The Zutons are back with The Big Decider.
L-R: Dave McCabe, Sean Payne, Abi Harding. Image: Jonathan Turton.
Prominent figures on the Liverpool music scene of the early 2000s, The Zutons made their name with hits such as "Why Won’t You Give Me Your Love?" and "Valerie" before disbanding in 2009. Now back together, founder members Dave McCabe and Sean Payne join us to talk about The Big Decider, their first studio album for 16 years.
Having reunited for a one-off gig in 2016, lead vocalist/guitarist McCabe, drummer Payne and saxophonist Abi Harding moved in together during lockdown and began writing new music. The first single from the album, “Creeping on the Dancefloor”, came out of that time. “When that one happened, it was like the nucleus for it all to go around,” says Payne. “We were buzzing off it more than we’d ever buzzed off anything we’d done before. Once we had that, it seemed like there was something serious about it.” “It’s just a general excitement thing,” McCabe explains. “You feel like you’re doing something worthwhile, and it’s really good after not doing it for so long.”
“Everything about the record feels like it’s good,” he continues. Payne agrees. “To be honest it’s probably the first album where we really loved every song on it, and we got the chance to make it how we wanted it to be. In the past, if a producer’s like, ‘That’s good,’ and the management like it, there might be something inside you which you’re not totally happy with, but you just go with it anyway, and I don’t think we did that this time really. We wanted to do it for the right reasons and make the songs so that we were comfortable listening to them every time.” Getting back together to record The Big Decider has been therapeutic, says McCabe – “It’s something to focus on. And because I’m a dad now, you don’t get an awful lot of time to do things that can be quite childlike, like doing gigs and making music, so that’s the buzz of it for me” – although Payne points out that, between the pandemic, McCabe’s recovery from addiction and their own perfectionism, the process was as likely to leave them in need of more therapy.
“When I first heard the sax breaks, I was like, ‘What the fuck’s this?’ But when I hear them now, I really love them. It makes me think this is what the difference is with our band: we’re not scared to have saxophone breaks.”
Most of the production was by Nile Rodgers but after the initial recording the band felt the album still lacked something and called in Ian Broudie, a long-time friend who had worked on previous Zutons records. “It was a nice surprise that he was up for doing it because he doesn’t really do much producing now,” Payne says. “We needed help, really, because we were a bit lost with some of the songs. He reassured us that what we had was good, he made it a little bit better and forced Dave to write a couple of middle 8s.” McCabe admits that he was initially anxious about associations with overblown eighties-style sax solos. “When I first heard the sax breaks, I was like, ‘What the fuck’s this?’ But when I hear them now, I really love them. It makes me think this is what the difference is with our band: we’re not scared to have saxophone breaks.” “We’re touching Spandau Ballet – you know that, don’t you?” Payne cautions. “It’s not a bad place, I think the world needs a bit of Spandau,” laughs McCabe. “But it’s tasteful enough to not let it go that far. It’s like if you go Gary Moore on the guitar. But I think it’s easier for the guitar – if I turn up playing ‘Parisienne Walkways’-style, you put a distortion pedal on and all of a sudden it sounds like Santana and it’s great – but with the sax you’ve got to work at it.”
One of the songs to benefit from Harding’s saxophone is “Company”, which McCabe wrote in the early days of getting sober. “Everything was blurry still, but I know that’s a good thing to come out of those few months when you first decide to stop and you’re doing whatever you’ve got to do to get away from it.” “I reckon that was Nile’s favourite song,” Payne says. “You could tell he felt something, and it gave him and Dave a bit of a connection there as well. He’d close his eyes: ‘I love these lyrics.’” “That’s the thing about songwriting – you get to say to people what it is you really want to say, in a really beautiful way,” McCabe explains. “It’s like you’re just expressing it to yourself, and if they want to listen they can. I think with the whole album, there’s a lot of truth on there.”
Image: Jonathan Turton.
Often that truth is an emotional state rather than an overt message. McCabe admits that he can’t say exactly what “Water” means, other than that it conveys a sense of vulnerability. Payne, who wrote the chorus and acted as producer on the track, agrees. “I’ve got an idea of what it’s about in my head: it’s a situation where someone’s a bit scared but it’s like, we’ll just let the good things happen, and don’t worry so much. I think that’s a bit of a theme with Dave.” “I used to dream about tidal waves quite a lot, and they were always really detailed and really scary. I don’t know why that’s popped into my head, so maybe that’s got something to do with it. But I don’t really know. It was about a barbecue at one point – that was a bit too fun, it was a bit daft.”
The Abbey Road recording sessions with Rodgers yielded several songs that haven’t ended up on The Big Decider, which Payne describes as deliberately concise. “We probably were working on 20-odd songs. None of them are bad but once we got focused on these ones, then the other ones just fell away. We’ve always maybe tried to put a song too many on albums before. Most of the best albums are about 35 minutes long.” McCabe describes the unfinished songs as having a torso and a head, but no limbs as yet. “So rather than sitting there and going, ‘Oh, we need to get the arms and legs’, it’s like, ‘Do you know what, we’ll cook that another time.’” As Payne observes, if they had opened the floodgates to including more tracks, they could have ended up with their own White Album. “I don’t think we’re in that position at the moment,” McCabe says. “Let’s keep it short and sweet. Let’s see if our fans are still alive and let’s see if they like it.”
The Big Decider is available now.
Author: Rachel Goodyear