For Metronomy’s third album, Joseph Mount wrote a record dedicated to his hometown. That album was 2011’s The English Riviera, and it went on to earn Metronomy a Mercury Prize nomination. Hit single “The Bay” has nearly 60 million plays on Spotify, while its video amassed over 50 million YouTube views. It features JUNO-60 bass lines and a wicked synth hook. The song is easy to love but wasn’t so easy to make.
Always the Sun
When Joseph Mount was a 12-year-old, he used to skateboard with his pals along the coast of South Devon, England. He’d look out at the grey clouds over the water and pretend he was somewhere cooler, like San Francisco.
“My interests were kind of worldly,” Mount says. “They weren’t rural, Devonshire interests. I was into music and fashion and skateboarding. The stuff I was taking in was all American, I guess—Californian and sunny.”
Those dreams fueled his creative pursuits. By his late teens, Mount was recording and playing music on his computer as Metronomy. A few band members joined him. Before too long, they even became famous, traveling to play in real-life San Francisco and around the world.
Celebrating a Hometown
For his third album, Mount put himself back in the shoes of a teenager and wrote a record dedicated to his hometown. Only now he sang about the place as if it were the international hub of culture and fun he read about in glossy magazines.
"I was into music and fashion and skateboarding. The stuff I was taking in was all American, I guess—Californian and sunny."
By the Bay on the Riviera
That record, The English Riviera, was a smash, and its conceptual high-point, “The Bay,” plays like a sort of twisted jingle for South Devon. It pits the seaside resort town of Torquay against Tokyo, London, and Paris. A fantastically funky tune, “The Bay” boasts JUNO-60 bass lines and a wicked synth hook. Mount recounts how the song’s initial sonic impetus came before its words.
“At the very heart of it was this loop you hear the beginning of the song. This was before I even had a lyrical idea or anything,” Mount says. “I had this instrumental loopy idea I wanted to turn into a disco-hybrid thing. Probably, I was thinking Daft Punk and Steely Dan. A lot of the references were that kind of West Coast yacht rock, like the Eagles and Hall & Oates.”
The Struggle Was Real
From there, the song dove into a maddening array of lyrical iterations. Mount says he often starts with a loop, then lets that drive a message, which in turn pushes the music in even more directions. He got stuck on this one, though.
“JUNO-60s were the affordable, cool, old synthesizer you could pick up and use in your band. It's all over that record."
“Sometimes you just struggle with making the thing match how you’re hearing it in your head,” Mount laughs. “I had this idea of how it would sound, how it would make me feel. When I heard it, I wasn’t able to make that happen in real life. I remember other people enjoying it, but not picking it out as a highlight or a hit.”
Magic in the Mix
Eventually, the a-ha moment arrived in the mix. “There’s a single keyboard note in the chorus that goes ‘de de de de,’ and it was quite boring,” Mount recalls. “It sounded like Morse code or something. We just distorted it, kind of washed it in reverb.” There was also a bit of studio alchemy in the final stretch. “We added this sidechain thing, which gives it this Daft Punk-like throbbing effect, and turned that on in the chorus. That was the switch, basically.”
Synths and Sounds
Speaking of sonic magic, the JUNO-60 is all over The English Riviera. “At the time, like 2009 to 2011, JUNO-60s were the affordable, cool, old synthesizer you could pick up and use in your band. So lots of people had them,” Mount says. “When I got one, I was obsessed with it. It’s all over that record. Most of the synthesizers you hear on it are the 60.”
And what about that signature Metronomy noise? A kind of plucky, off-center synth string. “Before I had an actual polyphonic synthesizer, I had these software synthesizers on my computer,” he says. “I was familiar with the controls of the soft synth before I tried it out on the real one.” Mount’s process was fairly consistent back then. “I very much had my own presets that I would create every time I got to a synthesizer.”
"What I wanted was a disco-hybrid thing. Probably, I was thinking Daft Punk and Steely Dan. A lot of the references were West Coast yacht rock."
Lucky Video Weather
Furthermore, those presets color the whole Metronomy universe, a sonic and visual playland that shines in “The Bay” music video. Filmed in Torquay on a serendipitously sunny day, it fulfills Mount’s childhood fantasies. The video depicts his beloved South Devon as a model-filled Los Angeles ala Elton John’s “I’m Still Standing.”
“David Wilson, who directed the video, got it immediately,” Mount says. “We managed to get a lot of favors from the local tourist board because it’s like a free publicity video for them. They closed off roads for us and let us use beaches. The weather was incredible, we lucked out. My favorite thing is that people genuinely didn’t believe it was England, but it is.”
Ten Years On
As “The Bay” and The English Riviera near their 10-year anniversaries, Mount feels particularly nostalgic. “You don’t necessarily realize the significance at the time,” he says of the album’s reception and Mercury Prize nomination. “I was over the moon and felt like it was going well. At the same time, the way we were touring was absolutely exhausting. This arrogant version of me was like, ‘Well, yeah, of course it’s nominated.'”
Nevertheless, the ensuing time and the band’s decade of experiences have given Mount perspective. “I suppose two or three years later, I realized, ‘Wow, that whole thing has got us to this point right now.’”
