Very few debut singles have launched a band’s career in the way Chaise Longue did for Isle Of Wight-formed indie rockers Wet Leg in 2021.
The lead track from their eponymous debut album of the following year combined suggestive lyrics, delivered mechanically in the form of deadpan spoken-word, with up-tempo rhythms played on bass and drums before the guitars come crashing in at the one-minute mark.
The song was written in a single day by singer and rhythm guitarist Rhian Teasdale while she was sitting on an actual chaise longue that originally belonged to co-founding guitarist Hester Chamber’s grandfather.
“I kind of inherited it,” Chambers told Under The Radar Mag in 2021, “and it now lives in my flat. When Rhian stays over it’s also where she sleeps. She actually wrote all the lyrics to Chaise Longue whilst sitting on the chaise longue all day long.”
In the same interview she went on to reveal how the pair had been “writing for fun and being silly” and genuinely “had no clue at the time that it would connect with so many people”.
Some of the more provocative and tongue-in-cheek lyrics in the track include “I went to school and I got the big D” – insinuating that while the lead character was studying for their degree, they were more focussed on doing other things – as well as “Is your muffin buttered?” and “What are you doing sitting down? You should be horizontal now”.
However, while some have interpreted the track as overtly sexually charged, the group have stated it’s more playful and irreverent than anything else.
“It’s quite funny when people ask us what it means and we can’t explain it,” admitted Chambers, noting how “ultimately it can mean whatever you want it to mean”.
For example: the line “Is your muffin buttered? Would you like us to assign someone to butter your muffin?” is a direct quotation from the 2004 teen comedy Mean Girls starring Lindsay Lohan.
In 2022, Teasdale spoke to MOJO magazine about the light-bulb moment that kick-started the creative process for the track.
“We went into teenage sleepover mode, watched loads of X-Files and Buffy The Vampire Slayer, and had late night jams,” she revealed. “And that’s where Chaise Longue came from, that big sleepover sesh.”
Interestingly, Teasdale’s rhythm guitar parts for the entire song consist of just one single chord – a straightforward G power chord played at the 15th fret.
The tracks sits at around 160bpm and despite its fast tempo, she often strums her part using downstrokes rather than alternate strokes to add to the overall intensity.
Chambers plays the lead line higher up on the G, B and high E strings around the 12th fret, with most of the notes double picked.
Chaise Longue went viral in a very short space of time, racking up millions of streams and video views.
The video reportedly cost just £50 to make, with Chambers setting up the shots and Teasdale editing the clips together using a free trial version of production software Final Cut.
The footage was recorded on their native Isle Of Wight. In an interview with Under The Radar Mag, Chambers revealed how “the house in the video is my mum’s house and stuff like the rocking horse were still there from my childhood”.
She added: “We didn’t really over-think it and made use of what we had”.
The song won the Grammy for Best Alternative Music Performance at the 65th Annual Grammy Awards in 2023.
The same year Wet Leg won Best British Group and Best New Artist at the BRIT Awards, where they also performed Chaise Longue live.
In a 2022 interview with Guitar World, Chambers explained how the pair – who officially expanded the band into a five-piece the following year – ended up finding their signature sound.
“We didn’t set ourselves any boundaries,” she revealed. “We took songs that we’d been playing in a folky way and put them in a full band context. We’d just hit our guitars sometimes. Actually hit them! If you’re wearing rings, you can tap your rings over the pickups and they make all these overtones.”
She continued: “Finding our sound was a bit of an accident. Before we wrote Chaise Longue we had a few songs that we’d jammed together, with a trashier garage-rock sound. When we got management we were a bit surprised that they were like, ‘Chaise Longue is so great; this is what we should roll with to introduce Wet Leg.’”
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