Britpop band The Bluetones have been talking about how they put together their biggest hit, Slight Return, to The Guardian.
The song, which reached Number Two in January 1996, was one of the first numbers they wrote when they were just starting out as a band. “Scott (Morriss, bass) wrote the chord progressions and structure, but didn’t have any words or melody,” remembers frontman Mark Morriss.
“He recorded guitar into a cassette player, then played that back on a second cassette player so he could record himself playing along to what he’d just recorded, in a very rudimentary way of four-tracking. We liked it, but we weren’t skipping around the room going: ‘My God, we’re going to be millionaires.’”
Guitarist Adam Devlin remembers the bassist bringing in a “faster, simpler” version of Slight Return. “I fleshed out the guitar parts and put in a guitar solo. Mark worked out the vocal melodies, and we added a coda – the instrumental that fades out at the end, which originally had a sample from Tom Courtenay in Billy Liar, which was all very 60s.”
Whatever, Slight Return went down well at the band’s early gigs. “It was catchy and memorable,” says Morriss. “We recorded a demo version and sold it on blue 7-inch vinyl at our gigs. When we got signed to A&M, they were keen for it to be a single, but we felt like it would be short-changing our fanbase, which was about 200 people, who had already bought it. We had to be talked around by the label, who said: ‘We can hear it being played on the radio.’”
They weren’t wrong. Slight Return was A-listed weeks in advance of release by BBC Radio One, who were by then Britpop’s most enthusiastic patrons. In the end it didn’t quite make Number One, beaten only by Babylon Zoo’s Spaceman, a track which had had the even greater benefit of months of prior publicity due to its use in a Levi’s TV ad.
Despite - or perhaps because of - its success, Devlin admits the track hasn't always been a band favourite. "We’ve been playing it for 30 years," he said. "One tour, we’d got so bored with it, we didn’t even play it, which was a mistake because people thought we’d gone up our own arses. We learned our lesson," while Morris admits, "I’m bored of rehearsing it. If we do rehearse it, we’ll play it at three times the speed or in a reggae or funk style."
But what of the title, which is not mentioned at all in the lyrics? It is, apparently, a “sideways tribute” to Jimi Hendrix’s Voodoo Child (Slight Return) according to Morriss.
It's still, apparently, a cause of some puzzlement. “I was at a farmers’ market recently when one of the stallholders said: ‘You were in that band who sang Where Did You Go?’ says Devlin. “I said: ‘Yes, but that’s not what it’s called.’ People get confused because Slight Return isn’t actually in the lyrics.”
