The world is more connected than ever but everyone is growing further apart. This is the theme at the heart of Part Time Spies, the captivating second album by Bristol-based five-piece The Ramona Flowers. It is a record surging with human warmth, filled with songs about the things that make life tick: death, rising rents, narcissism, broken relationships, selfies, the end of privacy, drunken nights out and hungover mornings in. It is a record irrevocably now and of this moment, filled with songs that will make you hug your friends, console your friends and dance with your friends.
Steve Bird (vocals), Sam James (guitar), Wayne Jones (bass), Dave Betts (keyboards, guitar) and Ed Gallimore (drums) formed when Bird answered an ad placed by James. The fact that the singer was in London and the band were in Bristol was by-the-by when the group realised the chemistry they had in a room together. James’ was looking to form a band who could do “something fresh and new” and Bird was looking for something to inspire him after a previous band split up. It was a perfect union. “This is what I want to do,” says Bird, “and luckily I found these guys.”
Their debut, 2014’s Dismantle And Rebuild, was made as they were learning to incorporate electronic elements into dramatic rock anthems. It introduced a band who could make grandiose songs that somehow still felt intimate. As they were touring, that sound was being honed and perfected in a way that suggested the follow-up would be a more muscular and intricate affair. “As much as we love the first album,” says Bird, “we were still forming and some songs didn’t transfer to the live shows as well. We wanted something more upbeat and this album has that.” Their next record, says James, “needed to be ballsier and have more energy. The choruses needed to come up and hit it.”
The song that led the way was "Skies Turn Gold". Its swaggering dance beat, layered sonic textures and pop immediacy laid a blueprint. Everything has been done on their terms. The album was co-produced alongside Friendly Fires and Passion Pit collaborator Chris Zane and was recorded at The Distillery studios in Bath between September and December 2015. There the band could hide away and focus on their work without disruption. They wanted to modernize the analogue warmth of the 80s sound. “There’s certain sounds I grew up with in the 80s that had a beautiful melodic vibe,” says James. They listened to lots of Peter Gabriel, but also a lot of their current favorites such as Everything Everything, M83 and Phoenix. They wanted their songs to evoke the feeling you get when you watch a great 80s film transposed to modern day.
The result is an album that exists within its own mesmerizing ecosystem, where the songs all sound like they belong to each other. There is something fluid and natural about the way The Ramona Flowers work, all in the same room together like a traditional rock’n’roll band, but usually on computers, vibing off each other as creative sparks fly. “It’s like painting a picture,” says James, “we’re all putting in our bits.” At the back of the room, Bird would sit taking in the sounds, crafting hooks in his head and recording melodic voice memos into his phone, drafting lyrics from the book he carries with him everywhere.
The opening track "Dirty World" grew out of a Giorgio Moroder-style synth sound that Gallimore was experimenting with. Inspired, James promptly put a piano hook that sounded like something out of Top Gun over the top. “I know it sounds like fucking Top Gun but we got a drumbeat on it and we realized there was something cool about it,” he says. Bird’s lyrics are about his frustration at being forced to leave London due to rising rent. “It’s unfair that you have to move out of the city you love not on your terms,” he says. At the time, he was renting a place in Battersea and new-build properties began to spring up about him until he was priced out. He now lives in Bristol with his bandmates.
All of these songs feel intensely personal at the same time as being instantly relatable. The euphoric "Skies Turn Gold" came from Betts and James spending a day in the studio trying to write “a classic four-on-the-floor dance track, with all the clichés chucked in” over which Bird wrote a lyric about letting loose and being with the people you love. The gliding "Start To Rust" is about a break-up - Bird dreamt the melody and first line and recorded them into his iPad when he awoke – whilst the anthemic title track documents Bird’s dislike of social media. “Part Time Spies is like everyone’s second job, we’re constantly being watched,” he says. “You get people who meet you on a one-off occasion and they don’t know you and they can write what they want about you online.” Similarly, the throbbing "Designer Life" is about selfie self-obsession and online personas. “It’s people presenting themselves how they want everyone else to see them. I don’t know when we became so vain,” says Bird.
Swirling instrumental "Midnight Express" came together over a few collaborative hours in the studio – Bird particularly wanted a vocal-less track in the middle of the record to break things up – and the poppy hurtle of "Run Like Lola" was inspired by the 1988 German thriller Run Lola Run. The jagged groove of Hurricane was born out of an “old school jam” around a bassline by Jones. Bird’s scathing lyric is aimed at himself: it's about losing it when drunk and not really knowing when to stop. It doesn’t occur on a regular basis, he says, and the dreamy soundscapes of "My Weirdo" is his love-letter to his girlfriend. The song was written from a charming piano chord progression Betts was playing in the studio. “I sung the chorus and weirdo came out,” says Bird, “so I must have been thinking about her.” The most personal track is the slow-building epic-rocker "Sharks", which is about Bird’s father passing away from a brain tumour when he was young. He’d wanted to write about it for a long time. Inspired by what his bandmates had created, the words came flooding out. “I had to visit him in his care home and it’s basically about having to sit and watch the sharks circling.”
The last track, "Cold Of The Night", sums up the magnetic charisma of The Ramona Flowers’ second album. It’s about trying to find a way out of dark times. “Before I joined this band, I was really lost and just got depressed. That song is about when I realized there was no point dwelling on it anymore. I was coming in out of the cold,” says Bird. That’s the theme that connects all these songs: triumphing over adversity, putting up with the shit and getting on with it, realizing that things can be bad but you can always fight back. The Ramona Flowers will help bring you in out of the cold.
