Blood Red Shoes: Blood On The Tracks

Words: Nathan Westley
Photos: Mike Burnell

In a time when most bands receive strict media training consisting of being spoon fed easily digestible soundbites to pass on, lectured on subjects to avoid, and have any opinionated thoughts smothered out of them, freethinking bands such as Blood Red Shoes are an uncommon occurrence - Steven Ansell and Laura-Mary Carter have personality in abundance.
In a small café in Brighton’s Lanes and with Laura unfortunately missing due to illness, Steven explains that being a typical Indie band is not high on their list of priorities, fitting in with what others portray them to be is not of much importance.
Their debut album ‘Box of Secrets’ may have won many plaudits amongst the ‘Indie community’, but they have not felt the need to stick to the same rigid template second time around: “I do think it’s different from the first record, but I don’t think its crazy different, the basis of all of the record is still guitar, drums and voices; it’s not like we really changed the sound to accommodate anything different. We were careful not to retread our steps in terms of how we wrote the songs; we spent more time and were more fussy about how the songs worked on this record than the first one. The first one we just jammed out some music and when it got to about three and a half minutes long we’d go: ‘wicked, that’s a song’. Everything was as fast and as loud as possible throughout the whole song, we’d tape it and the energy would be enough. With this album we’d tape it, keep recording it, listening back and picking holes in it, we kept going: ‘this is totally obviously what we would do, so let’s not go straight into the chorus; it’s too obvious’. We didn’t really mess around sound wise except in the studio, and that grew organically, we tried to push how we wrote the songs rather then the sound of them. We are never going to be using that many other instruments, we’re not going to do a record where we score out a load of other parts for a brass section, it’s just not us.
“It feels like a lot of bands are going all out on their records and putting on as much stuff as possible, loads of layers and loads of different parts and all the rest of it, I don’t know why. I feel that maybe it is a sign of weakness, they are trying to hide behind this big production rather then write a song that really works. Most of my favourite records don’t have loads of fucking stuff on them, they are actually quite stripped back; the song and the delivery of the vocal and the way it is played is intense enough without having to build a wall of strings or have fifteen guitar overdubs in every song.
“I see it as a weakness in a band when they just do as they are told, the producer says ‘Let’s put all this on your record’, it’s like saying you are not good enough as you are, I actually think we are fucking good enough. There’s too much music out there which is too superficial, that is controlled by all these forces outside of the band. I think if we stay true to our vision of what we should be like it may take a bit more time but people will figure out that they can relate to it more, because it is for real.”

So it is of little wonder that they chose to stick with some traditions and chose to continue working with co-engineer and co-producer Mark Crossey. “The record would have turned out worse if we hadn’t done, as we had spent so much time working together already, we really understood each other, we’d spoken about it previously and it seemed obvious. There were certain things we wanted to do better than we did on the first record and he totally saw the same weaknesses, one was that we wanted to mix it differently, have it a lot less compressed and more dynamic, so the overall record is a lot quieter but actually when you turn it up the quiet bits actually go quiet. We were really insistent on wanting to use tape. If we had gone with someone else we would have taken two weeks finding our feet and getting to know the other person and then we’d have another week left in the studio, it wouldn’t have gone so far down the line.
“The thing with this record is that a lot of it is what we were trying to do on the first record, we just got better at doing it. We wanted the songs to have more of an emotional impact. We wanted them to be more dynamic, to have more of a feel to them. We had a thing about wanting an atmosphere, all of my favourite records have one, Pixies have a real atmosphere, it’s not always straightforward like a certain guitar sound or something, it’s a certain feel. ‘In Utero’ has that, Joy Division has that, I think My Bloody Valentine has that. Our first record is just total hyperactivity the whole way, which I’m really glad of because that’s kind of what a first record should be. If we had written ‘Boring by the Sea’ again, we wouldn’t have made the record, we would have just given up; if we had found out that we couldn’t do anything else, we’d have just stopped bothering.”
This is a band that has fire in their bellies and it seems fitting that the new record should be titled ‘Fire Like This’, though Steven informs me that the naming wasn’t really conscious: “It was a phrase that was around, when we were in the studio we had a massive white board that we would write things on and one of those things was a quote from Twin Peaks, which we watch all the time: ‘When this kind of fire starts its very difficult to put it out’, something like that. Then we realised that there are a lot of lyrical references to fire in the songs and then it also felt that it had some symbolism for the dual relationship in this band, since we made the first record it has gotten a lot more intense, a lot more volatile and goes from being very creative to very destructive very quickly. I think we have always had a very destructive tendency on our hands, that’s what punk music is though isn’t it? Destructive, chaotic music.”
So it’s not really surprising that Blood Red Shoes remain true to original punk ethics and are very much independently minded, asked if they can be a bit too headstrong sometimes and Stevens answer is an honest one: “Yeah, sometimes to our fault, sometimes we need to listen to people more than we do.
“I’m pretty sure that those bands that are very careerist take too much advice from other people and do what they are told. I think people are not stupid enough to be taken in by the stylists and the record label and the rest of it. We are really ambitious, I wouldn’t call us careerist but we want to be a big fucking band, we have absolutely no shame in saying that. Our strategy is that if you make a record that is real, make a record that sounds like you, wear your heart on your sleeve, and when you sing you fucking mean it and don’t do something that fits in with the trend of the time, don’t record in a way that’s in, just do what suits you, don’t let those people steer you because the public will know its fake, I don’t think the public are that stupid. It will probably take us a lot longer to get as recognised as those bands that do it for short term game.”
The band also takes care over how they are presented visually, whether it be for promo shots or music videos: “When we started we just did whatever, someone would show up and go: ‘Let’s make a music video’ and it sounds like a laugh, you’ll do anything, and after five videos you realise that none of it really represents your music. We have learnt the hard way that people actually judge your band on that shit, some people won’t listen to a band because what one photo looks like. Now we are really insistent on that, we thought we were kind of in charge of it before but we were fucking kidding ourselves because we weren’t. There are loads of pictures of us that I hate and would like to delete as I don’t think it represents us. We don’t really look like a heavy, mean band, we’re not covered in tattoos… It’s an uncomfortable part of it, but if you’re not in charge of it someone else is.”