“The Way My Heart Beats”
from the album No Hope, No Future
2010
iTunes
“You only have to turn on the news or read the Daily Mail and you’ll get pretty depressed straight away. You’ve got a disaster like Haiti and you look at the world and you think, ‘We’ve got no chance!'”
Good Shoes’ singer-guitarist Rhys Jones is explaining the rationale behind the title of the band’s second effort, No Hope, No Future. Yet listening to Jones speak is to belie a musician who, in reality, is a man whose glass is half-full rather than half-empty. As he’ll readily later admit, the Good Shoes member who takes centre stage each night is looking forward to grabbing 2010 by the lapels to give it a good shake.
Let’s rewind. Formed in 2004, a heavy gigging schedule and a serrated and jagged take on indie soon came to the notice of BBC 6 Music’s Steve Lamacq and Radio 1’s Zane Lowe who soon gave the band the same level of devoted support that was afforded to them by Xfm’s influential spotter of new talent, John Kennedy. Support slots with Kaiser Chiefs, The Rakes, and Maximo Park brought the band to a wider audience and their debut album, Think Before You Speak, swelled interest in the quartet.
So why, with their second album about to be released, are they so glum?
“It’s also about breaking up with my ex-girlfriend,” admits Jones, “so it’s as much about relationships that have no hope or future.”
And yet, there remain reasons to be cheerful, not least Good Shoes’ — who also count guitarist Steve Leach, Jones’ brother Tom on drums, and bass player Will Church — ability to record an album on a shoe-string budget while still maintaining quality.
“Yeah, we recorded the album in a friend’s basement studio in Morden and a studio in Dalston,” says Jones cheerfully of the London localities where the album too shape. “It’s a lot cheaper that way and the end result sounds just as good as out first record and anything else that’s out there at the moment.
“You know, we recorded the album for seven grand. You get all these bands spending so much money on recording their albums; I hate to think how much Klaxons have spent on their album — how much return do you think they’re going to make on their album?”
Indeed. Jones believes that a good album isn’t synonymous with flashing the cash.
“Anyone can record an album for a decent price and that’s what needs to happen,” he explains. “You look at record labels complaining about not making enough money but they spend money as if Blur were still around and selling 100,000 records and I guess that we’re shaking things up.”
So, despite the doom-laden title of their album, Good Shoes are accentuating the positive. So what are their hopes for the future?
“I wanna play gigs everywhere,” declares Jones. “The plan is to go to the States and play the South by Southwest festival and we’ve got a month-long tour of Europe coming up in places that we haven’t played before and that’s going to be a lot of fun.”
And with that, Jones offers a cheerful good-bye as he and the band hurtle down the M4 towards Bristol for the start of their campaign. No hope? No future? Don’t believe a word of it.