ZorbingStornoway, Beachcomber's Windowsill

The song that did the work. A self-released single with a homemade video that reached a million views, and still the door most people walk through to get to this band.

What it is

Zorbing is the sound of a specific kind of English summer euphoria: hazy, slightly absurd, and over almost before you have settled into it. The title refers to the business of rolling down a hill inside a large inflatable ball, which tells you most of what you need to know about the register.

Musically it is deceptively simple. An acoustic guitar figure, a vocal that sits high and unhurried, and an arrangement that keeps adding things without ever getting crowded: trumpet, glockenspiel, harmony vocals arriving in layers. The drums stay almost out of it for the first half, which is why their arrival lands as hard as it does.

The single, and the video that carried it

It came out in July 2009, self-released, with no label behind it. It failed to chart in the UK top 200, which on paper makes it a flop and in practice made the band.

What it had was a video made by the band with the help of a friend, Hilary O’Hare. No budget, no director, no plan beyond making something watchable. It passed a million views on YouTube in October 2012 — a substantial figure for an unsigned British band at the time, and the single largest reason most listeners found the band at all.

After 4AD signed them the song was re-released properly and did what it had not managed the first time: 74 in the UK, 11 in Belgium, and 4 on the UK independent chart.

Where it sits

Zorbing opens the debut album, which is the correct decision and not an obvious one — it is the most immediately likeable thing on the record, and putting it first means everything after it has to work harder.

It is also the song the band kept circling back to. When they crowdfunded Bonxie five years later, one of the rewards on offer was a day out zorbing with the band, which is either a good joke or an acknowledgement that a song can end up owning a piece of your biography.

The thing the title refers to

Zorbing is a real activity: you climb inside a large transparent inflatable ball and roll down a hill. It was briefly fashionable in Britain in the 2000s, it is faintly ridiculous, and it produces a very specific feeling of helpless momentum that the song reproduces exactly.

Choosing it as a title was a small act of nerve. A first single named after a novelty leisure pursuit is not a serious calling card, and the song is entirely serious underneath the surface. That gap between the frivolous frame and the real feeling inside it is something the band went on doing for twenty years.

It also gave them a reusable joke. When they crowdfunded Bonxie in 2014, backers could buy a day out zorbing with the band, which several of them did.

What the reviews said at the time

Alexis Petridis, reviewing Beachcomber’s Windowsill for the Guardian on 20 May 2010, spent his opening paragraphs on this song’s first line, which he called the least rock’n’roll opening lyric in the history of rock’n’roll — a boy noticing conkers and feeling like he has just started university. He meant it as a warning about who this band would and would not reach.

Several paragraphs later he recanted. The song, he wrote, rewards anyone who can get past that opening line by showing off the band’s remarkable melodic facility: it rises and rises to an authentically life-affirming crescendo of brass and massed harmonies.

That pair of judgements — the flinch and the surrender — is the most accurate short description of this song anyone wrote in 2010.

In the sequence

It opens the record, ahead of I Saw You Blink. That puts it first of eleven, at 3:30.

It was issued as a single — July 2009, self-released; re-released 2010, reaching UK 74 · Belgium 11 · UK indie 4. The rest of the record, and how it was made, is on the Beachcomber's Windowsill page.