Abi Harding is lost for words. Asked how her band, The Zutons, will go about rustling up a sequel to their platinum-selling debut record, she has lapsed into a puzzled, rather defiant, silence.
“Erm,” she stutters, eventually, her Scouse accent as brackish as four-day-old porridge. “I dunno. We’ll just go and write some songs and record them. It’s quite simple really.”
Self-doubt, one begins to sense, is not something to which The Zutons are prone.
Harding, who plays saxophone and dances barefoot on stage, has the air of a precocious 14-year-old. She bats your questions nonchalantly, without ever actually going so far as to answer them.
The Zutons, she reveals after a degree of prompting, are currently writing a batch of fresh songs in preparation for their second album. What does the new material sound like? That, it appears, is not so easily explained.
‘It sounds like, us – doesn’t it? I mean, we can hardly sound like anyone else.”
Certainly, there’s no argument there. Purveyors of swampy indie-blues, The Zutons give the impression of having been conjured from an alternative dimension. A murky Neverland where The Specials were the biggest band of the ’80s and nobody sniggers if you cite Madness as an influence.
Twelve months ago, the five-piece released Who Killed The Zutons?, a record that generated equal quantities of bafflement and adoration. A screwy conjunction of helter-skelter melodies, out-to-lunch arrangements and cleverly nonsensical lyrics, the LP sounded a note of giddy incongruity. Here, at last, was a young band whose ambitions stretched further than new wave pastiche.
Throughout, Harding and her saxophone tinged the project with scattershot melancholy. Her playing was fraught and steely; Harding seems to pluck melodies from some strange and alien place.
“I try to do things a little differently, I suppose,” she says, breaking, rather alarmingly, into breathy giggles. “My playing has to function within the overall song. It’s got to sound like it belongs. It has to sound like a Zuton saxophone.”
The Zutons sole female member, Harding says that, for a young woman, being in a band can sometimes bring baggage. For one thing, there is an amount of unsolicited amorous attention. She does not believe the music business to be fundamentally sexist. Sometimes, though, it can be incredibly sleazy.
“Well, you do get guys coming up to you and trying it on,” she agrees, with an audible shudder. “But I don’t think that’s specific to music. If you’re a woman, it’s going to happen anyway. “
She refuses to elaborate, but says that, having been hit upon more times than she cares to think about, she’s learned to spot a creep at distance.
“What can you do, though? The rest of the guys look out for me and I’m not the type to put up with crap anyways.”
Unwelcome suitors aside, she maintains, her gender is not an issue. On the tour bus, the rest of The Zutons hunker around the Playstation while Harding kicks back with a book. These are hardly the sort of differences of lifestyle to drive a group apart.
“We have a laugh. Being the only girl in the band doesn’t make a difference. I don’t feel any different. We’re all part of the one big gang.”