Let The Music Take Control

How Nile Rodgers inspired The Farm's new release

The Farm’s new album has been a long time coming - 31 years to be precise. I saw the Liverpool band perform key tracks recently at the Byline Times festival at Keele University and they were in exuberant form, with the soulful tones of Alex Goatley offering a youthful counterweight to the more conventional indie vocals of Peter Hooton, the band’s founder and frontman.

Like a lot of modern pop, the title track of the new record has an 80s retro vibe, without sounding old-fashioned. Hooton told me how the song came about in a recent interview for Brum Radio, as well as reflecting on the band’s hit making career.

PH: “‘Let The Music Take Control” is about vacuous statements from politicians. So I was saying, “No, no, let the music take control.”

“It was a nod to Nile Rodgers, really. We went to see him a few years ago in the Liverpool Arena, and he had just done a master class at LIPA [Liverpool Institute Of Performing Arts] with our guitarist, Keith Mullen. Keith had a few words with him, and talked about the different guitars that he used.

“At the next rehearsal, Keith comes in and starts playing like Nile Rodgers. I mean, he was already inclined to do that, but it was definitely notable. And ‘Let The Music…’ has got one of those type of riffs on it.

“When [Nile] played at the Arena, he harked back to all the records he wrote, like ‘Let’s Dance, and ‘Daft Punk’, so we had definitely had that in mind when we were writing the new album.”

AG: The band’s biggest hit was the anthemic ‘All Together Now’ which almost made the Xmas No.1 in 1994. Is it a millstone or a milestone?

PH: “It's a milestone. We played a concert the Liverpool Arena last week, and it was all Liverpool groups - The Zutons, Lightning Seeds, Jamie Webster, The Real Thing - and ‘All Together Now’ was probably the best song in terms of audience participation, along with The Real Thing’s ‘You To Me Are Everything.’ So I don't see it as a millstone. We’re very very proud of it. It's very emotional singing it. And we had the full Liverpool Philharmonic Orchestra behind it. It's based on classical piece, so it obviously works with a with a full orchestra.

“It's one of those songs that captures people's imagination. We immediately followed ‘Z Cars’ which is the Everton theme tune and ‘You’ll Never Walk Alone’, which was a tribute to [Liverpool footballer] Diogo Jota and Andre, his brother, who died tragically recently. So we had to follow, ‘You’ll Never Walk Alone.” I thought ‘I may as well give up.’ That's what I said to the band before we went on stage.

“Anyway, I hadn't even opened my mouth, and everyone was singing. So 10,000 people singing it. You're never going to get bored of that.”

AG: ‘All Together Now ‘is a song of solidarity. It's a message that’s not heard often enough these days, but it’s very much at the heart of what you're about, bringing people together.

PH: “Yeah, that's the idea behind it. It's about solidarity, and the futility of the First World War. I’ve read many books on the First World War, and no historian can agree on the reasons for it, because they all just sleepwalked into it. The major powers of the world just sleepwalked into a conflict, thinking it was some glorious 19th century adventure, but it was a 20th century war, with mechanised machine guns and it was a complete slaughter, wasn't it? You’ve only got a look at Blackadder. It's hilarious but there's also elements of truth in there - the futility of it. The reality is that the working class of of Europe was decimated because of disputes between royal families and capitalists. That's what it was.

Listen to the full interview here at Brum Radio.