Scene In All The Right Places
Ocean Colour Scene’s Simon Fowler talks about his favourite instruments and the highs and lows of touring.
Colm O Hare, 06 Apr 2010
Mosley Shoals, Ocean Colour Scene’s breakthrough album and arguably their finest offering in a 20-year career, was named after the recording studio in which it was made. Mosley was a suburb of Birmingham, where most of the band are from – although the name was also part-inspired by the legendary Muscle Shoals studios in Alabama. Released in 1996, at the height of the Brit-pop era, the album sold over a million copes and featured a string of OCS classics including ‘The Day We Caught The Train’ and ‘The Riverboat Song’, popularised when Chris Evans used it as the theme for TFI Friday.
Sadly, while the band continues to record and tour, Mosley Shoals is no more, having fallen victim to the developer’s wrecking ball. “It was a real shame that it was knocked down,” muses OCS frontman Simon Fowler, following their recent blistering set at Dublin’s Olympia.
“We had no say in it whatsoever. It was a compulsory purchase order. In hindsight we should have at least eBay-ed the bricks when it was torn down. We would have made a fortune. It was a fantastic place to work and we practically lived there back in those days. We’d go down in the afternoon, do a bit of work and then go out to the pub and get smashed and go back later on for a jam that would probably go on all night.”
However, as Fowler points out, the studio would probably have been well past its sell-by-date even if it still existed today. “Times change and it probably wouldn’t work that way now even if we still had it,” he suggests. “We all don’t live in Birmingham any more for a start and some of the guys have wives and kids and live more normal lives.
He continues: “Rockfield in Wales is where we do most of our work these days and it’s the best studio around. Although when we’re down there the HQ is the local pub. Another place we’ve worked recently is a village on the edge of the Cotswolds called Great Wolford, where Steve (Cradock) and I have done some demos. It was great too. Funnily enough, there’s a good pub besides that one too. You have to have a great pub near a studio as far as I’m concerned. It’s where we do some of our best work.” (laughs)
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