You know how looking back at your nascent work can be super embarrassing? Well, it’s nothing like that when it comes to Brit, indie sensation Gomez’s sophomore album Liquid Skin, which the band is about to tour in its entirety.
“In a lot of ways, it can be like looking at pictures of yourself from when you’re younger, but it still stands up,” says Ben Ottewell, one of the band’s three singers – albeit the one with pipes pretty much synonymous with Gomez’s sound.
While a second album can be a difficult baby for many bands, Gomez managed to top their feted first platter Bring It On (1998) with an even bigger belter a year later in Liquid Skin. For Ottewell, at least part of the album’s success boils down to the fact that they had what he describes as a “broader palette” to work with.
“Bring It On was very much based on demos, and a lot of what you hear on that record is a thing we’d recorded in a garage and augmented in a studio,” he explains. “The feeling with that record was that we wanted to keep it as true to our origins as possible. It just sounded good and weird, so why fuck with it?
“But when we came to do Liquid Skin, we were in a studio from day one. Back then, there was money in the recording industry, and we were able to get into Abbey Road and record strings. It was the same approach as with Bring It On in terms of using what was available to us, it just happened that with Liquid Skin, Abbey Road was available to us.”
Another significant difference between the two albums is that by the time they came around to recording Liquid Skin, they’d already had the benefit of taking the songs out on the road.
“We’d actually played them live a bunch of times, which we’d never done with Bring It On,” Ottewell reflects. “We were incredibly lucky, because other bands usually slog it out on the road for a couple for years before getting signed, but we never did that. We got signed and went straight on the road and played pretty big gigs straight away.
“So, Liquid Skin was informed by broader horizons as well – like my first trip abroad, which was a press trip to Paris. That’s ridiculous. It was good to bring back all of that experience and all of those opportunities we had back into the studio.”
That said, Ottewell sees a pretty clear through line from Bring It On to Liquid Skin.
“It was a strange time, in a way, because there wasn’t any rest at all – we were either playing gigs or in the studio, so in a lot of ways they’re almost like musical twins, those two records,” he muses. “A lot of those songs were written around the same time as the Bring It On songs. There’s a song called ‘Bring It On’ on Liquid Skin and ‘Revolutionary Kind’ was already written, as was ‘Rhythm & Blues Alibi’.
That Gomez is about to play Liquid Skin track-for-track Down Under is a treat for a number of reasons, not least being that they’ve only recently taken the band on the road again following a six-year hiatus.
The band had never intended to be away so long and it certainly wasn’t because they were at each other’s throats. Rather, they were just a bit tuckered out. That’s totally understandable given that they’d been playing consistently since 1997, during which time the band’s lineup remained unchanged. That’s no small feat. When asked about the band’s longevity, Ottewell doesn’t hesitate.
“We split the money equally. Everything’s straight down the line.”
Happily, playing together again has been akin to riding a bike.
“It’s muscle memory, it’s occurred to all of us. When we were in rehearsal before touring again, if you didn’t concentrate, you played it right. We’d played over a thousand shows and it’s been engrained in there somewhere.”
Gomez hit The Lost Lands which comes to Werribee Mansion from Friday November 1 to Sunday November 3. Head to festival website for tickets. They’ve also sold out The Croxton on two nights, Sunday November 10 and Monday November 11.
