Track By Track: Lemonade Sin – Nothing For A Pair

You get a whole lot from the different pairs of people that feature on Lemonade Sin’s new album, Nothing For A Pair.

The band’s songwriters Lee Friese-Greene and Simon Aldous, who co-wrote the album and this Track By Track, teamed up with another iconic pairing, Lucy and Matthew Board of Pale Blue Eyes, who produced as well as appearing on the album.

So, it shouldn’t be a surprise that the LP leans heavily into a classic and decidedly English indie sound, the light and jangly textures reminiscent of the 80s. It has its darker moments, humour too, but I’ll let the band tell you more about that. But if you like early Pulp and have a soft spot for the likes of Cud, The Pipettes, Orange Juice, and the heyday of C86, indie music with a flair for pop and sharp asides, Nothing For A Pair is for you.

Chewy Gooey

After we’d decided what the album’s theme would be, we brainstormed every pair of people we could think of. Ice cream makers Ben and Jerry were one of the more unlikely couplings on the list, but we learned that Ben has a condition called anosmia, meaning he has a very limited sense of taste – and this is apparently why lots of their ice creams are big on texture as that’s what he is able to experience.

We went for lots of nice onomatopoeic words to convey the sensuality of their products. And we tried to echo that in the sounds as well, with a quite icy synth pad interspersed by some more chunky sounds!

A Song That No One Can Dance To

This was inspired by our all-time favourite musical duo: Nancy Sinatra and Lee Hazelwood, and specifically their song Some Velvet Morning, which apparently Lee H wrote because he was a bit precious about his songs and didn’t like people saying they were good to dance to.

So, he deliberately wrote something awkward with a changing time signature. Our song is, in fact, quite easy to dance to, aided by some particularly groovy stick work from our drummer Jen. But we do reference the title by slipping into a 5/4 rhythm in the chorus, which could catch someone out if they were moving their body along to it.

Cold

Our tribute to ice dancers Torville and Dean, who won Olympic gold in 1984, performing to Ravel’s Bolero, which the intro to the track references.  Because their dancing was quite sensual, it raised lots of speculation as to whether their partnership was more than merely professional. They say very much not, but we’ve gone with the idea that they were suppressing feelings of attraction so as not to distract from athletic excellence on the ice.

Smithereens

It’s a song in the proud tradition of creating a track around a neat bit of gear, or in this case a synth setting, the fading in sound at the start. It’s about another musical partnership and how quite often, one or both of the pairs starts to resent their lack of complete control and believe they’ll be better if they go it alone.

And more often than not, they never do anything as good as when they were together. Our own experience has been almost the opposite of this. We had both only written songs on our own before we started Lemonade Sin, and if anything, we find the absence of total control quite exhilarating.

The Godlier Way

A few days before we met up to start writing these songs, Simon found himself at the Machynlleth Museum of Modern Art, where there was an exhibition about dress-maker Laura Ashley accompanied by a short film.

It dwelt on her relationship with her husband Bernard who had a strong business sense, while she was just trying to make dresses that conformed with her quite puritanical chapel upbringing – high necklines, long sleeves and minimal flesh on display.

Bernard turned her designs into a highly successful venture, creating a 70s fashion trend. Contrasting with Laura’s traditional values, this track is entirely electronic, apart from our voices and the sound of waves at the end, which Lee recorded at Broadsands beach in Devon.

Murmurs and Creaks

The album was produced by Lucy and Matt from the band Pale Blue Eyes, whose specialism is motorik rhythms, and for this track we may have been influenced by this quite a bit, though we’ve given it a strong Lemonade Sin twist with lots of harmonies and vocal interplay.

Strictly speaking, this song may not be about a pair at all, taking its starting point as the relationship between Jane Eyre and Edward Rochester, but also his first wife Bertha, so a thruple perhaps – though as we understand it, most thruples don’t involve one of the parties being locked away in a tower.

Where Were You Last Night

This song is about Anthony and Cleopatra; about lust and jealousy, and venting one’s sexual frustrations by invading another country. We wanted a properly epic feel to this, which we’ve sort of achieved, alongside an inadvertent nod to musical theatre in some of its melodies. Co-producer Lucy is responsible for the menacing trumpets on the track, while the car-alarm-like sound at the very end is, in fact, a Fender twin amp feeding back.

Ugly Creatures

Inspired by the characters of Pip and Estella from Great Expectations. Estella was the ward of Miss Havisham, who was jilted on her wedding day, and has raised Estella to be incapable of love, and to break men’s hearts as some kind of revenge on men. We wanted to combine this dark subject matter with quite an upbeat feel, combining electronicy verses with quite heavy drums and guitar in the choruses, and hopefully make it quite danceable.

Hold the Frame

Written about Lee’s all-time favourite film Dirty Dancing, which is set in a Catskill Mountains resort in the early 60s. Musically it’s a reference to that slow rock and roll style that would have accompanied many a slow dance of the time. Charlotte our bass player has found a quite wobbly sound and there’s also some chorused guitar, a shimmering synth and some quite haunting trumpet from Lucy again, all giving it a nostalgic feel that fits well with the film’s coming-of-age theme.

Rose

About one of our favourite Doctor Who episodes, the quite heart-wrenching one where Rose Tyler ends up on a beach, stranded in a parallel universe never able to see the Doctor again. In a later episode she is given a “human” clone doctor as a companion, but you kind of feel he isn’t a satisfactory substitute – like dating twins and ending up with the wrong one.

We were trying to include some sci-fi sounds, including a theremin. Except Simon whistled the tune to demonstrate how he wanted it to sound, and Lucy and Matt decided to use that sound instead. We wanted to end the track with a huge array of our signature ‘ba ba ba’ harmonies, as if it were an epic end to the album. Except it’s not because in fact then finish with a sweet little coda of a song – almost like the hidden tracks you used to get on CDs.

Oh Good Grief

And that track is Oh Good Grief, written from the viewpoints of Charlie Brown and his ‘psychiatrist’ Lucy Van Pelt. It’s a ukulele-led ditty about the chain of unrequited loves in the Peanuts cartoons, and in particular Charlie Brown and “the little red-haired girl”; and Lucy and would-be concert pianist Schroeder.

Lee is very big in the Totnes ukulele scene so it was good to see her put her skills to broader use. Simon found a toy piano sound that seemed to fit the narrative, though possibly inaccurate as Schroeder’s piano surely sounds like a concert grand.

Nothing For A Pair is out now and can be picked up in CD and digital format on Bandcamp. Connect with the band on Facebook and Instagram for streaming options and band news.