Recording To Tape With The Clash's Mick Jones

Since the release of their eponymous debut in 2009, the UK’s Kitty, Daisy & Lewis have gone from strength to strength. Initially, this would have seemed unlikely — here were three siblings from Kentish Town in northwest London, near Camden, purveying an old-timey brand of music that drew heavily from country and the blues, with a definite stripped-back ‘50s rock‘n’roll element also thrown in the mix. Not really something to strike too many chords in an era dominated by ‘80s throwback bands, synthesisers in gobsmacking abundance.

And yet today, looking back, the trio have sold over a quarter of a million albums, have supported the likes of Coldplay and Mark Ronson, and have taken their music around the globe, including Australia, where they seem to have a strong connection with audiences, something that will be renewed when they head this way for Splendour, along with a slew of sideshows.

“Yeah, musically, since the first time we’ve come, we’ve always done pretty well [in Australia],” muses Lewis Durham. “Compared to how we thought we would have done, anyway. I don’t know why that is, really.”

" He'd [Mick Jones] come around every day and make the teas and stuff like that, and it’s just like, ‘Oh, Mick’s here,’"

Regardless, the group has been embraced internationally. You might not have thought it initially, but their music has proven infectious, fun, something real and earthy amongst the slew of ‘same’ being regurgitated around them.

This has been captured to a tee on latest album, their third long-player, aptly titled The Third, released earlier this year. It sees the siblings — Lewis, along with sisters Kitty and Daisy Durham — expand on their original MO, investigating new avenues, a slightly more muscular sound in evidence.

This was aided in large part by friend and ex-The Clash guitarist Mick Jones, who helmed production for The Third. “Mick we’ve known for a while, he was a fan of the group. He used to run his own club, and we’d play there, we’d see him at clubs, we had some mutual friends.

“We’d actually met with another guy to produce the record… but that didn’t happen and we were just gonna go ahead with it anyway without a producer, but I just asked Mick. I said, ‘Do you want to come and sit in on the record, produce it?’ not all of it, just a few songs. But he ended up just coming around every day with his guitar, just jamming all the songs, and we couldn’t get rid of him.”

It seems Jones became an honorary Durham during the process. “Yeah, he did really,” Durham says. “We spent about five months rehearsing it three or four times a week, just running through the songs, and then three months in the studio — one month recording it, and then another two months farting around with other stuff.

“So yeah, he’d come around every day and make the teas and stuff like that, and it’s just like, ‘Oh, Mick’s here,’ you know.” Jones was no doubt responsible for the slightly bigger sound, his guitar-playing making an appearance on a few tracks as well.

Durham mentioned how long a pre-production process the album went through, which was due in large part to the group’s ‘home’ studio still being under construction in an old Indian restaurant in Camden.

“Yeah, it took quite a while to do. We added [in] a sixteen-track too, our last two albums were recorded on eight-track. So it wasn’t ready when Mick came on board, so we were still rehearsing with him at my mum’s house.”

The five-month rehearsal period paid off, the band no doubt knowing the 12 tracks on The Third intimately by the time it came to actually committing to tape (literally — Kitty, Daisy & Lewis have never recorded digitally). Great care was then taken in the new studio to faithfully recreate these songs, hence the four-week recording time, the end result the strongest record the trio have produced thus far.

“I think the songwriting has changed,” Durham ponders the evolution from their debut and its follow-up, 2011’s Smoking In Heaven. “Not changed maybe, but more added on, like a bolt-on, you know? I think the production and the way it was recorded allowed for a different sound. And obviously, working on the sixteen-track, you can layer things up more. So it’s a lot more of a traditional studio album, the way it was recorded in a kind of post-1960s way.

“It’s just kind of an evolution really. And we’ve always done that — the first record was literally just us in a back room with a few mics and hit ‘record’, and the second one was, we’d done a few more things, were trying to make it a bit more listener-friendly; and the third one, we’ve just kinda progressed on again.”