Menace Beach: "What if someone cursed our house?"

Bands often complain about album recording sessions being cursed and bad luck befalling their every move. In the case of Leeds scuzz rock heroes Menace Beach, their own peculiar curse provided the inspiration for ‘Lemon Memory', a superb second effort that sees the band spreading their wings and taking their brand of heavy grunge pop in some weirder directions.

As singer and guitarist Ryan Needham explains, Menace Beach's relationship with the dreaded lemony hex goes back a long way. "When we went to Ibiza on holiday we took a few books with us, and one was called mysterious cults," he begins. "There's a bit about curses and to wish someone bad luck you can chop a lemon up fill it with some of this stuff, tie it in a bag and bury it on the property of the person you want to curse. I was going to Liza, I remember when we found at the house we used to live in in Derby a bag of 15-20 lemons on the doorstep. It was probably some kids, but I was like, ‘What if someone cursed our house?’ Loads of bad shit happened there. That was a bit of a jumping off point for the album, and I got a bit carried away with it."

[sc name="pull" text="It’s probably a load of hocus pocus…"]

Strange lemon-based activity was not the only difference in the making of their second album which was a world away from their night time recording sessions in Ryan's flat in Sheffield. This time the band wanted to do something different and in many ways, ‘Lemon Memory' is a reaction to their instant hit debut ‘Ratworld' rather than a mere consolidation. "After the last tour, me and Liza were like, 'Shall we just fuck off somewhere and have a bit of a break?' So we found a cheap holiday in Ibiza, took the iPad and stuff and then we found a guy who could get us a couple of guitars," explains Ryan. "We had a beach holiday and wrote four or five songs. That was the start of it. It doesn’t sound particularly Ibiza inspired, but that’s where it started, and we just came back to even sunnier Sheffield to finish it off."

Writing in a drastically different location proved inspiring to the band who are now firmly established under the core songwriting partnership of Ryan and Liza. Travel and discovery informed the band's creative direction. "We went to this little island underneath Ibiza. I’m a real geek, and I get obsessed with local history," says Ryan. "We found out that this island back in the 60s was part of the hippie trail where people would come from Morocco. Pink Floyd lived there in the late 60s, and Bob Dylan lived in a windmill there. We went and found these landmarks and just got into that. Once knowing that I was like, 'Yeah! There’s good energy here.' There was something pretty magical about the place. Once you learn about all this stuff you’re like, yeah, I can get into this. It’s probably a load of hocus pocus, but once you get that in your mind, you just run with it."