Life In A Northern Town

"It’s going off all over Britain, in the north-west, and up in Scotland it’s madness, yeah? Floods and everything. Fuckin’ ’ell.”

First time in almost a decade of interviewing that I’ve begun a conversation with a preamble about the weather. But then, the furies have outdone themselves this winter: storm warnings, floods, tsunamis, icebergs colliding – those of an end-times bent might suggest that Mother Nature’s throwing an almighty wobbler, something that’s not lost on Doves vocalist and bass-player Jimi Goodwin.
“On one side we’ve got people fucking waging war on our behalf, apparently,” he says, “and then you’ve got nature throwing shit at you. It’s a really weird time in the world at the moment. A really weird time.”
He could sing that if he put a tune to it. And he has, after a fashion, on a new song called ‘The Storm’. But while Doves’ forthcoming third album Some Cities might not exactly qualify as a state of the nation address, it is primarily concerned with the band’s immediate environment, namely Manchester, – although it was written primarily in rented cottages around the UK and recorded with producer Ben Hillier, the man behind Blur’s Think Tank and Elbow’s Cast Of Thousands, in Liverpool, Brixton and Loch Ness.
“We’d just rent cottages and literally fill our van full of gear and go away for two weeks, cook for ourselves and just start writing straight to the eight-track,” Jimi explains. “We did that all over, in the Peak District in the north east of England, up in Snowdonia. We’d get four songs together that we were happy with, set a date with Ben last April in Liverpool, did five weeks there, took a month to write some more tracks and reconvened in June or July for another session, and it went like that, the routine we sort of established on The Last Broadcast.”
Which certainly sounds more amenable than headquartering in some expensive city centre rehearsal complex for weeks of pre-production.
“Your environment affects what you’re doing and where you are, even on a day to day level,” Jimi reasons. “Songs like ‘Some Cities’ sound dead urban, even though it was done in a cottage, but lyrically it’s telling you exactly what we’re going on about. That and ‘Black And White Town’ have a loose theme about the past and the present, cities evolving and mutating and buildings coming down that you loved, and a shit office block going up, the greed, observations like that.
“You bung the council a bit of dough and there you go, you’ve got a shitty new yuppie housing project, and all the people who lived in that area for three generations who haven’t got 200 grand to spend are now in a sink estate somewhere. But that’s cities, man, you’ve all those things colliding and always will have.”
The ‘man’ you heard dropped in there by way of punctuation is not an arts-lab hippy-ism so much as northern vernacular. Doves are the quintessential Manchester band, and Some Cities is, in part, a chronicle of the changes that have taken place in the city.
“I find it hard to see Manchester as a tourist-y city,” says Goodwin, “but apparently it is. you do get a lot of Japanese or Spanish kids coming to see God knows what. A lot of them come on the music pilgrimage, I can dig that. (It’s like) Dublin, which I know pretty well ’cos of family. The whole tourist thing, I wonder about the resentment that might cause in local people, ’cos Dubliners are pretty much like Mancunians; you’re pretty cynical, pretty hard-nosed and pretty funny. And you’ve got your local pub that’s now turned into a…”
Sports-themed cattle shed...
“…yeah, like a Weatherspoon chain. That’s happened in the last 12 years, it’s gone mad. ‘Black And White Town’ obviously is about growing up in satellite towns. So I think my point is, I find it fascinating that you can walk across Manchester in ten minutes, and I think now, the amount of people moving to the city centre, you’ve got one doctor per 400 people, and a Tesco Metro and a Sainsbury’s catering to possibly now 30,000 people in the centre of Manchester, and it’s a very small city. I just don’t know how long that’s gonna last. When are these flats suddenly gonna become empty again and Manchester hits another depression like Liverpool in the 80s?
“I’m just cynical about how sustainable it is with everyone living in the city centre. Not that I’m saying everybody should come to the suburbs, ’cos they have their own unique boredom and all that, but it’s just observations that you see when you return from recording and all the touring we did in the last few years.”

One of the consequences of all that touring is that Some Cities is a simpler, more direct record than its predecessor The Last Broadcast. The sounds are more analogue-based, the songs more traditionally arranged and the playing more economic.
“Working with Ben (Hillier), he brought that out of us a lot more,” Jimi says, “that whole thing about rehearsing songs for a lot longer. We always rush to put them down because we’ve got so many ideas and so much overdubbing and layering to do, and this time he was good for saying, ‘Just go with the guide mate. It’s not broken’. A lot of the lyrics on this album are consciously more direct. The arrangements are very concise. I’m not saying there’s flab on the other albums, it’s just that it means more business.
“The other albums were more exploratory on some of the tracks. Like The Sulphur Man has about five different sections, and that’s great, it works, but this one’s a bit more urgent, and that’s just because we’re three years on from then. So hopefully that spontaneity comes over on some of the songs, like ‘Snowden’ and ‘Almost Forgot Myself’ and ‘Sky Starts Falling’.”
These are certainly the most elaborate tracks on a record that otherwise sticks to a less-is-more ethos, Motown’s nailed down rhythm sections crossed with garage band attack (the natural hybrid of the two being Elvis & The Attractions).
However, this listener does hearken after the sheer ambition of the Sean O’ Hagen produced Last Broadcast, an album still widely held in high regard, not least by Dave Fanning, who named his TV show after it.
“You’re joking,” Jimi exclaims. “I’ve talked to Dave over the years but I didn’t know that.”
Mind you, Some Cities was only in my possession for a couple of days before the record company’s publicity department were instructed to reclaim it – yet more evidence of ludicrous piracy paranoia – so it might yet emerge as a slow-burner. Also, songs like ‘Snowden’ and ‘Shadows Of Salford’ do contrast extraordinary quasi-operatic effects with insanely dirty guitar sounds, a mixture of hi-fidelity and low distortion that is normally the preserve of people like Flaming Lips/Mercury Rev collaborator Dave Fridmann.
“Yeah, only he and possibly Jason out of Spiritualized can pull that off and not be dead bombastic,” avers Jimi.
The point being, Doves are at their best when they co-opt apparently outré elements, as happened with ‘Where We’re Calling From’ off the last album, an amended Ray Carver title put to a tune written under the influence of Mulholland Drive.
“Jez (Williams, Doves’ guitarist) gets mad visuals like that,” Jimi says. “I think it’s his favourite film, and we all loved it. Lynch, in Fire Walk With Me and Blue Velvet, there’s some scenes where the audio just goes nuts, him and Angelo Badalamenti. It just goes really freaky and surreal and lurching, like, ‘Woah, what is going on here’.”
True enough, if you boost the volume in certain scenes in those films, you can feel a subliminal sub-bass hum that provokes a dreadful feeling in the pit of the stomach.
“Or you suddenly notice that there’s been the dirgiest Gorecki-style strings under the scene for the last ten minutes, and no wonder you’re feeling, ‘What the hell is going on?’ Really clever the way they work together.”
Did any outside sources inform Some Cities in a similar way?
“Nothing off the top of my head. We never really get informed by music, or go, ‘I want it to sound like this.’ I used to read about that band St Etienne who would literally go in the studio with a box of records, going, ‘Right: middle-eight of this…’ I find it fascinating, that approach, that’s a real DJ approach. But Andy and Jez are mad into architecture and stuff, and as we were writing it, it started to become apparent that we had a couple of tracks that seemed to be set almost in Manchester, and you start realising there’s a bit of a thread going on.”
One thing about Manchester guitar bands both before and after The Hacienda – Oasis excepted – is that they all possess a pretty sophisticated rhythm sense: Joy Division, Durutti Column, New Order, Happy Mondays, The Stone Roses.
“I think maybe it’s just an unconscious thing we’ve grown up with,” Jimi reckons. “Even with Joy Division and New Order, there is a vaguely funky side.”
Certainly, one of the funnier scenes in 24-Hour Party People was the Martin Hannett character lecturing Joy Division about Can.
“Yeah, yeah: ‘Come back when you’ve listened to them!’’’
Speaking of producers, one can’t help wondering what would have happened had the band persevered with initial sessions overseen by William Orbit in Grouse Lodge, Co. Westmeath a year ago.
“That was the official start of the recording,” Jimi explains. “William’s great, and we did a couple of tracks with him, but we just felt we had do it on our own again. We just had to get it out of our systems. On paper it’s an incredibly interesting potential clash of styles, but it just didn’t happen.”
Orbit’s an intriguing character, having cut his teeth in ostensibly avant-garde territory, but along the way developing a keen instinct for pop hooks.
“That’s what makes him unique, really,” Jimi observes, “he can bring out a song if it’s there, but also there’s all the Strange Cargo stuff.”
Did they get any good Madonna stories out of him?
“A couple. But obviously it has to be diplomatic, as in, ‘She’s a lovely woman’, or ‘I made 16 billion pounds whilst working with her!’ He didn’t say that but… it was a fruitful period, wasn’t it? But he’s a cracking guy, top producer, a deep cat, William. I’ve got nothing bad to say about him.
“Obviously production is very important to us, but without a song and a melody to produce, you ain’t got nothing. You can see through sheen. We just don’t want be a plug-in-and-play indie band, we never have been, and I think that’s apparent on the three albums. We’ve never wanted to do a straight-up guitar album, although you could argue some of the tracks on this album are. But if that’s what the song requires, that’s what we’ll do with it.”

Some Cities is out now on Heavenly.