I Saw You BlinkStornoway, Beachcomber's Windowsill

The demo that got a radio presenter suspended, and the first Stornoway song anybody outside Oxford heard.

The demo that started everything

In March 2006 a demo version of this song went out on BBC Oxford Introducing. The presenter, Tim Bearder, liked it enough to barricade himself in the studio and play an hour of the band’s demo EP, for which he was suspended from work.

That is the origin story, and it is worth noticing what it is not: no showcase, no A&R, no industry. A local radio presenter heard something on a demo tape and behaved unreasonably about it. Four years later the same song came out as a single on 4AD.

The song itself

It is built on a small observation — catching the exact moment someone blinks, and what that fraction of a second does to a conversation — and the arrangement treats that smallness as the point. The verses hold back; the chorus opens out into the three-part harmony that became the band’s signature.

The lyric has the specificity that runs through all of Briggs’ writing: coloured glass, a window, a hill climbed on the way home. Nothing is generalised into a feeling. The feeling arrives because the details are exact.

As a single

Released on 22 March 2010, it entered at 119 — the band’s first single to reach the UK top 150 — and got to 12 on the independent chart. A video followed on YouTube in the same homemade register as Zorbing’s.

It sits second on the album, immediately after Zorbing, which makes the opening of Beachcomber’s Windowsill a pair of singles back to back. There is a version of this band that never got past being liked for those two songs. The rest of the record is the argument against that.

Jools Holland, and what followed

In November 2009, still without a record deal, Stornoway became the first unsigned band ever to appear on Later… with Jools Holland, on an episode that also carried Sting, Norah Jones, Jay-Z and the Foo Fighters.

The effect was immediate. The band’s homemade videos picked up tens of thousands of views, the BBC’s national stations added them to their playlists, and by December they were on the longlist for the BBC Sound of 2010, chosen by a panel of some 165 tastemakers.

Four months after that they signed to 4AD, in the castle grounds at Lews on the Isle of Lewis, having finally visited the town they had named themselves after. This single came out in the same month.

Two singles, two very different chart runs

This was the band’s first release on 4AD and the second of only two singles lifted from the album. It reached 119 in the UK and 12 on the independent chart.

Set against Zorbing, which had gone to 74 and to 11 in Belgium, the numbers look like a step backwards. They are better read as a label finding its footing: the first single had been self-released with a homemade video and eighteen months to work; this one had four weeks and a release schedule.

No third single followed. The album was left to do its own work, which by that summer it was doing.

In the sequence

On the record it follows Zorbing and leads into Fuel Up. That puts it second of eleven, at 3:50.

It was issued as a single — 22 March 2010, 4AD, reaching UK 119 · UK indie 12. The rest of the record, and how it was made, is on the Beachcomber's Windowsill page.