On the RocksStornoway, Beachcomber's Windowsill

The song the band recorded with an orchestra behind them, and the title of the EP that came before the album.

Twice over

On The Rocks was already the name of a self-released Stornoway EP in 2008, two years before the debut album. By the time the song appeared on Beachcomber’s Windowsill it had been road-tested through the band’s entire unsigned period.

That shows in the writing. At four minutes forty-nine it is the longest thing on the record, and it carries its length without strain because the arrangement was worked out in front of audiences rather than in a studio.

With the orchestra

The version worth hunting down is the live one on the 7-inch that came with early independent-shop copies of the album: On The Rocks recorded at the Sheldonian Theatre in Oxford on 30 October 2009, with the Oxford Millennium Orchestra.

That night the band became the first non-classical act to play the building, and the orchestral arrangement gives the song a weight the album version deliberately holds back.

In the album’s last stretch

Ninth of eleven, it opens the run that closes the record, followed by The End of the Movie and Long-Distance Lullaby. Those three tracks together are the most sustained and least immediate part of the album, and the sequencing is a statement of confidence: a debut that puts its singles at the front and its longest, slowest material at the back is a debut that expects to be listened to twice.

The EP that shared its name

On The Rocks was a self-released Stornoway EP in 2008, the third of three the band put out before signing to anyone — after The Early Adventures of Stornoway, the demo collection that got played on BBC Oxford Introducing, and Letters From Lewis in 2007.

Those EPs are the reason the debut album sounds so finished. By the time the band recorded it properly they had been performing this material for years, and several of the songs had already been through a self-released version.

The same year the EP came out, the band headlined the first Wood Festival — a small, solar-powered event in Oxfordshire that the band kept returning to, playing it again in the summer after their reunion.

The longest thing here, and the one they took to an orchestra

At 4:49 this is the longest track on the album, and the only one the band chose to perform with a full orchestra for a release.

The album was self-produced, by Briggs and Ouin, which matters for a song built this way: the decision to let it run, and to let the arrangement open out rather than tighten, was the band’s own and nobody else’s.

It is also the track that most rewards the album’s sequence. Placed ninth, after the record’s shortest and lightest stretch, it is where Beachcomber’s Windowsill stops being charming and starts being serious.

In the sequence

On the record it follows Watching Birds and leads into The End of the Movie. That puts it ninth of eleven, at 4:49.

It stayed an album track. The sleeve, the sessions and the chart run belong to Beachcomber's Windowsill.