We’re here today to discuss a ‘90s indie-rock anthem by a band from the north of England, fronted by a pair of brothers…
No, not that one.
In early November 1997, West Yorkshire five-piece Embrace scored a UK Top 10 hit with their powerful and rousing call to arms, All You Good Good People. Beginning with a seemingly relaxed, picked guitar line that flowed between F# and B chords, the song’s musical framework established a summery scene…
Frontman Danny McNamara’s yearning vocals however, sounded a note of unease…
You always say you need more time
Well I'll stay right here and I'll wait for good
Until I find a love worth mine…
It’s the sound of a man that’s emotionally exhausted - with a lyric that seems to suggest a longing for a partner to fully commit.
The song then built to its towering chorus, becoming much more than your typical love song.
Instead, the song grows into a rallying cry, with a gospel preacher-like McNamara urging us to shake off our inner doubts;
All you good good people, listen to me
You're just about done with the way that you feel
Cause nothing rings home enough to dig your heels in
You don't have to leave me to see what I mean
As if that wasn’t stirring enough, the track becomes even more epic, with triumphant horns and awesome widescreen strings. There’s even a Hey Jude-style sing-along refrain. The Beatles comparisons don’t stop there either…
On the full version (6 minutes and 18 seconds), rather than the radio edit, there’s an orchestral crescendo that nods to A Day in the Life. This extended outro also incorporates some gorgeous rippling piano and slightly bluesy electric guitar.
Originally released in February 1997 as a limited edition 7 inch vinyl single by London-based independent label, Fierce Panda (only 1,300 copies were made), the song, which was Embrace’s debut record, was an NME single of the week and picked up substantial radio play, creating a buzz that led to the band (singer Danny McNamara, guitarist Richard McNamara, bassist Steve Firth, keyboardist Mickey Dale and drummer, Mike Heaton) being signed to Hut Records, a subsidiary of Virgin.
All You Good Good People was then re-recorded and re-released as the lead track on a four-track EP of the same name and became a hit single. This surprising success changed everything for the band and lead to their first appearance on legendary music TV show Top of the Pops.
“It was amazing and really exciting,” Danny McNamara tells us. “For about six months, we were the coolest band on the planet. Before us it was Ride and then Suede, and after us it was Gomez, The Strokes and Arctic Monkeys. We were on the front cover of NME and Melody Maker half a dozen times and radio was playing us a lot. All the TV shows wanted us as well, but we were too cool for school.
“When we did Top of the Pops, we did that thing that plumbers do - if there’s a job that’s worth 300 quid but they don’t want to do it, they’ll quote you a grand to try and put you off. With Top of the Pops, we said we would only do it if we could record the song live at Abbey Road with a 24-piece orchestra, and they came back and said, ‘Yeah, alright.’ I was terrified, though - we'd never done anything like that before.”
Embrace recorded yet another new version of All You Good Good People for their chart-topping 1998 debut album, The Good Will Out, with Martin ‘Youth’ Glover - the Killing Joke bassist who co-produced The Verve’s Urban Hymns.
The main sessions for the album, which, as well as Youth, also involved co-production by the band and Dave Creffield, as well as Hugo Nicolson (Primal Scream, Björk), Jonny Dollar (Massive Attack) and Steve Osborne (Happy Mondays, U2, Suede), took place at residential studio Hook End, which was located in a 16th-century Elizabethan manor house in rural South Oxfordshire - formerly owned by Pink Floyd’s David Gilmour - and at Metropolis Studios in Chiswick, West London, where a 24-piece orchestra was recorded.
But long before Abbey Road, magazine front covers and TV appearances, the original version of All You Good Good People had been demoed in a studio local to the band - Beaumont Street Studios, in Huddersfield. McNamara explains how the song came together.
“It came out of a piece of music that our drummer wrote - it was called Mike’s Fast. We loved it, but All You Good Good People doesn’t sound anything like Mike’s Fast - we were just jamming and trying to get some vocals for the piece of music,” he says.
“We must’ve been working on it for six months or something, and eventually I got the chorus for All You Good Good People. I was listening to a Happy Mondays song [Do It Better]. In it, he [Shaun Ryder] sings: ‘Good, good, good, good, double, double good, double, double good.’ All You Good Good People song was originally called All You Good People, but when I listened to The Happy Mondays, I thought, ‘let’s do that,’ and the title was born.”
Danny adds: “We had the chorus for ages, and the song went through all sorts of different guises. At one point, there was a rap about World War Three in a verse, which was weird, and the guitar was like something that The Music might do, or early Kasabian.”
The song took a different direction when McNamara went to a Radio 1 Sound City festival and saw a band playing Beatles-inspired songs.
“I thought it was cheesy that they were ripping off the Beatles - you can’t get away with that. It was just wrong… I was trying to get a verse for All You Good Good People and eventually I wrote a horn line for it, which became the vocal melody.
“I wrote the opening line, ‘I feel like I meant something,’ at a Placebo gig,” Danny tells us. “They got signed to Hut just after us, and there was a fuss about them. I remember thinking, ‘Oh, these are the next new thing…’ I’d been excited about that, and that’s when I wrote that line.”
The song deals with a relationship - waiting for someone to commit - but it could also partly be about wanting to be famous and being recognised for what you are before it’s too late.
Using the metaphor of a contract as a lyrical device, McNamara sings: ‘All I wanna do is find my name upon the line…’
“At one point, it was ‘my name up in lights…’ but I thought that was too obvious, so I steered away from it,” he tells us. “The song has a Barry Manilow, I Made it Through the Rain, vibe. When I was eight, my mum got me a ghetto blaster, a Greatest Hits compilation, Madness’s Absolutely and a Barry Manilow album - she probably bought the Barry Manilow album for herself, but it was the one I played the most. I’d also fallen in love with this girl called Sharon Pownall, and I used to hang around at end of her street, listening to the Top 40, or Barry Manilow, on my ghetto blaster.”
Talking about recording the earliest version of All You Good Good People in Huddersfield, McNamara says: “We got some demo money out of London Records, I think it was. We did three demos and All You Good Good People was one of them, and then we ran out of time.
“The initial idea was that we were going to mix it up north with Dave Creffield, but our management company, Big Life, said they knew plenty of people who could do a good job of mixing it, so why don’t we send the tapes down to London?
“The idea of giving the tapes to some guy I’d never heard of in London… I can remember being on the phone to my manager and saying: ‘He’d better not f*** it up. If he does, I’ll find out where he lives, go round and do his windows!’ My manager said: ‘Why don’t you see if he does a good job first?’ He was ever the pragmatist.
“In the end, the guy who mixed it was Ott, who’s since gone on to become an artist in his own right. He did an amazing job. There was an acoustic guitar that went round the houses for about a minute before the song started, and he got rid of that. We’ve re-recorded All You Good Good People quite a few times, but we’ve always tried to mimic what Ott did when he first mixed it for Fierce Panda.”
Recalling how the arrangement for the song developed, McNamara says: “There’s a breakdown bit where things go crazy… Mick hadn’t officially joined the band at that point, but we were like, ‘we need some piano and strings on this…’
“We asked Dave Creffield if he knew anyone, and he knew Mick. He came down and we gave him a couple of hours. I said: ‘I need to get my head down because I’m worn out from being up all night writing lyrics and getting everything finished’.
“I wanted him to write the piano and strings parts, and he did it all on Cubase, which shows you how long ago it was. Mick came in and brought it all up to speed.”
He adds: “There are three versions: the Fierce Panda version, the version we did for the EP and the one we did for the album. We did the second version at Beaumont Street, and we had all sorts of people trying to mix it - we tried it with Andy Wallace, Chris Potter… I think Jonny Dollar was involved too, and Steve Osborne. I can’t even remember who we ended up with. That version is cool but Jazz [Summers], who was the manager of Big Life, was always bothered by the drumbeat. He thought it was a bit weird, so he felt strongly that we should go with Youth.”
So, how was Youth to work with? “I absolutely love him - every album of ours he’s produced has gone to number one. I don’t think that’s a coincidence,” says McNamara.
“He’s an incredibly talented guy and so inspiring to be around. He works hard, but it looks like he’s just coasting along - he zones in and out, but, being a producer, you need to do that, because there are times when something’s going to take a bit of time and you’ve got to be patient, but then there are other times when you need to be laser-focused - Youth manages to go between one and the other, effortlessly.”
Working with Youth and Hugo Nicolson, Embrace recorded their parts for the album version of All You Good Good People at Hook End and then the 24-piece orchestra arrived at Metropolis to do their thing.
So, did the finished version blow the band away?
“To be honest, I was never more blown away than by the original demo because the difference between what we gave Ott and what came out of the speakers was such a shock. It sounded even better than it did in my head,” says McNamara.
“The horns were a terrible sample, but when you heard it on the radio, the compression made them sound natural and powerful. I think we were on tour with Travis and the Longpigs when we heard Steve Lamacq play it [on the radio] for the first time, and we all ran out to the car to listen to it, and it sounded amazing - we were just so proud of it. The album version is probably better, but it was never as much as a surprise as [first hearing] the original, which was a complete shock to the system.”
On the full EP version and the one on the album, there’s some bluesy, slide guitar in the outro: “That was born out of us doing it live a lot - Rich [Richard] would just go off on one. In the ‘A Day in the Life’ bit, if you can call it that, where it all breaks down, that would get longer and longer, and madder and madder. So, we tried to capture that on the album version - the guitars are louder, the drums are more powerful and my vocals are better,” says McNamara.
All You Good Good People is still a fixture for Embrace in their current live set, and the band are touring the UK this year to celebrate both their 30th anniversary and support their latest album, Avalanche. At a recent homecoming gig at the Piece Hall, in Halifax, they opened the show with it.
“It’s a statement of intent - you definitely know that by the end of All You Good Good People, we’ve arrived. ‘Everyone can calm down - this is going to be good,’ is basically what we’re trying to tell everybody,” says McNamara.
“It always feels powerful every single time we do it and it also feels fresh. It’s one of our oldest songs but when we play it, it reveals new things about itself. It’s evergreen, and I can’t say that about everything we’ve done.”
Embrace’s new album, Avalanche is out now on Cooking Vinyl. For tour dates keep an eye on their official website
