Lucky Soul

Lucky Soul

Lucky Soul are a British six-piece pop band based in South East London. Formed in 2005, the band consists of Ali Howard on vocals, Andrew Laidlaw and Ivor Sims on guitars, Russell Grooms on bass and Paul Atkins on drums, with the recent addition of Art Terry on keys.

The band have performed numerous live dates in the UK and overseas, and on June 20, 2007, were one of the first acts to perform at The O2, as part of Greenwich Council's soft launch event. They also supported Bryan Ferry on his Dylanesque tour that same year. They have since toured in Spain, Italy, Germany, Sweden, Japan, the United States and most recently Russia, where they performed at the Kinotavr Film Festival in Sochi.

History

Their debut single "My Brittle Heart"/"Give Me Love", released in March 2006, was made Single Of The Week by The Guardian newspaper, who described it as featuring "melodies as colossal, memorable and irresistible as a stampede of elephants bearing down on your tent".

In June of that year they released another single, "Lips are Unhappy", now famed as the music for the Clas Ohlson TV ads in Sweden. The summer of 2006 also saw "Give Me Love" featured on How Does It Feel To Be Loved?'s "Kids At The Club" compilation.

This was followed by an EP entitled "Ain't Never Been Cool" in early 2007. "Ain't Never Been Cool" achieved recognition by being featured on BBC Radio 1 DJ Colin Murray's top 20 tracks of the year. A further single, "Add Your Light to Mine, Baby", was released on March 26, 2007 as a digital download, on CD and as a limited edition, hand-numbered vinyl, followed by "One Kiss Don't Make a Summer" in early September.

The band's debut album, The Great Unwanted was released on April 9. 2007. Produced by George Shilling, it had a five star review in Metro and The Independent on Sunday, four stars from both The Guardian and The Times and a further four star review in Uncut magazine.

The group is currently working on their second album. A new song, "Woah Billy!", was released on their MySpace page in April 2009, and was followed with a new single released in January 2010, named "White Russian Doll".

Biography

by Simon Price

“Dark times ahead…”

The first three words on the stunning second album by Lucky Soul are a taste of what’s in store and a statement of intent, but we’ll come to that in a while. They are also, in a world where ‘pop’ has increasingly become lazy defeatist shorthand for ’sunshiney inanity’, not the most conducive to gaining the daytime radio airplay the band so richly deserve. But then, Lucky Soul have never been ones to do things the easy way.

It’s a story, like all the best stories, about a boy and a girl. Andrew Laidlaw was studying Sound Engineering in Glasgow when he had his Damascus moment. A tiny club called Papa Cool, specialising in classic Sixties soul, gave his whole world a 45rpm spin. “To me”, he recalls, “it felt like when people talk about going to the Hacienda, even though it was only 100 people in a postgraduate student union in Glasgow, dancing on the table. At the time the charts were full of slow, meandering acoustic stuff, so I had that massive injection of amazing music.” Inspired and energised, Laidlaw would sneak into the studios at the dead of night and try to recreate the euphoric vintage sounds he was hearing out on the floor.

All too soon, the course ended and, skint and demoralised, Andrew moved back to his native Yorkshire, “broken-hearted and listening to a lot of Dusty Springfield.” A man cannot live long on Springfield and self-pity alone, so he packed up and moved to London with the intention of channelling all that heartache – and knowhow – into forming the perfect pop group.

Easier said than done. Having assembled a nascent Lucky Soul line-up with a few friends, Andrew placed a classified ad in a newspaper looking for a girl singer, with the specific stipulation “No divas, no faux-American accents” to weed out the X Factor wannabes. “I said they must not sound like Christina Aguilera. We had 300 replies, and they all sounded like Christina Aguilera.” Well, all except one.

Ali Howard grew up in East Grinstead, home to the headquarters of Scientology and also “rock star territory, where they all go to retire”, and didn’t take the most traditional route into rock’n'roll herself. From the age of 3 to 15 she attended what she now describes as a “militaristic” ballet academy. “It wasn’t stage school. It was stricter than that. Everything was geared towards being a ballerina, and then you reach a certain age where you realise you’re not going to go professional, and it absolutely breaks your heart. So that’s when I rebelled, completely turned my back on it all, and discovered boys and drinking and rock’n'roll.”

Desperate to get out of Grinstead, she moved to the capital and did a degree in English, as well as “a lot of bumming around”. After joining various bands which invariably imploded, she chanced upon Andrew’s small ad. “I’d split up with my last band, split up with last boyfriend, and I was on the verge of giving up. I was actually looking for a flat, and I couldn’t believe there was this band that was so perfect for me.” The feeling was mutual: “From the first email,” says Andrew, “I knew.” The honey-haired Howard didn’t only have the right look for Laidlaw’s ideal band (comparisons to Twiggy or a young Marianne Faithfull are frequent); she had the perfect voice – sweet, pure and vulnerable – for the timeless and heartfelt songs he’d been writing.

Forming the ideal pop group was one thing, getting it a record deal at a time when classic soul-influenced songwriting was still unfashionable was quite another. “Right now,” says Laidlaw with no visible signs of bitterness, “there are suddenly loads of female singers around with a bit of style and drama. A few years ago it was all blokes in skinny jeans, and everyone without fail in the industry told us ‘Ooh, it’s a bit Sixties…’”

True to the DIY approach which has informed Lucky Soul since day one, they sidestepped this problem by forming a label of their own. With start-up cash from a friend called Nick Woodhead who had inherited his father’s farm (“which is quite ironic,” says Ali, “because we’re both vegetarians…”) and the music biz expertise of another mate Nathaniel Perkins, who was working for industry giant Universal at the time, Ruffa Lane – named after a street in Laidlaw’s home town of Pickering – was born, and is currently home not only to Lucky Soul themselves but to Napoleon, an eccentric soul-rock ten-piece from Uppsala, Swedish singer-songwriter Montt Mardié and Americana-by way-of-South-London group, Grantura.

The knowledge that this might be their only shot focussed the band’s minds on ensuring that their debut album would be as close to perfection as humanly possible. Before they’d even played a gig, Lucky Soul were in the studio applying ambitiously lavish arrangements to Laidlaw’s songs. “The only time you heard orchestras was on Coldplay records,” he recalls, “just playing one note over and over, which is such a waste. We wanted to do it properly. We didn’t think for a moment that we didn’t have money to do it.” The resulting record, The Great Unwanted, was a bittersweet beauty. The sound was unquestionably “a bit Sixties”, but as Laidlaw explains, “We’ve never tried to be futuristic, because then you’re immediately dated. We’re never going to be out of fashion, because we’ve never been in it.” Nevertheless, the R-word followed them around, much to Andrew’s annoyance. “The songs I love from the past still move me as much as I hope they moved people at the time, so how is that retro?” If Lucky Soul’s debut did anything, it moved people. From the widescreen heartbreak of the title track to the swinging optimism of the single “Add Your Light To Mine, Baby”, it seemed to be universally loved by all who heard it. Lucky Soul were the sort of band you clasped to your heart, and only shared with friends you were certain would ‘get’ it.

This kind of word-of-mouth groundswell has its upsides and its downsides. “The pro is that the fanbase is incredibly loyal,” Ali agrees, “and they think you belong to them and they’re reluctant to share it, like it’s a bit hush-hush and they’ve discovered something. The con is not having a massive marketing budget.” It’s a situation which brings frustrating ironies. “What we do is blatantly pop music… even if it’s now not popular,” Andrew laughs. “I never wanted us to be a secret. I want everyone to love it. When people hear it they usually do.”

The acclaim which greeted The Great Unwanted as its reputation spread – 4 and 5 star reviews across the board, and descriptions such as “the link between Motown and The Smiths” – brought all kinds of unexpected bonuses. Lucky Soul had already been invited to perform to 500 fans in Bangkok before the record was even released, and now found themselves playing in the US, Europe, Scandinavia (where their music was used to soundtrack a homewares ad), Russia (where they played Elle magazine’s Russian Film Festival party) and Japan, where they were signed by Sony and scored a top 10 hit. “Apparently Ali’s got the perfectly-pitched voice for the Japanese market,” Andrew explains. “It’s weird landing in a country where you’re popular,” says Ali, “with people hanging around your hotel for autographs.” Meanwhile they toured the UK, and supported Bryan Ferry. “It was that tour where he was murdering Bob Dylan songs,” says Andrew. “He’d be in his limousine and we’d show up in our clapped-out white van, go onstage and play to 6,000 mums.”

The line-up which would take Lucky Soul into their second phase was almost as international as their audience. “Rusty (Russell Grooms) the bass player, and the next Duck Dunn was in the LA Doors! Mr Atkins (Paul Atkins), the drummer, is a Kiwi. “Our manager, Nat met him at a barbecue. He hadn’t drummed for a whole year, but he turned up with a bit of paper on which he’d notated the entire album, and just played it straight off. I thought ‘It’s OK, you don’t even need to audition’. With those two we’ve got a good bit of bottom end with the raw power to hammer the point home. Ivor Sims, our mercurial lead guitarist, we nabbed when he was young, playing the blues in the Spice Of Life pub on Charing Cross Road. He plays quite a lot like Johnny Marr, which is great because I wouldn’t be in a band if it wasn’t for The Smiths. And Art Terry, the keyboardist, was a piano tuner. He walked in wearing a Trilby and a suit. I asked him where he was from, and he turned ‘round and said ‘LA, Baby!’ He used to knock around with Arthur Lee from Love and is ridiculously cool.”

The drawback of doing-it-yourself is that there’s no benevolent parent company to offer a financial safety net and tide you over ‘til the royalties come through. For a while, it was uncertain whether Lucky Soul’s second album would be made at all.

All the goodwill from The Great Unwanted had yet to translate into hard cash. “We knew some money was gonna come in from the first album,” Ali says, “but it was a while off.” Lucky Soul were facing a crossroads. Andrew was only ever heading in one direction. “There was no way I was going to back to work to a normal job.”

Instead, skint but determined, Laidlaw moved into the band’s rehearsal space in Greenwich and lived there. “It was really dark,” he recalls. “Literally. No windows, no running water, I had to go to the swimming pools for a shower… but it meant I could work all night.”

By his own admission, he went a bit Brian Wilson. “Playing the same chord for hours and hours, I probably did go a bit weird…” Ali nods in agreement, silently but vehemently. “I stopped short of a sandpit,” he laughs, “but I could be found rocking in my chair with staring wild eyes… No change there, really! I’m a bit like that anyway, an OCD perfectionist. One reason we took so long was obsessing over tiny details no-one’s going to care about.”

The first fruit of this intensive perfectionism was the 2009 taster “Woah Billy!“, a glorious Blondie-meets-Bolan confection, and an unmistakeable step onwards from the Sixties stylings of Lucky Soul’s past. “Woah Billy!” was the unsung (but far from unsingable) pop single of the year, raising phenomenally high expectations for the new album.

A Coming Of Age more than lives up to those hopes. The triple meaning of its title – adolescence, the arrival of maturity, the onset of old age – is explained thus: “It’s about this moment in your life when you lose your innocence and go from childhood to adolescence, or from adolescence to the next stage. I think there’s a lot of adolescent romance in the album, but it’s also about moments when you know life’s never quite going to be the same. It’s a rude awakening.”

Musically it’s the sound of a band suddenly going 3D. The power-pop/glam of “Woah Billy!” is only one example of the Technicolor spread of Lucky Soul’s sonic palette second time around, from the Motown stomp of “Up In Flames” and first single proper, “White Russian Doll” through the Dolly Parton-esque Nashville twang of “Love³” and “Upon Hilly Fields” to the classic Carole King-style songwriting of “Warm Water” and the glorious Bacharach-meets-Smiths excess of the title track (in whose superbly OTT finale you can truly hear the attention to detail which went into the album’s creation).

Laidlaw has an instinctive idea of which sounds can, and cannot, be assimilated under the Lucky Soul umbrella. “I know when it fits and when it doesn’t. But I don’t want it to stay the same forever. We wanted to push it a bit more. There’s a complete loss of ambition in music right now. Everything’s boiled down to its lowest common denominator. There’s a lost magic.”

If it’s a more vividly colourful record than its predecessor, it’s simultaneously a much darker one in tone, and in this paradox lies its beauty. One track speaks of “a southern melancholy, like blood on the brain” (not the only medical metaphor; coming as it does after a reference to “shadows on my lungs”). Another speaks of losing the will to live, and the final track confesses “without you I’d probably do myself in”. Not that it isn’t leavened with a little gallows humour (“Some say I’m schizophrenic, but I walk in single file…”)

“I’m a natural worrier, “ admits Andrew (who also confesses to reading a lot of Sylvia Plath while writing the lyrics). “All my favourite soul music is this incredibly uplifting music about bad stuff happening.” Ali agrees. “The dynamics of it work, because it’s got dark lyrics and my squeaky voice so you can get away with a lot more than if we sounded like Radiohead. It’s our job to make people happy, even when we’re singing about bleak things.”

Laidlaw speaks of being on a “on a mission to create something timeless”, and ventures “it’s hard to walk the line between making it a pop song, but making it personal and meaningful. Music should be full of soul, even when it’s great pop music. We’re not just writing for the moment. We want these songs to live forever.”

The title of the final track, “Could Be I Don’t Belong Anywhere”, isn’t accidental. It sums up Lucky Soul’s place – or lack of a place – in the current scheme of things. Which is, of course, exactly why we should treasure them. “It’s true in real life,” Andrew agrees, “so why not write about it? It’s an acceptance of being out-of-place.”

“Our trouble”, adds Ali, “is we do fall between a lot of stools. We’re too ambitious for the indie crowd and we don’t make the sort of sound that the pop crowd are used to hearing. So all you can do is exist in your own bubble. But it’s about making that bubble bigger.”

In an alternate universe where Cowellism doesn’t rule (and ruin) everything it surveys, that bubble is already planet-sized and Lucky Soul are already huge. With A Coming Of Age, these pop dreamers have made the record which deserves to make that a reality.

Discography

Singles

Single	Release date
"My Brittle Heart"/"Give Me Love"	March 20, 2006
"Lips are Unhappy"	June 2006
"Ain't Never Been Cool"	January 16, 2007
"Add Your Light To Mine, Baby"	March 9, 2007
"One Kiss Don't Make A Summer"	September 3, 2007
"Lips Are Unhappy"/"Lonely This Christmas"	December 17, 2007 (download)
"White Russian Doll"	January 11, 2010

Albums

Album	Release date
The Great Unwanted	April 9, 2007
A Coming Of Age	April 5, 2010

External links

• Official website