Liquid Skin

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Ottewell theorised that the band's experience travelling in Australia, Europe and the United States influenced their writing.

You ask how come they have been around all this time, I'll tell you Gomez are one of the best bands of all time. While Gomez never quite stepped into the big league, 'Liquid Skin' earned them a platinum disc, and they went on to become a lot more successful Stateside than many other British bands from their era. We were just writing all the time, we’d be dealing with 24 songs for each record and on another day those songs might have made the record. Get Miles” is the Gomez pitch in a nutshell; it’s a swamp blues with a penetrating analog synth hook sung out of the park by Ben Ottewell, who does a frighteningly good approximation of Howlin’ Wolf for a nebbish with glasses who’s a dead ringer for the actor David (Michael Bolton) Herman. The fact that we had been students was supposed to be some kind of problem, but every single band going had been to art college or university or something.Gray wrote the song in a house on Ash Grove in Leeds; when they were recording it, the hall they were tracking in would burn down frequently.

Gomez were allowed to self-produce the sessions after their label heard the strength of their demos.

As well as the woozy, acoustic 'Nobody's Girl', there's 'Brother Lead', where 60's psychedelia meets 70's disco meets 90s alt-rock, and the gravelly vocal is dialled up to 11. And that moment, just a handful of seconds, provides such an immense peak that it gives me chills just thinking about it. It’s typical whenever an inactive band gets back out on the road to celebrate an anniversary that you speculate about whether the reunion will lead to new music. I'm not worried about your state of mind, 'cause you're not the revolutionary kind," croons Ben Ottewell, Gomez's gravel-voiced singer on "Revolutionary Kind", but indeed, it's precisely this attitude that mobilises Gomez's harshest critics.

Eventually, two of their members set up homes in America, and in recent years there have been a number of solo records from members of the group. There's always been a lot of love for the band and that album in Australia, but the extent of the excitement was a little surprising. Just getting together over that music and remembering those times a bit, was an overwhelmingly positive thing. Obviously, there is a load of shit that hasn’t been released and will never see the light of day,” Ottewell responds.There were certain gigs, like Barrowland [Ballroom] in Scotland where we really didn’t have to play, the crowd would just take it on for you. California" is a slow-building song that incorporates droning, and switches to a boogie; throughout this, the song details escaping California.