Combine the Victorious
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10/11/2007 1:04:35 AM
The story behind Blue Kitchen
This song was the very first song that Isabelle and I wrote for our project. After the initial idea to write an album was born, a few weeks later we decended to the basement to see if we could write anything worthwhile. So armed with nothing but a concept, we booted up the G5 and sat down to write. Hmm.... I picked up a guitar and played a really silly riff: something like a Rage Against the Machine meets Extreme kind of riff - very ridiulous. However it did provide us with somehting to sing over and the first draft of Blue Kitchen was born.
That initial draft had some very dodgy lyrics to it: I seem to recall my lines being sung in an incredibly awful psuedo bluesy manner, which, if anyone were to ever have heard it, probably would have been enough for them to convince us to forget about our little dream! Thankfully those words and melody were left behind and something closer to the final version emerged. The only thing that's stayed the same throughout the entire writing and recording process was the story of the song. The concept of the lyric is very direct: we were writing about our friends Barry and Ingrid and the amazing times we always had at their flat in London.
Those two are amoungst our most favorite people in the world: both artists, both fantastic musicians and both incredible people. When I first met them five or six years ago they seemed to be the most sorted and generous people I'd ever encountered. They have an awesome apartment in Islington, a three story walkup with the most comfortable layout and design possible. In their flat we've had some of the most humorous and entertaining nights and afternoons (none of us are morning people you see) of the last ten years. And, of course, their kitchen is in fact blue; a lovely ocean blue, like the Mediterranean.
Over the summer of 2005 Isabelle and I worked on our new songs and started to build up a sound and collection of music. At one point we'd flown back to the UK to go to a couple weddings and managed to sneak away to Roma for a week between the family events. Baz and Ingrid came with us. The four of us had such a brilliant time walking around that gorgeous ancient city (really you've got to see it to believe it) and one night we sat in Villa Borghese Park, drinking cheap wine and chatting freely while the sun set over the Vatican in the background. Isabelle mentioned to Ingrid how we'd started writing an album together and was pleasently surprised by the enthusiasm with which our idea was greeted. When we told them that we were writing a song about their place they were both rather charmed. It was Ingrid's suggestion to call the song Blue Kitchen, because up until then it had only been titled "The Kitchen." Well Blue Kitchen reminded me of Blue Monday ( a favorite of long ago) and I reckoned 'hey you can't go wrong with a New Order reference can you?!' So after that trip we returned to Canada and when next we worked on the song I'd retitled it "Blue Kitchen."
The words are very literal. When the first verse says:
Standing under the street lamp talking
Waiting for you to pick up the phone
Can see you smile through the third floor window
Open it up as you throw down the keys
That's exactly what we'd do each time we visited. Their buzzer doesn't work so you'd call them from your mobile and then wait for Baz to chuck the huge skeleton keys down. He'd always warn you not to try to catch them as the clump of them together consisted of some fairly weighty pointy metal. After that is was a three story walk up the narrow stairs until we were at their door.
Coming to you floor
Knocking on your door
Always room for more
Pretty obvious isn't it. That's always been my hesitation about this song: it's so damn literal and simplistic. However everytime I threatened to drop it Isabelle would defend it very strongly so we continued to work on it, get it into the shape it's in now.
The chorus is almost embarrassing in it's elementary rhymes
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