‘The string section we got in thought I was the tea boy. When I asked for a psychedelic improvisation like A Day in the Life, they went: “Why is this guy telling us what to play?”’
We’d made our first album and were waiting for it to come out. But we wanted to carry on writing more stuff while we were in the mood. I even cut Christmas dinner short at my uncle’s in Brixton, London, so we could get back to the studio. We would work until we passed out, then I’d sleep underneath the mixing desk with my head in the bass drum, as that’s where the pillow was.
One night in early 1996, my brother Paul and I stayed up all night drinking vodka, trying to write as many songs as we could, and we came up with much of the Big Calm album. We showed Skye Edwards the chord progression for The Sea and some lyrics, and she came up with a melody. When the first album was released, we were suddenly doing lots of TV shows and touring, but when we played the Concorde in Brighton we went down on to the beach. It put us in the mood to record The Sea. Paul and I grew up in Hythe on the Kent seafront, so it felt poignant.
We recorded a rough version and gradually made it better. One night I came back at 3am with a load of people that we’d dragged from the pub after a lock-in, and I decided to record the wah-wah guitar bit. Another day we got a string section in and because I was 20 and was making them cups of tea they thought I was the studio assistant. When I asked for a psychedelic improvisation like at the end of the Beatles’ A Day in the Life, they went: “Why is the tea boy telling us what to play?” Paul found some loops for the drum beat and we ran everything on an Atari two-inch tape machine to piece the music together. Then Skye came in and sang.
