Beachcomber's Windowsill— the 2010 debut album

Four people and more instruments than people

The debut arrived four years after the band’s first radio play, which is a long apprenticeship by the standards of 2010, and it sounds like it. Nothing on it is tentative. The arrangements are dense without being busy — close harmony over acoustic guitar, with a trumpet, a glockenspiel or a bowed saw turning up exactly where a lesser record would have put a guitar solo.

The lyrics read like field notes, because in a sense they are. Briggs was training as an ornithologist while the band was forming, and the songs are full of weather, coastline, birds and the specific texture of small English places. “The Coldharbour Road” is named after a real road. “Watching Birds” is about exactly what it says.

The title came from an early song the band never released — one of those pieces that does not survive the cut but leaves its name behind.

The singles, and the video that did the work

“Zorbing” came out first, in July 2009, self-released and with no label behind it. It failed to chart. What it had instead was a video the band made themselves with the help of a friend, Hilary O’Hare, which went on to pass a million views on YouTube by October 2012 — an unremarkable number now, a substantial one then, and almost entirely responsible for how most people first heard the band.

“I Saw You Blink” followed on 22 March 2010, by which point 4AD had signed them. It entered at 119, the band’s first single to reach the UK top 150, and got to number 12 on the indie chart. “Zorbing” was then re-released properly and did better than it had the first time: 74 in the UK, 11 in Belgium, 4 on the indie chart.

Some copies sold through independent shops came with a live 7-inch, recorded at the Sheldonian Theatre in Oxford on 30 October 2009 — the night the band became the first non-classical act to play the building. Side A is “We Are The Battery Human”; side B is “On The Rocks” with the Oxford Millennium Orchestra behind it.

Reception

The press largely took to it. The Guardian gave it four stars, NME eight out of ten, The Times four stars, Drowned in Sound seven out of ten. The Independent was the outlier at two stars out of five. At the end of the year it took Album of the Year at the XFM New Music Awards.

The dissent is worth keeping in view, because the charge — that this was pleasant, well-mannered music for people who did not want to be disturbed — followed the band for years and is the thing the later records argue against.

What followed

A great deal of touring. Glastonbury and WOMAD Charlton Park in July 2010, main stages across the UK and Europe, England and North America through the autumn, Australia in February 2011 for the St Jerome’s Laneway Festival. The year’s last home show was a sold-out Shepherd’s Bush Empire, two thousand people, their biggest headline audience to that point.

In August 2010 they recorded four songs unplugged for 4AD at the Rotunda in Iffley Village, an abandoned doll’s house museum on the edge of Oxford, which tells you most of what you need to know about how the band liked to work. The next record, Tales from Terra Firma, took most of 2012 to make.

Track listing