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Picture yourself on a towel by a swimming pool, Portuguese sun smiling, limitless supplies of Rosé and Sagres to hand - then you're pretty much in tune with the warm-glow week that went into creating the soul sound of MacArthur.
It was summer, 2001, and MY LIFE STORY keyboard player Dan Turner's Portuguese girlfriend's brother was getting married. Singer Dom Chapman came too. Pals at the start, after seven days of "lying by the pool, skint but happily drunk" they were well on their way to musical partnership. "I love you," and so on, no doubt.
Dan, from Ipswich, is one of those determined dreamers who told the school careers advisor he planned to be a pop star. A music degree probably didn't advance his ambitions, but, as he'd done since he was 12, he carried on playing in pop bands ... who had their moments. But that week in Portugal he was on a break between tours as St Etienne's keyboard tech.
Meanwhile, blond Dom, who grew up in Colchester, set himself up as a Nick Hornby-style music anorak via several studious years as a record shop manager. There were stints in bands, a lot of DJing and a thespian excursion (a movie "with" Dame Judi Dench, you know)
All of which led inexorably to their meeting as neighbours in Crouch End, north London. And so to Portugal. "After that, Dom came round and we wrote a song and recorded it that afternoon," says Dan. "It was so easy we knew we were on to something." To their amazement they soon had 50 songs, 30 of them demoed in Dans bedroom studio. They'd get the music down, then Dom would go off to work on lyrics which range from "fun for pissed people" to Another Smile's psychopathic savagery (as in "I'm gonna cut you ...").
Their aggregate inspirations included The Who, The Jam, Scott Walker, Dom's dancefloor stuff and Dan's sneaking fondness for smoothie Jack Jones who used to sing to his mum while she did the ironing. But what prevailed when they wrote together was their grounding in Stevie Wonder, Roberta Flack, James Brown, Curtis Mayfield, Dexy's Midnight Runners and, southern boys though they are, the whole attitude of Northern Soul - "It's a trashier, cheaper version of soul and I like that feeling," says Dom; "We thought about that in the recording process," adds Dan, "we didn't want to make it polished, we turn the cymbals up till they hurt. If it's old-fashioned, well, we've got an excuse - we're from East Anglia and everything takes a long time to get up the A12."
With a name provided by an anagram website (Chapman-Turner Overdrive was never going to suit), they set off round the record companies.
The usual frustrations ensued until DAVE STEWARTS(EURYTHMICS) AN label bowled them over: heard it on a Saturday morning, rang their manager Saturday night, signed them on the Monday. Crikey. Feeling positively Portuguese again, they made short work of the album - especially when, by way of further inspiration, they roped in Gary "Mudbone" Cooper, lead singer with Bootsy's Rubber Band and Funkadelic, to provide backing vocals throughout.Chris Sharrock (The Las, World Party, Robbie Williams) provided the trashy beats , The Crow (MLS ) the bass and Lucy Wilkins(MLS) the strings. They produced themselves, they said, "just lightly arguing amongst ourselves, a bit red-faced sometimes", and emerged unscathed and optimistic - an album ready to go, enough money to play gigs at last and broad vistas of possibility ahead (they've already co-written a song with Mick Jagger - true!).
The self-titled album was due out in May, 2003, with the album finished, singles cut and videos done they were ready to launch just as the record label went into liquidation! Ah the music industry! After a two and a half year legal battle they seem to be emerging at the end of the tunnel with the rights reverting to themselves and a label wanting to take on their music once again- so watch this space!
