Doves on: Lost Souls

Drummer Andy Williams on Lost Souls (2000)

"As Sub Sub we never made the album we thought we were all capable of.

We'd always been in love with the idea of albums as opposed to just singles - which are cool in their way and suit dance music perfectly but we wanted to stretch ourselves and make a statement with a set of songs.

So around 1996 we started writing and recording the songs which would finally become Lost Souls. We were for all intent and purposes still Sub Sub (we only called ourselves Doves a week or two before The Cedar Room (EP) was released, because we wanted a fresh start and a break from the past).

By this time the studio fire had happened in our first studio in Ancoats, Manchester and as we were signed to Rob Gretton's label he suggested renting New Order's Cheetham Hill studio off them. This was where the bulk of the album was recorded. We really did lock ourselves away for 3 to 4 years until we discovered how we wanted to sound, it was a pretty oppressive place with no windows and thieves trying to break in!

But it was also an inspiring place to be as it belonged to New Order and we were fans (they¹d had enough of this place by this time!). The garage there was full of their old gear; it was full of vintage keyboards, sequencers, drum machines and was like some weird techno graveyard in there. I also remember finding Stephen Morris' Rogers drum kit that he used in Joy Division stuffed behind some knackered flight case.

I think the key songs for us on Lost Souls were The Cedar Room and Break Me Gently, because they were the first songs Jimi sang properly and we realised we needn't go looking outside the band for this 'mythical singer' (something our friend and label boss Rob Gretton had been telling us for years). The best thing was that after all the years of hard work and very testing times we knew we were finally creating the sort of music we had
always wanted to..."

3:30 PM | 06/04/2009

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