend for myself on the dancefloors of what few cool club nights there were in Essex in my ultra-skinny jeans. After I produced my debut single "Her", writing an experimental electro track about how much I missed moshing with Harriet seemed obvious.
Geeky fact: the track is heavily inspired by the awesome "Daydream Nation" album by Sonic Youth - not only in its sound but also its lack of repetition. A lot of record label A&R's (the people who sign records and say what's hot and what's not - apparently) thought I was "shooting myself in the foot" by making a 6 minute long instrumental which has arguably the best "hook" I've ever written but yet makes you wait 2 minutes and 14 seconds to hear it and it only happens once hehe! The horrible major label people - whom I've since escaped from incidentally - even made me make a version which had the main hook twice - which I dropped in my live essential mix for radio 1 in last year. Like all the tracks on this album "Harriet" is a really personal to me so giving it "more commercial potential" ruined the track for me which is why the original version is on the album.
Bethnal Green Cafe
So I mentioned that writing this album was the hardest experience of my life earlier and this is about one of the reasons why. My time away from home during this period had basically destroyed the relationship with my girlfriend Caz and it was made worse by the fact that it was very hard to explain why I was never there for her. It wasn't just me who was suffering girlfriend problems either, my cousin and by this point, partner-in-crime on this album was also getting angry phone calls every night which would last for hours sometimes.
So basically this song is about resentment - and in particular the tragic way in which we argue with our loved ones instead of making the most of our time together. The local greasy spoon represented this to me since it was one of me and Caz's favourite things to do together but we'd often get stuck arguing instead of just relaxing and enjoying ourselves.
The synths are supposed to sound a bit like those on "Love Will Tear Us Apart" too as it happens but the subject matter of the songs is just a coincidence.
Youth
My favourite track on the album this - but maybe not yours haha! It's also the most complicated piece of music I've ever written and I kinda refer to it as "Harriet Pt. 2".
This is about a very specific memory of when me and my school friend Rob went to a house party on the other side of town. Rob was staying round mine that night but my mum said we had to be home by midnight at the latest. Anyway we got totally smashed up on Bacardi Breezers and 20/20 wine as usual in those days and both pulled hot girls from school which was cool. When it hit 23:40 I suddenly panicked, grabbed Rob and we walked miles and miles (we couldn't afford taxis) home as fast as we could until we hit my front lawn at about 00:01. We were so out of breath that we didn't say anything to each other and just collapsed on the lawn looking up at the stars.
We'd had such an awesome time that night - one of many around that age of about 14-15 - and although this sounds a bit cheesy I remember thinking that I would probably never get a chance to have a night like that ever again.
And that's what "Youth" is about! Sorry I've written so much!
Kissy Sell Out's 'Youth' will be released on San City High/ADA Global Ltd on 22nd March and is also available in all good record stores and online via itunes and all good digital stores.
'Youth' Tracklisting:
1.Through The Leaves
2.Garden Friends
3.Essex Boy
4.Apple Jelly
5.This Kiss
6.Bubs N Bizzle
7.Go Explode
8.Pop Bottle
9.Harriet
10.Bethnal Green Cafe
11.Youth
Kissy Sell Out International gig dates:
12th February - Social Club, Paris, France
14th February - Hotel Shanghai, Essen, Germany
19th February - Webster Hall, New York, USA
20th February - Voyeur Night Club, San Diego, USA
23rd February - Train, Aarhus, Denmark
