One Day Like This was the song that gave Elbow their breakthrough hit in 2008 — and as singer Guy Garvey says, it was written because the band’s record company demanded a song they could take to radio.
One Day Like This was a last-minute addition to the album The Seldom Seen Kid, and as Garvey recalls in a new interview with The Guardian: “I got a call from David Joseph, who was head of Universal Music. He said: ‘Congratulations on the album but have you got anything else, to help us out on radio?’
“I said: ‘Given that it’s taken us two and a half years to write the 10 tracks that you have, I doubt it. But by all means, I’ll give it a go.’”
Garvey had just two weeks to deliver the new song.
“I started kicking ideas around, recording some simple voice notes at home,” he says. “The first idea I had was in the bath. I’m literally saying the words: ‘Blinking in the morning sun’. It had like a weird da-da-da thing about it.”
Garvey developed the song with Craig Potter, Elbow’s keyboard player and producer, working at Blueprint Studios in Salford.
“I had the idea of every line being echoed by a string section,” Garvey says. “You throw strings at a track and the listener feels ennobled, catered for and looked after.”
His reference points included The Verve’s Bitter Sweet Symphony and Massive Attack’s Unfinished Sympathy.
“The song exploded into what can only be described as Lion King-esque euphoria,” Garvey says. “I knew the track was going to be a singalong of some proportions.”
One Day Like This reached No.4 on the UK chart, and in 2009 the song won the Ivor Novello Award for Best Song Musically and Lyrically.
It also became a favourite for weddings.
Garvey says: “The loveliest legacy of the song is that at least twice a week, somebody approaches me in the street and tells me that they walked down the aisle to it.
“And somebody once sent me footage of a few hundred people on either side of a tube track singing it to each other. That is kind of magic.”
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