Westside Cowboy break down their messy, magnificent debut EP

Westside Cowboy walk us through the five songs that make up their first EP.

Westside Cowboy’s debut EP, ‘This Better Be Something Great’, isn’t interested in polish or poise - it’s five songs that sound like they were built in the middle of the room, with limbs and amps and opinions all colliding at once. There are lyrics about love, furniture, and the kind of joy you can only get from doing something loud very badly and then slightly better the second time round. These aren’t songs that arrived fully formed; they’re the sound of a band finding out what works by playing it too fast and watching it fall over. Which, lucky for us, turns out to be exactly the point. Here’s Paddy, in the middle of the chaos, explaining how it all came together. Sort of.

Hello, Paddy the drummer here to talk about our EP. Reuben's making curry downstairs, Aoife's playing in an orchestra, and Jimmy is at Johnny Roadhouse making a deal, so it's just my opinion you're getting today, which is lucky considering that mine's the best one.

I think this was the third song we wrote as a band. It started life as a Casio drum machine keyboard loop that Jimmy brought in, with Reuben doing a bad Stephen Merritt impression on top of it. We were working on it in my bedroom one day, maybe like two weeks into the band, and it was all too complicated in hindsight. Too many chords and changes and all that. Nothing was really coming of it. Then, and without much discussion, if I remember, we just decided to play it the way we do now, basically in full with the fill and everything. It just sort of happened. It's blunt and brash, but also very heartfelt, and we like that. We've played it at every gig since, and people sing the words sometimes, too; we're not used to that by any means.

I remember after we played it for the first time, I got on my bike to ride to a friend's house. I put the voice memo of it on whilst I rode and had to stop to replay it. I arrived at their house and made them listen to it too, and they said something like, 'Yeah, that's good, that', I think. It wasn't that the song was any good or played very well; the thing was about half the speed of how we do it nowadays. It just felt very tied up and neatly packaged, despite all that, the way a good pop song should feel. Especially considering that our bands before this were breakneck speed surf punk and drum machine noise pop, the fact that we had been able to write 'a proper song' felt quite astonishing. We started to care a little more about it after that.

Written a few days before, Jimmy came to us with this idea pretty fully formed, guitar and words at least. I just remember Reuben playing that slide riff for the first time and thinking it was hilarious, like something out of Wii Sport Resort or something. I then started playing this weird version of a train beat, like some cursed Nashville creation, and it was away. Aoife, who had only been playing for about two weeks at the time, was running her bass through a crappy little guitar amp; it was way too loud, making it squeal every time she lifted her hands from the strings. I thought the noise was going to topple the wardrobe.

It felt like a punk song, though, super simple, aggressive, but I'd argue approachable as well. Like with everything in the band early on, it was just so much fun. It reminds me a bit of the Violent Femmes and the Minutemen, two punk bands with a kind of off-kilter sense of humour. It's another one that got progressively faster the more we've played it live. The thing fucking ruins my hands every time now.

P.S Jimmy had no idea about the Johnny Cash reference somehow.

The latest song from the bunch, the name comes from the fact that we thought it sounded like a surf rock song played by very drunk people. Amazing, I know, but it doesn't really sound like that anymore. The opening drumbeat is meant to be a Flaming Lips rip-off. I always liked that despite how intricate and pretty a lot of their instrumentation would be on those 90s albums, it would most often have this crushing drumbeat behind it, driving it all. I think that's what makes good rock drums, I guess, not necessarily accurate and certainly not clever, just propulsive, I suppose.

Doing this in the studio was a fun one, too. We're normally pretty anti-overdubs, but we added a couple of cool bits here and there. We just got Aoife to stack a lot of cello takes and then cut in and out of the bits that we liked. You can also hear a bell from the church next door get picked up by the room mics in the second chorus, too. We liked it being there, so there it is!

Reuben and Aoife came in one day with this, I think the day before our first real gig. The song is inspired by a certain section of a film we really like, but will remain nameless. I was quite happy to leave the whole of it acoustic, but like with everything in Cowboys, it became ear-splitting at some point along the way. We wanted those first floor tom hits to sound like a truck driving through a wall, kind of laying waste to any semblance of calm that had been established by the very lovely opening. Safe to say that we get a lot of mileage out of dynamics in this band.

Outside of that, getting the harmonies right for that proved a little testing. I remember them sounding pretty diabolical at first, all of us falling over each other, out of key and all sorts, and it still has the power to sound quite awful if we don't practice it every now and then. Who cares, though, really? I don't think people come to our gigs to hear in-key singing anyway.

A James Bradbury classic. What more is there to say? "Does the chair in your parlour creak when there's no one around?" is one of my favourite lyrics of all time, and I can say that because I didn't write it.