The band talk about A RUSH OF BLOOD TO THE HEAD

Is it right that ‘In My Place’ is the oldest song on the new album?

In My Place is the oldest pivotal song. Just when we were finishing our last record, PARACHUTES, we were in Liverpool in this little room that had been great on the last record. And the record had basically been finished so we were packing up, ready to go. And the album was coming out in about a week, so it was fineline timing. And I was just sat at this organ that my friend had lent me; this pump organ that you have to sit and peddle which was really designed for sea shanties and drunken sailors, and I wasn’t either. So I suggested we tried a sea shanty and these chords just came out. It was at a time when we were too late for the last record and we suddenly discovered things like Jimmy Cliff and even Whiter Shade Of Pale (I’m not saying that this is quite as good as that!). So that tune we’ve pretty well had since the end of the last record but it came too late to be included. So, it’s become the lynch-pin of this new record around which everything else has been written.

The bass line on ‘God Put A Smile Upon Your Face’ is worth talking about. How did it happen?

When we came to record it in the studio, we struggled because there was something not quite right about it. I wasn’t happy about where we’d left it and where we were happy to leave it. We couldn’t put a finger on what it was so it was really a nice day when I was trying to record bass at the time, and me and Chris were sitting down trying to brainstorm it to find what was wrong. And so I just started to do some bass lines and between the two of us we came up with this kind of groove which stays on the same note as opposed to changing. It gave a lot of bounce to the song and made it roll along in a much more fluid way; it was a bit mechanical beforehand. And it’s just interesting that something small like that can really change the whole vibe of a song. And it really nice because from then on it became one of our favourite tracks and it almost did not get on the record. It’s now one of our favourite tracks.

How does the track, ‘The Scientist’, fit in?

When me and John went up to Liverpool on the train in November, and we were listening to what we had on the record (we had eight rough done) and we had the feeling that it was alright. And then I was sitting at this battered old piano that was completely out of tune and I’d just heard All Things Must Pass by George Harrison and heard this song called Isn’t It Pity with this circular chord sequence. And this is all very anal but I felt I would like a chord sequence that went around and around, and where you don’t know where it begins or ends. And this chord sequence just arrived and I thought it was really lovely. And then the whole song just came out and so we recorded it then and there, and the piano and vocal was from the day it was written. That’s it! And the best moment of the entire record for me was when came back three weeks later when we came back to this song, I just heard through a wall this riff and that’s what he does at the end, and that’s my favourite bit on the record. That was a great moment because it was brilliant.

I believe the song ‘Clocks’ was the last to make it onto the album?

We were just about to hand the record in but it was sounding rubbish but we thought we had to do it because we wanted to release it then. Some of our record company guys came in and basically everyone decided that we had to put the record back to take the pressure off and Phil, our sort of figurehead or fifth member, said, ‘listen, you should record that song Clocks‘ because I was saying that we should save this one which was a real mistake to make because I might be shot tomorrow. And so, quite rightly, he said ‘put that song on because it’s good‘. That song just arrived and I don’t know where that came from! But I do know where the good bit came from! I was showing it to Johnny -and he picked up his guitar (a sure sign that he likes a song) and played these brilliant chords, and then Guy came in and added a bass line and then it sparked something else. It was like a chemical reaction process. That was mega and great fun. But we finished it and we thought ‘that’s got to go on‘.

There’s a very interesting sound at the start of ‘Daylight’. What’s that?

The instrument at the start of the track is a twelve-string guitar with a slide (like George Harrison) and lots of strings. What is amazing is what you can’t hear; there’s a kind of drone because it’s very hard to play. So there’s these amazing little noises on it and we still don’t know why they were in there. I think we’ve been quite lucky that we’ve recorded a lot of stuff down as soon as it’s been written because you spend most of your life trying to recreate the first moments that you wrote. With Daylight we were all sat in a room and there was the piano track and the singing going and we were all playing over the top of it, and we just recorded all of it with Mark who does all the computer stuff with us. And then just chopped bits of it and there’s quite a lot of samples or loops in it.