Tim Burden, returning as Late Stay Ultra Girls, is back, this time with his latest offering, Derek Is A Reasonable Man. The Bristolian is returning off the back of Like Washing Sieves and Chasing Rats. Polly, the single, blends ska and post-punk with darkened humor and an outside-the-box rock sound that is tricky to pin down. Produced by Massive Attack’s Stew Jackson, Late Stay Ultra Girls is simultaneously light and dark, abrasive yet vibrant.
Burden explains: “Derek Is A Reasonable Man is about a horrible pub, which I loved. It was the one place in my hometown that stayed open past 11 when I was in my early 20s. Get there before 11 and you could stay until 3. Get there too late and the landlord Derek sent you back off into the night. At 3 he would shoo people out with a deep Somerset ‘time to go’. He was a reasonable man.
Pubs like that tend to have a pretty well stocked roster of colourful characters. I wanted to write a song that got across that vibe. Most people will have experienced it, there’s a very specific, very British charm, or perhaps the opposite of charm, about the flavour of weird and difficult people you find in those pubs. The song depicts it as a bit of a hellscape, various goblins chewing your ear off or being threatening or minging in different ways. Tom Waits is one of my all time favourite artists and lyrically I wanted to try and do a certain Waits-y thing of describing this roster of freaks in a dive bar and conveying the vibe at the same time with the music. I really love it.
Musically it’s quite a bit darker and broodier than my other two releases. The piano intro is an interpolation of clair de lune which I transposed into a different key and then janked the rhythm about. There’s a bit of a dub influence in there I think with the bass and piano groove. With the guitar hook I was trying to get as close as I could to pizzicato strings using guitars. That laid back vibe gave us loads of space to then chuck god awful sounding synths and disgusting wailing guitar solos over it to ramp it up.”
Already hailed by BBC Radio 1 and Radio 6 Music through being a touring member of Desperately Seeking Suki, Late Stay Ultra Girls’ latest release is one of a series of releases to follow later this year.
