After riding on the success of the band’s self-titled record for almost three years, Kitty, Daisy and Lewis have hit the studio again and the finished product is ‘Smoking In Heaven’. The band’s Kitty Durham called in from London to chat to Undercover’s Tim Cashmere.
“It’s been a while [since our last record], but we haven’t felt that we’ve disappeared already. We’ve just been doing loads of gigs and stuff. For example ‘I’m so Sorry’ on the new album, we’ve been playing that for a few years, but most of the songs were kind of written for the album,” she says of the band’s latest effort, ‘Smoking In Heaven’. “We were still kind of learning them and developing them as we were recording them, but we’ve started playing most of them on stage now, so yeah, it’s good.”
“We missed out deadline actually, a couple of times, but it was all done in a bit of a hurry, but we got it together on time.”
This record tends to have more of a jammy approach, with a few songs going for upwards of eight minutes and occasionally dodging any lyrics at all.
“It’s what we’ve been doing for years ever since we were babies,” Durham explains. “It was how we got into music, just from jamming with each other. Not just listening to records, just playing at home, there were always instruments lying around the house, so we just picked them up and bashed them around.
“The first album was mainly covers, and they were songs that we’d been playing for years just jamming at home. My dad came from a big family and he used to jam with his brothers and sisters and he used to sing to us as babies, so we learned those songs from hearing them from him, so we used to jam them at home years before we took it to the stage, so when we recorded that [self titled] album, we’d been playing those songs for years, and when we were asked to record the album, those were the songs that we had and those were the songs that we knew.”
The band are known for using vintage recording gear as often as they can. Much of the gear is from the father of the Durhams, Graeme, who runs The Exchange Mastering Studios in London.
“For us, [analogue gear] suits us best, not because of the music we play, but just because of the natural sound of it,” Kitty explains. “We have tried using computers. We’ve got our mates who do it professionally to bring in ProTools and stuff like that, but it was just so bad compared to our gear, it was just laughable and terrible. A lot of people say that analogue gear sounds warmer and things like that, and that’s true if you compare it to digital, but in actual fact that’s just the proper sound of a recording. It’s nothing to do with being warm, it’s just if you plug a guitar in and put it through a tape machine then that’s how a recording sounds, but if you put it through a computer it takes away certain elements of it, like the top and the bottom end and you just get left with this flat sound.
“Obviously it suits a lot of people, but for us it suits us to use this equipment because of its natural sound,” she added.
When I suggested that my sister and I would not last five minutes in a band together, she explained that the Durham family are actually a bit of alright when it comes to long hard slogs on the road.
“There’s a hell of a lot of arguments, obviously. We’re all so used to it, we’ve been doing it for a long long time now. It’s just normal to us really. There’s a lot of bickering and squabbling, but we get over it five minutes later. We’re all mates anyway. We hang out and go to the pub.”
It was even mum’s (Ingrid Weiss) idea to have a picture of the band smoking on the cover.
“It was actually my mum’s idea. It had nothing to do with the title of the album, she just came up with the idea one night after a party,” Kitty explains. “She got the camera out and took a few shots, but the title of the record, my dad actually came up with it in a dream. The track on the album ‘Smoking In Heaven’, he’d been messing around with it for a while, with that riff, but we were trying to come up with some lyrics for it. We recorded it live in the room and while we were mixing it we brought a mic into the room and just started singing along and nothing was really happening. My dad had this line that he thought of in his dream, actually in his dream my mum came up with it and he was like “Ah that’s shit,” then he woke up and went “Ah that’s quite good actually.” So we were in this room and he said to Daisy “Why don’t you just say that line at the beginning of the song? It might work,” so she said it and we didn’t really have a name for the album, so we just decided to call it that.”
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