“Let’s Do Something Strange!” Courting Are Aiming For The Unexpected

Barely allowing the dust to settle on their second album, Liverpudlians Courting are back with a third effort fourteen months later. (Deep breath) ‘Lust for Life, Or ‘How To Thread The Needle And Come Out The Other Side To Tell A Story’ is a culmination of the band’s fusion of indie, experimental rock and electro pop, formed across their seven-year career.

CLASH spoke with lead vocalist Sean Murphy-O’Neill to discuss how the new album came about, his songwriting process and what’s next.

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CLASH: We last spoke backstage at Reading Festival, and you alluded to another album. You were good to your word!

Murphy-O’Neill: We’re just so quick. Essentially, we found out we had a tour in October, and when that was pencilled in – I think it was February 2024 – we just knew that if we didn’t have any album before then, we’re gonna be slow. So we worked incredibly hard and powered it out. Because it is quite an in-house operation, it’s not too hard to do that. We’re very grateful that we have management and a label who don’t listen to our album and say, ‘Do this instead.’ They give us the ability to be creative so we do just go in the studio. We came out and got it all ready to go. The album was done by Reading and Leeds and then it’s just a case of waiting for the right time. That’s the game; the quicker you have the music finished, the quicker it is to set everything up around it, rather than panicking last minute about changing masters or mixes.

You’ve said this album brought about a change of approach. How so?

On the last album, we tried to set the scope really wide and create something theatrical and concept based. On this album, I didn’t want to have to think about conceptual bells and whistles. It made more sense to write songs that were exactly as they wanted to be. Let the record speak for itself, something really direct in contrast with maybe how weird and mysterious the last one was, at least in narrative. It’s just more direct. The songs are usually shorter and they get to where they want to go a bit faster.

And each song on the album has a ‘twin’?

That came from a songwriting exercise. As an artist, you’ve got to be constantly thinking of new ways to write songs. The idea of, ‘Here’s a riff, here’s some lyrics…’ you can just churn out some boring shit sometimes. For me, to write something interesting, you have to give yourself an interesting way to do it. On this, what we kind of did was, every time we were stuck on where a song should go, we said ‘Let’s pair it with something else.’ Doing something like that takes to places you wouldn’t normally go with a song. ‘Stealth Rollback’ and ‘Lust for Life’… both use a lot of the same instrumentation. They use the same sample, the same drums. It’s kind of like a writing game to make things more interesting, and I think it did. It all happened very naturally because the two titles of the record were in place before the concept of the record. Everything emerged from having the dual title idea.

There are no real rules to it. They are only properly twinned in a case when we needed to push it in a different direction and needed to do something more interesting. On songs like ‘Eleven Sent’ and ‘Namcy’, which sit in the middle, their twinning comes from the fact that they are more traditional. They are less experimental. I feel like we didn’t need to borrow too much for the others because stylistically, they live in the same world. I don’t think there’s a specific rule we set we followed; they just came naturally.

And obviously ‘Lust for Life’ is quite a familiar title…

I like the idea of exhausting or twisting rock cliches. I think that’s such a traditional title, it’s been used by Iggy Pop and Lana Del Ray. The scope is crazy there. So the idea was to borrow the first half of the title from something legacy based, steeped in rock music tradition, and then maybe subvert that cliché by making it really wordy and expansive. It’s kind of cheating, isn’t it? If we’d called an album ‘Lust for Life’, people would have had exceptionally high expectations for it but mock the title for being too lame or too easy. We’ve played this so we get the best of both worlds. I think it’s like how we work as artists as well; on the one hand, the title is ambitious and out there, and on the other hand we have some songs that are more straightforward rock.

On that first album, ‘Guitar Music’, we were using that space to experiment a lot with production and what we wanted to do. On the last album, we took a completely different step, really, into wanting to use what we’d been practicing, like traditional song structures, or mess around with the structure of a traditional pop song. On this one, we’ve had enough practice at both that we’re now playing around with pop song structure mixed with weird, strange production. It’s kind of a mix of the best elements of what we’ve been working on for the last few years.”

You reference older songs on the new album as well.

I just like to lyrically include a lot of references to things we’ve already said. It makes it interesting to invent a setting where all the characters from your arc can live. We just keep mentioning the same things when we write songs, unintentionally coming back to the same reference points and visual settings. They become present in a lot of our songs. But I guess because of how I’ve set up the previous albums, it does all feel interconnected.

Do you try and stay away from writing about the state of the world, or does writing about things closer to home come naturally?

I’ve not taken any reference to anything important in, like, five years. I try and write based on really small details of things, and then expanding into better worlds. A lot of lyrics I write are lines taken from adverts and magazines. Old sitcoms. You can find really beautiful one-liners in low-art settings and then twist them into things that are a little bit more interesting. In the first two albums – at least once – there’s a line from ‘Friends’.

I think writing about things that aren’t real, not only do I not like to do it, I think it’s hard. Anyone can write a political song. To write a good political song is incredibly difficult, because as soon as you start approaching it with any nuance, you have to be educated on the subject and so good of a songwriter, that if you are approaching it in any way that is traditional, you have to turn global news events into melodic prose in a way that doesn’t sound like ‘We Didn’t Start The Fire’. I think that’s so hard to do that I won’t touch it. In a similar way, that’s why there are so many political bands who come out with these heaps of shit because they don’t believe what they’re singing about. They’re just like, ‘This is a pretty broad point I’m gonna make about masculinity and then just whack it out there.’ It’s just so vague and vapid, no one can really criticise it. It doesn’t do anything.

I think the same can be said about a really good love song. I do like really good love songs, but I feel like it’s more fun to approach it in a weird way and write from the perspective of someone else. A really good love song – as a writer – is a tremendously difficult thing, to say something that no one’s ever said before and do it in a way that is beautiful. It’s why it’s so rare when you come across a song. This is not me putting a slight on love songs in pop music, the amount of them that actually go straight down the middle, like ‘God, I’m in love’, just suck. Whereas the ones that are successful twist that in some way. Like most of those Sabrina Carpenter songs, they are weird twists on traditional love songs. Same with the Chappell Roan songs. They do well because they put interesting takes on it. I’m not saying that’s not because they couldn’t write a really good love song as well, it’s just that difficult that as a songwriter it’s more enjoyable to play around with it because who are you going to relate to?

I don’t listen to bands, to be honest. I think there is something so lacking, and I don’t know if it’s the way the music industry is, but I’m making something I want to hear. I’m not sure that everyone wants to hear what I want to hear. They might want anthemic lad-rock to drink a beer too, and that’s fine. You get what you want from the music… but I want something that I’ve never heard before. I don’t know that it’s because most things have been done and we need to accept that. I’d rather hear someone try and fail than fail to try. I want bands who can headline Glastonbury to be releasing ambitious albums instead of phoning it in. If you’ve got the money and you can headline festivals, let’s get weird. Let’s do something strange. That’s what I want.

Obviously, it’s easier said than done. Maybe I wouldn’t do it either. But it’s so uninteresting. Most other genres have scope. There’s so much rap that’s inspired by rock, and ambient music, dance music from the ‘90s by really programmed guitars. Some of it is proggy in places. There’s so many split-offs and interesting things that rap has done in the last ten years, and rock has hardly done shit. People are so scared of messing with what works. It upsets me. I want to see something with ambition. Something new. I don’t know if it’s people just holding on and there’s no room for change.

You’ve got a busy few weeks coming up. What have you got planned for the live shows?

It’s a show. We really planned a show. On the last album, the ethos was: we know we’re a band with two albums, but let’s play it sweaty. Let’s play all our numbers hard and fast and let people heckle and suggest. Just play it by ear. This time, we’ve resolved into the fact that we have three albums, we’re gonna do what we want. Let’s play a really tight show. If I had it my way, we’d been playing this exact show headlining Alexandra Palace or whatever. We would play the exact same show to ten people as we would 10,000. It doesn’t matter where we play, I want to give people an experience. I don’t want to act like a small band.

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‘Lust for Life, Or: How To Thread The Needle And Come Out The Other Side To Tell The Story’ is out on March 14th.

Words: Richard Bowes
Photo Credit: Charlie Barclay Harris

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