Menace Beach: "I feel like I get it all now"

Leeds duo Menace Beach make wonderfully scuzzy alt-rock. Following their whirlwind debut, second album ‘Lemon Memory’ sees them more assured than ever before - as Ryan Needham explains.What’ve you guys been up to since your debut? Do you think you’re the same band now as you were when you made ‘Ratworld’? In some ways yes, but in most ways no. The time around recording this album is the first chance we’ve had to stop and think about what we want to do creatively now that we’ve accepted that this is more of a full-time prospect than we first imagined. The first couple of years of Menace Beach was a bit like learning the shot-putt in the stadium at the Olympic games; we recorded the first songs I'd ever written just for a laugh, or like a thing to do when we moved to Leeds. A week after that it had been passed on to Too Pure and we had a release, then maybe three weeks after that we’d got booked to do a BBC 6music session, and maybe another three weeks after that we signed a record deal. That was before we’d even done a show together, so we felt on the back foot from the get-go. I’m obviously really grateful for all that stuff, but it's been really important to have nearly a year just doing nothing but resetting. I feel like I get it all now. When did you start working on ‘Lemon Memory’, and where did you find yourself writing for this one? ‘Give Blood’ was in Ibiza, wasn’t it? Yeah, Liza [Violet] and I found a girl out there with an apartment that had a few instruments included, so we took a laptop and did some writing and super basic recordings. We wrote the bulk of the record in Formentera which is a tiny island just below Ibiza that was a regular stop on 60s hippy trail. Bob Dylan lived in a windmill there in the late sixties and Pink Floyd and Janis Joplin were there around the same time. We only found all this stuff out while we were there from an English couple that had moved there in 1963 for similar reasons to those guys, and after that I got well stuck into the history of the place. There are still a fair few creative communities out there and the place has somehow retained that open and relaxed spirit. Did you learn anything new during the record’s creation? I learnt a lot. I learnt a lot about the industrial, social and musical history of Sheffield from Ross [Orton, producer] he loves that place. I learnt that it's really good when you just give shit up to people and let them run with it when they have a strong idea that maybe you first just don’t get. I learnt that it's hard when you are doing creative stuff and you want people to understand your ideas and get it, but sometimes it's okay when people go ‘Yeah I get this, but don’t like it’. I learnt that you just have to show yourself and then if they don’t like it then maybe just doing the process and the work is the destination, and then next time it’s different.