Surf band The Loose Salute in bid to not seem cheep
Words Ben Graham
“I love the beach, and I love vintage surf culture. Neil Halstead called the album beach music, and there’s definitely something to that.”
Ian McCutcheon, songwriter and driving force behind The Loose Salute, is talking to me from his native Cornwall, and I can actually hear the sound of waves down the phone. “It’s a good day,” he says. “The swells are breaking at about four or five feet.”
The Loose Salute’s debut album, Tuned to Love, is the soundtrack to an idealised English west coast surf scene - all soaring, sun-kissed melodies shot through with regret and melancholy, on the one hand celebrating an idyllic, carefree, endless teenage summer, but on the other looking back at lost opportunities, love turned cold and bittersweet memories of the last time your life actually seemed to make sense.
“I surf, yeah, and I’d love it if we could spearhead a new wave of cool English surf music,” Ian says, while fearing that his fellow Cornish wave catchers are all listening to tripe like Jack Johnson. The Loose Salute, naturally, worship The Beach Boys and the solo work of Ian’s fellow singing drummer Dennis Wilson, as well as such latter-day exponents of the psych-tinged sunshine sound as Beachwood Sparks and The Tyde. But it’s lead singer Lisa Bilson’s extraordinary voice that makes the album more than the sum of its influences; a confident, heart-breakingly expressive instrument made all the more remarkable by the fact that Ian discovered her singing along to a Dylan tape at London’s Fortress studios.
“I was recording some tracks with my old band, Mojave 3, and Lisa and Charlotte were working in the café there,” Ian recalls. “I thought she had a great voice, so I asked her to sing on some songs that I’d written.”
Ian’s original vision for the band was far more in an alt. country mode, influenced by Gram Parsons and ex-Monkee Michael Nesmith. Indeed, the group are named after one of the excellent country rock albums Nesmith made with his First National Band in the early seventies. But the girls - Charlotte also joined on guitar - had other ideas, and over three or four years and several line-up changes, they evolved the mixture of surf, country, soul and power pop we hear today.
One of my favourite tracks is ‘Through The Stratosphere To The Bars,’ which cleverly pays homage to a whole host of cheesy early seventies pop classics, recalling The Equals and The Rubettes before ending up with Middle of the Road’s ‘Chirpy Chirpy Cheep Cheep’. That must be intentional.
“No way!” Ian is aghast. “I’ll never be able to listen to that track in the same way again! I thought it sounded a bit like ‘I’m The Man Who Loves You’ by Wilco, off Yankee Hotel Foxtrot, but…”
No, it’s ‘Chirpy Chirpy Cheep Cheep’. It’s brilliant. You can sing along perfectly.
“Well, you know,” Ian sighs, “if it ticks the right boxes for you, then great…”
The Loose Salute. Where the bubblegum meets the beach.
