Remember gigs? They were good, weren’t they? Music, friends, leaving the house? Well, we can’t give you all of that, but Egyptian Blue here are pretty good at recreating the live experience at home. Assertive, loud, and packed with energy – blasting their new EP ‘Body Of Itch’ from your living room stereo won’t make up for all the world’s wrongs, but it’ll probably help a bit. Here, Andy and Leith talk us through the release, track by track.
NYLON WIRE
This track was born in our rehearsal space, it came to us at the tail end of writing ‘Never’. It’s perhaps one of the more direct EB tracks.
I [Andy] remember breaking a string in rehearsals while writing ‘Never’ and instead of re-stringing we just started jamming, then the riff for ‘Nylon Wire’ came out of the dark and into the light! Sometimes that’s just how it works. Some of our tracks take weeks of configuration, others take minutes. Because we’re constantly rehearsing it means we end up on an equal wavelength with each other – that’s how a track like ‘Nylon Wire’ can be written in minutes, it’s symbiotic. The first demo we recorded on that day isn’t too far off the ‘Nylon Wire’ on the EP. The lyrics are borrowed from another song I’d written, which had been laying around and hadn’t found a home. Eventually, my lyrics can merge into a completely different Egyptian Blue song somewhere down the line. Recording’ Nylon Wire’ was as syncretic as the writing, quick, efficient measures, didn’t need any tampering, and quickly formed. If it were done any other way, it might have lost some of the rawness and energy at its heart. The whole EP was recorded at Brighton Electric Studios by our good friend Theo Verney who also favours this fast and efficient method of recording.
FOUR IS THE LAST FOUR
While watching a band in London last year with a friend, a mate of mine whispered in my ear, “Why don’t they say something like this four is the last four” (referring to the band counting each song in). It was pretty out of context but created a setting for the song. The music was written back home in Suffolk – I was listening to a lot of abstract noise music at the time, which I knew I wanted in the track, and for me, it’s an integral part of the sporadic intensity for the track. Lyrically it plays on the monotony of dead-end jobs. Clocking in and clocking out like a robot, servicing commercial giants and for what(?). It’s all nonsensical like the title, like many of the lyrics. And it feels like there’s no way out.
NEVER
‘Never’ is the closing track of our ‘Body Of Itch’ EP. The intro for the track actually came from playing the last chord of one of our other songs called ‘Contain It’, again during a late-night rehearsal. We do find that some of our tracks have a sibling. We ended up jamming this weird glitchy intro for quite a while, which was reminiscent of a stuck, broken record. At the time it felt like we had struck one of our most emotive and powerful moments, perhaps a side we hadn’t looked too much into prior to this moment. Lyrically with ‘Never’ we focused on various themes, some of which are perhaps more obvious than others.
At the time I had been listening to this one track that was so monotonous, but yet never deteriorated my attention so part of that ideal and awareness might have seeped into the track, but really Never is very much a conveyor of emotions. I’d like to think the line of weapons of mass deception sheds light on politics today.
