Welcome to Western Approaches, the fourth album by pop industrialists Red Rum Club. If it’s your first time with the band, dive in: the water’s lovely. If you already know the Liverpool six-piece from their riotous live shows or previous fiendishly addictive albums Matador, The Hollow Of Humdrum and How To Steal The World, it’s good to have you back. Album four is equally infectious, but things have changed for our heroes.
Having released an album a year from 2019-21, Western Approaches arrives with a sense that this is the tipping point for a band who’ve established a fearsome live reputation from songs built around a succession of earworm hooks and some of the best lyrical one-liners in any genre.
“It feels like there’s more of a demand for us than ever,” smiles singer Fran Doran. “There have been little signs, like selling out our US tour warm-up gig at The Cavern in 45 seconds, where we think there’s a proper buzz around this album. Before, I think we were a band people were pleasantly surprised by – they’d see us at a festival and go: ‘Oh, they’re actually really good!’ Enough people have given us a try and liked us that there’s a real need for Red Rum Club now, rather than people saying: ‘I guess I’ll give them a listen.’”
That anticipation is cemented by their next UK tour climaxing with Red Rum Club’s first arena headline show, to 11,000 fans at Liverpool M&S Bank Arena on 5th April 2024. “That’s a big step, but you’ve got to go for it,” notes guitarist and main songwriter Tom Williams. “Fortune favours the brave,” adds Fran. “We headlined our first festival outside Liverpool this summer, This Feeling By The Sea at Bridlington Spa. We were really unsure about the idea of a festival in Bridlington. You think: ‘Are there enough people who’ll come here to fill this place?’ Then it went great, everyone had a brilliant time.”
Any concerns that Red Rum Club won’t have the new songs worthy of filling arenas are dispelled by one listen of Western Approaches. Their trademark hooks are firmly in place – Afternoon is a delirious celebration of love in the afternoon, Daisy blasts by like Valerie with extra groove, Undertaker’s chorus of “Undertaker make my day” will be sung along to with the fervour of existing live staples Eleanor, Would You Rather Be Lonely, Love Me Like You Want To Be Loved and Eighteen.
For an album that’s nautical vibe is clear from the opening brief instrumental of the title track’s chilly blast of lapping waves and Morse Code (spelling out “Red Rum Club Western Approaches”, dot-dash-dot fans) there are also plenty of moments on album four to luxuriously bathe in: Hole In My Home’s harmonies harking back to Red Rum Club’s earliest days covering Fleet Foxes, Last Minute’s fretful woes dressed up in the biggest ballad of the band’s career, Jigsaw Shores quickly detonated by the apocalypse arriving in the middle-eight.
“After four albums, we’re at a point where we think less about what everyone else will think,” explains Fran. “We have more confidence in our judgement.” Tom adds: “We don’t feel like a band on our fourth album. I think of band well into their career when someone says ‘Album four’. At the same time, Elton John and David Bowie took a bunch of albums before they got real success.”
“It takes a while to find your exact sound. There’s no shame in releasing music while you’re still doing that. Some bands wait until they’re certain, because they want an initial blow-up, but music rarely works like that. You should release music both to see what people want from you and to see what you want from yourselves.”
As mightily catchy as the 10 full songs on Western Approaches are, there’s also a new unsettling edge to the sonics, filled out by guitarist Mike McDermott, bassist Sam Hepworth, drummer Neil Lawson and trumpeter Joe Corby. It’s partly down to the sound of Red Rum Club’s new rehearsal studio, a previously rundown warehouse, finding its way onto the album.
“The docks are on one side of the studio and a big scrapyard on the other,” reveals Tom. “Making the album demos, you could hear a lot of banging from one or the other. We thought: ‘This is a nightmare.’” Enter new producer Rich Turvey (Blossoms, Courteeners, The Coral). “Rich told us: ‘This is the sound of the album,’” enthuses Tom. “He said it encapsulates the environment of working-class Liverpool. Scrap metal machines banging in the background have survived from those demos.” Their studio is certainly the opposite of fancy, as Fran states: “It was a former brothel. When we moved in, it was freezing, bare bones and rat infested. We’ve made it our own, but if walls could talk, it’s a dark place. It’s a big part of the album.”
The album’s title also feeds into the music’s industrial mood. Western Approaches is the name of the area in Liverpool where cargo was sent from North America during World War II. “It’s an all-encompassing name for this album,” reasons Tom. “It fits in with the nautical side, ‘Western’ has connotations with religion, which is explored in a few songs, and the word ‘Western’ is sometimes used about our music.”
The anthemic Undertaker is one song most explicitly about religion, with its lyric “Running late for the rapture” typical of Tom’s casually brilliant way with pithy lyric. The rousing single was partly inspired by Leonardo Di Caprio’s environmental satire Don’t Look Up, as Tom reveals: “World War III trends on Twitter every other day. If it ever is the end of the world, people will react in the same way as we are now. As hell is coming out of the ground, we’ll complain we can’t get the best spec on our phones to film it.”
Few songs have sounded more like the end of the world than the middle of Jigsaw Shores. It began as more of a disco workout, “Like an eight-minute Abba” in Fran’s words, before it was decided to “Go Apocalypto.” Rich Turvey told the band they were going to go “further afield than ever”, but it was completed in just 20 minutes of throwing everything at the song. “There’s no way you could write it down in musical notation,” grins Fran. “It had to be the last song on the album, because how do you follow that?” Tom adds: “As the last song you hear on the album, Jigsaw Shores also gives us licence to go down that avenue more on the next album if we want.”
That Jigsaw Shores was completed with the minimum of fuss for the maximum sonic boom was typical of Western Approaches’ economical recording. It was made in just four weeks – a deadline that couldn’t be moved, as mix engineer Tom Longworth’s partner was booked for a C-section the day after. “We were mixing as we went,” smiles Tom Williams. “After two weeks, I thought: ‘This is going too smoothly, something is going to trip us up’, but it stayed that calm.”
The first song for the album, the scuzzy drama of Alive, was co-written with Circa Waves singer Kiaran Shudell. It was made six months before work properly began, as a tester to blow the cobwebs off. “Alive became the benchmark,” explains Tom. “Every song was: ‘Is this better than Alive?’ For ages, we thought Alive would be the first single, but now it’s not a single and is track nine on the album. Every song became: ‘This could be a single.’”
For a band who’ve thrilled festivals worldwide and nicked headliners’ fans as the support for everyone from The 1975 to Jungle, Red Rum Club are a band keenly aware of the instant illicit thrills of a classic single. Yet it was less of a concern during the writing than on previous albums.
“This album is our most impulsive,” considers Fran. “It’s more about feel than thinking. There’s a lot of energy in the studio that just feels right, so we go with it. Before, we might worry about how a song would translate live. Rich’s attitude was: ‘That’s not my problem. I’m just here to make a record, you can worry about the live side afterwards.’ That’s quite right.”
Tom believes Western Approaches has the raw mood Red Rum Club aimed for on debut album Matador. “This is the first record we’ve not thought about what the fans will make of it,” Tom insists. “We’ve always been surprised by which songs take off in the live show. That takes the pressure off, because if a song is going to take flight, it’s going to happen naturally.”
Level-headed about becoming arena stars and festival favourites with the minimum of industry support – “Every city has had its own scene since Liverpool in the 60s, and now every northern city has four artists who could be the next to break big,” as Fran reasons – Red Rum Club hope their fourth album will make the crowds bigger everywhere. “I want people to see that this album is a logical step,” muses Tom, before Fran summarises: “I want us to become an established festival name. We should be doing evening slots on the main stage, and once we are, for people to think: ‘That’s right – Red Rum Club should be playing that slot.’”
Western Approaches: an album built on the intimacy of longtime friends that works in front of any crowd.
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