His issue with Swallowed was that it used a standard quiet/loud dynamic, but the label felt really strongly about it. Working with Steve Albini was incredible, I had a life-long appreciation of his work, as the most infamous recording engineer in post-punk and hardcore. "Going into the writing of Razorblade Suitcase it was nice to have this song in our back pocket. I remember after I wrote it we played it during a soundcheck, and everyone liked it so much that they said, 'Don’t play that any more in soundcheck!' in case, like, I don’t know, the Russians were secretly taping our soundchecks and would sneak out a remix of it. The label were terrified of Albini, but they said, 'But this one has a melody!' and it became the first single… and our only hit in England, where we’re famously One Hit Wonders ( laughs). "My instant memory of Swallowed is that Steve Albini said it was the only turkey on the album: he thought we shouldn’t include it. ![]() For most people, this would have been their first taste of The Kingdom, and I think it’s a good reflection of what people can expect." ![]() I hadn’t seen the movie at all when I wrote the song, but lyrics like, 'I used to wish in symphonies' seemed to fit in perfectly. He played the song for Chad, who was working with him on the soundtrack to John Wick: Chapter 3 – Parabellum, and he liked it and that was it. "Tyler is so busy, he always has, like, three movies and two TV shows on the go, so it was just a two hour session, but luckily I write quite quickly, and he comes up with great riffs and melodic ideas. So then we went into the studio and just hit it off, and Bullet Holes was the second or third song we wrote together. ![]() I didn’t necessarily want to be there, I thought my time would be better spent in the studio, writing, but I thought I should be open to new ideas and new possibilities. "As we started out writing songs for the new album my manager Peter Katsis asked if I’d be interested in writing some songs for movie soundtracks, and he set up a couple of lunch meetings with Tyler Bates. ![]() But it didn’t initially feel like a hit single: in fact, when we lost our distribution deal with Hollywood Records, and got dropped, someone there famously said, 'Not only are there no singles on Sixteen Stone, there are no album tracks either.' I went back to my day job as a painter, and just thought, 'Oh, okay, well, I enjoyed making the record at least, that was fun.' But then Rob Kahane got us onto KROQ and suddenly Jimmy Iovine and Ted Field at Interscope told us that they loved the song, and wanted to meet us. "We rehearsed in an estate in Harlesden, which at time was a really heavy area, like, the murder capital of Europe, and when the guy who signed us to our first record deal saw us there, this was one of the songs he liked best. Britpop was really massive at the time, and I’d sort of given up trying to be successful in music – I’d been in a couple of bands already and got nowhere – and I was fully aware that in writing that line I was signing my own death warrant in terms of getting signed to a record label in England, because it was going to be (adopts horrified London A&R man voice), 'This doesn’t sound like Suede!' So that felt really liberating. Writing the lyric 'Should I fly to Los Angeles, find my asshole brother' felt like a change in my approach, that incendiary lyric immediately felt like it had more impact than anything else I’d previously written. I guess I’d written enough shitty songs by that point that I was inevitably going to start writing some better ones! As with all the earliest Bush songs, it started with me and my drum machine: I’d record the riff on a cassette tape and then walk around The Regent’s Park or Hyde Park playing it in one ear, and trying to sing melodies and lyrics to go along with me. "Writing Everything Zen felt like a seismic moment for me.
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