Capturing The Vibe of Lily Allen’s ‘West End Girl’ – Part 2

Don’t Pass Up Part One!

RECORDING THE VOCAL

Working together in producer Blue May’s home/studio, the songwriters would hum melodies and freestyle lyrics, picking from words that Lily Allen used while telling her stories. Allen would then re-engage when she was ready, editing the lyrics in a shared note on her phone, then laying down a scratch vocal.

“By this time, we’d already have music recorded,” May explains “She took the lyrics everyone else had written and redid them in her own voice. She interpreted the melodies they had been singing, then delivered them in a melodic style that only she can do. She did that on maybe 20 percent, not necessarily on purpose, just innately. She has these turns of melody and she’s a really skilled pop songwriter, and suddenly you’ve got a Lily song, not a pop song.”

To record Allen’s vocals, the chain was kept straightforward: Shure SM7B into a Universal Audio Apollo x8p through a UAD 1073 Pre/ EQ, AutoTune and an 1176 compressor. Occasionally—as when vocals required some pop sheen, as well as for backing vocals where layers were more stacked—an AKG C12 mic through a BAE Audio 1028 preamp into a Tube-Tech CL 1B compressor was set up.

They tried setting up a vocal booth for “Tennis,” but found that it didn’t sound as good as when Allen tracked her vocals from her spot on the couch, tea or coffee at her side, iPhone at hand to reference the lyrics. More often than not, her scratch vocals ended up being what’s heard on the finished album.

“That always happens,” says May. “It’s a recording basic that you always prepare to record the final vocal at all times. Even still, you never learn from it. The very first song we wrote was ‘Just Enough,’ and the vocals were the roughest recording because I didn’t think we were going to make 14 songs in 10 days. I thought we were going to take our time with it. The speakers were on, people didn’t have headphones on, but she delivered the most gut-wrenching vocal of the whole record. We tried to re-record those vocals several times because I was worried about the recording quality and certain parts of her pitching. I could never get it because the vulnerability in that vocal is so special, it’s worth forgoing some of the fidelity.”

Each producer brought a specialized skill to the project with Kito’s being her ability to use Splice as an instrument. Not a conventional musician, she is particularly deft at pulling sounds from the platform, shifting tempos and creating drum patterns. From there, May could easily grab one of his bass guitars and lay down a bassline.

He also balanced sounds from the Minimoog with his nylon‑string or Hagstrom guitars, which he used to write “Just Enough” and “Sleepwalking.” This combination of synthetic and acoustic textures is a defining characteristic of West End Girl, which May pairs with what he calls “the slightly plasticky, slightly unreal, toy sounds, sort of nursery-rhyming quality” of Allen’s early albums.

West End Girl was partially worked on at Chrome Sparks’ studio, just down the street from May’s home. His approach was to let any producer involved work in the environment where they felt most comfortable. Clampitt and Kito preferred May’s studio, but at Sparks’ place they had access to a wall of synths, a drum kit and a piano.

BRINGING IN THE BAND

May describes West End Girl as “not a posh record,” meaning it was created without the bells, whistles and expenses that most pop music relies on. The acoustic guitar parts and the piano, for example, were recorded on an iPhone microphone—partly because the pace of work was so fast and partly because everyone involved liked the sound of it. On “Sleepwalking,” which is more of a high-fidelity pop song, either an AKG C12 or an RCA Type 77-DX ribbon microphone was used for its more rounded sound. Even for the drum fills, only one microphone was positioned over the kit, with another one on the kick.

After each session, May would continue working on his own, sometimes deep into the night, “chasing an obsession,” as he calls it. On “Dallas Major,” for example, there was a rough version of the song that felt loose and unstructured, with a chorus that wasn’t quite big enough. It wasn’t so much that he had a fixed idea of what he wanted to do with it, but rather that he improvised with additional sounds, chopped and rearranged parts, shortened or tightened sections, and even responded to mistakes in the recording process to see if they could be turned into elements that strengthened the song.

“The first verse repeats on the third verse,” he says of “Dallas Major.” “I don’t know whether that’s a copy-and-paste of the vocal, or whether that’s Lily on the scratch mic singing that lyric twice. To me, there was something charming about coming back to that lyric at the start, which would be accidental in the first sense, and probably something that we should have fixed. In the third verse, there’s a pad that comes in that sets a slightly different tone. It makes the lyric feel slightly in the past, rather than the current. I wanted to chase down how to use the music and the production to shift stuff a little bit.”

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Another example is “Beg For Me,” which was almost discarded. It started out messy, but May quickly reorganized the sounds, and the song came together in an hour and a half. With a verse and repeated chorus, the track doesn’t follow a conventional structure. Feeling that it needed something extra, May pulled a sample from Lumidee’s 2003 song “Never Leave You (Uh Oooh, Uh Oooh),” which fit perfectly with the lyrics.

“That’s just improvisation,” he says. “It’s no different from when you’re a kid playing around on a piano to find harmonies, or learning to solo on a guitar over a record.”

COME BACK TOMORROW FOR THE CONCLUSION!