The first thing we thought when we heard the new Rhythm Method single was that we’d listened to it before. We hadn’t of course, but like all great pop songs there’s that wonderful feeling of knowing what’s coming next: a chorus to which one belongs to as much in five minutes as in five years and that’s no less rewarding because you knew (in fact, it’s probably better).
A friend of ours described it as the London duo’s Danny Boy and we can see what he means. It’s a song to cling to, a song to belt out at closing time, a song to ask your Uber driver to turn up when it comes on the radio after a night out (if there’s still anywhere in London to go out to, that is). “With every closing bar, there’s hollows in my heart,” sings Rowan, the band’s keyboard and music half, in a timely post-script to this week’s Fabric saga (Joey, the band’s main singing and lyric half tackles the road-weary verses).
“This is the first song we wrote together,” say the Elton John approved pair. “We were living in a recently vacated office building in SE1, in the shadow of Tower Bridge. We lived in a dream like London cliché: going for pie and mash on the Walworth road, playing darts in the Anchor Tap and paying cheap, precarious rent.”
“It’s a bitter sweet song, part love letter, part lament for the city we’ve grown up in,” they continue. “It’s become a victim of its own success. It’s kind of like that Smokey Robinson song, You Really Got A Hold On Me. “I don’t like you, but I love you.” That’s how we feel about London.”
The clubs may be closing but The Rhythm Method works. Let them light up your senses like a night out in Wandsworth below.
Home Sweet Home is released tomorrow (9 September) on Fnord Records.
Credits
Text Matthew Whitehouse