Starsailor

“In spite of all that we achieved back in the day the feeling of being the underdog has never quite left me.”

Where The Wild Things Grow, the new album – produced by Rick McNamara – from Starsailor is one of the natural wonders of the world. Of course, if you’re unsure as to the veracity of this conjecture, you should be aware that I am including certain recordings by Nick Drake and Teenage Fanclub and Tim Buckley amongst these worldly treats, as well as more traditional landmarks like the Great Wall Of China, The Leaning Tower of Pisa and the food delivery services of middle England. Indeed, so effortlessly beguiling is Where The Wild Things Grow, you may find yourselves, flicking through your record collection to check whether this bunch of songs has been knocking about your house for years. Of course, this turns out to be a wild goose chase, although Starsailor have been releasing ever-increasingly brilliant records for so long now, that we should be easily forgiven such folly – but herein lies a tale.

Formed in and around Wigan at the start of the millennium, or the end of the last one, depending on which way you want to look at it, and featuring James Walsh (guitar, vocals), James Stelfox (bass), Barry Westhead (keyboards) and Ben Byrne (drums), Starsailor have released five albums to date, including Love Is Here in 2001, Silence Is Easy in 2003, On The Outside in 2005, All The Plans in 2009 and All This Life in 2017. A greatest hits compilation entitled, Good Souls: The Greatest Hits surfaced in 2015, featuring all ten of their UK Top Forty singles to date, including their biggest hit, Silence Is Easy, which reached No.9 in 2003.

Produced by Steve Osborne and recorded at Rockfield Studios, 2001’s Love Is Here, in particular, was a breakthrough release for the band – it’s sold over a million copies since its release – peaking at No.2 in the UK, and showcasing a band operating at the peak of an effortless whimsy. Contemporaneously affiliated to the New Acoustic Movement and ever-present entities like Coldplay and Travis, Starsailor proved to be much more than the sum of their parts, however, a fact picked up on by insightful commentators at the time, the Guardian heralding the band’s debut as “an intricately produced tempest of a record,” whilst the NME noted “an edge that pushes them way beyond the feathery, big-eyed, hatchling indie of Coldplay.” “Twas ever thus, I hear you cry, but when Starsailor reconvened to Los Angeles to record their second album, success surely beckoned – except success sometimes arrives with a caveat in the form of Phil Spector.

“I feel uneasy revisiting that chapter given the tragic events. It was a huge honour to work with him at the time but it feels different now.”

“I’ve changed a lot as a person since the early days of Starsailor. I feel much more grounded and have a better perspective on things.”

Where The Wild Things Grow – the album – features additional guitar work from Rick McNamara and Travis’s Andy Dunlop, as well as backing vocals by Lucy Joules (Sam Smith). Rick, himself, who produced the album, is now unofficially ‘the fifth Starsailor’, or, as Walsh puts it, “another creative in the room who really cares about the songs and pushes us to our limits.”

Over the past two decades, Starsailor have been compared to everyone from Neil Young and Van Morrison, to Wigan compatriots, The Verve – Walsh cites the latter’s homecoming show in front of 33,000 people at Haigh Hall on 24th May 1998 as a revelatory experience – although, concurrently, perhaps we should add Tim and Jeff Buckley, as well as Arcade Fire to that increasingly debatable list. Whatever your pronouncements on the matter, one thing’s for sure: Where The Wild Things Grow bears up to candid analysis, repeat listens proving it to reveal layer upon layer of casual observations and quiet reflections on life being loved, and love being lived. It’s also an album that has no right to be as good as it is – and yet here it is.