Underdog

Our first attempt at recording apart, made a few weeks into the 2020 lockdown. Jon Lilygreen, Matt Sage, KT Parker, Tay Cousins, Camille Bennett and Isabel Stead, in six different houses.

Underdog was a deliberate choice. It was new at the time, it is built around a rhythmic vocal rather than a big sustained one, and it has enough contemporary R&B and jazz in the harmony to give six singers something to actually do. A song with one lead vocal and a band behind it would have been a much duller exercise.

The technical reality of this kind of recording is unglamorous. Everyone plays to a rough guide, sends a file, and someone assembles it. You cannot react to anyone. All the small timing adjustments that a band makes without thinking have to be decided in advance, and the parts that survive are the ones where somebody committed rather than played safe.

It is not the tightest thing we have recorded and we are not pretending otherwise. It was the first time the six of us had been in anything resembling the same room in a month.

It was the first of what became the Lockdown Sessions.