Scene In All The Right Places

Mosley Shoals, Ocean Colour Scene’s breakthrough album and arguably their finest offering in a 20-year career, was named after the recording studio in which it was made. Mosley was a suburb of Birmingham, where most of the band are from – although the name was also part-inspired by the legendary Muscle Shoals studios in Alabama. Released in 1996, at the height of the Brit-pop era, the album sold over a million copes and featured a string of OCS classics including ‘The Day We Caught The Train’ and ‘The Riverboat Song’, popularised when Chris Evans used it as the theme for TFI Friday.

Sadly, while the band continues to record and tour, Mosley Shoals is no more, having fallen victim to the developer’s wrecking ball. “It was a real shame that it was knocked down,” muses OCS frontman Simon Fowler, following their recent blistering set at Dublin’s Olympia.
“We had no say in it whatsoever. It was a compulsory purchase order. In hindsight we should have at least eBay-ed the bricks when it was torn down. We would have made a fortune. It was a fantastic place to work and we practically lived there back in those days. We’d go down in the afternoon, do a bit of work and then go out to the pub and get smashed and go back later on for a jam that would probably go on all night.”
However, as Fowler points out, the studio would probably have been well past its sell-by-date even if it still existed today. “Times change and it probably wouldn’t work that way now even if we still had it,” he suggests. “We all don’t live in Birmingham any more for a start and some of the guys have wives and kids and live more normal lives.
He continues: “Rockfield in Wales is where we do most of our work these days and it’s the best studio around. Although when we’re down there the HQ is the local pub. Another place we’ve worked recently is a village on the edge of the Cotswolds called Great Wolford, where Steve (Cradock) and I have done some demos. It was great too. Funnily enough, there’s a good pub besides that one too. You have to have a great pub near a studio as far as I’m concerned. It’s where we do some of our best work.” (laughs)
Saturday is OCS’ ninth studio album and the first on Cooking Vinyl.
“It was recorded very quickly over six four-day periods at Rockfield,” Fowler explains. “We work a lot faster theses days than we used to. Put it down to experience. You learn pretty quickly if you haven’t got a song or a take. You would normally do three or four takes maximum. Otherwise you start trying to impersonate yourself. You start trying too hard to sound like what you think you should sound like.”
Fowler says he isn’t all that enamoured by the recording process and leaves the hi-tech stuff to others.
“I find studios quite boring. I’m not much of a musician. I strum an acoustic guitar. That’s about it. I use Gibsons, Fenders and Marshalls, the classics. My favourite is a Gibson J45 dreadnought acoustic built in 1962. It looks like the one John Lennon used to play on those old Beatles clips. I use the J45 or a Martin – I think it’s an HD 100. I always wanted one of those, it’s what Neil Young has always played. We use Taylors too. They cost a fortune but I find them great for doing for radio sessions.”
Fowler describes himself as “a rubbish electric player” and leaves that end of things to Steve Craddock.
“He mainly plays a Gibson 335 and also uses a Gibson SJ. And he’s got a Rickenbacker. It’s the one Paul Weller played on Top of the Pops with The Jam. Paul gave it to him as a present. When I saw him bringing it on the road I thought ‘you must mad bringing something so valuable on tour.”
While they might not enjoy the kind of critical success that others receive, OCS are still a huge live draw and continue to tour. “We haven’t slowed down, that’s for sure,” Fowler insists. “In fact, we’ve done the biggest tour ever and right now we’re going to Paris then to Amsterdam back home again and back out to Berlin, Munich, Rome and Madrid. Then we’re off India where, believe it or not, we’re opening up a series of Hard Rock Cafés. I love touring. We try to get home between gigs as much as we can. When we were very young we all lived in hovels and dingy bedsits. Going out and staying in a hotel was fantastic and it still is.
“We pace ourselves a bit better. You’re generally not offstage until 11pm and by the time you’ve had a sit down and a couple at the bar, it’s two in the morning. You can’t go back to your hotel room as soon as you come offstage as you’re still pumping from the gig and you’d end up watching Sky News all night long.”
Advice to young musicians? “I would always say to them to ignore what people like me say – you need to find it all out for yourself (laughs)”