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.
