Interview with The Lodger: ‘We’ve been told we sound like a 60’s band mixed with The Housemartins!’

Illkley, West Yorkshire-based pop band, The Lodger, released their first full-length album, Cul-De-Sac of Love, earlier this month, giving us 13 tracks peppered with melancholy and soaring choruses, all with their trademark retro twist.

The band comprises Ben Siddall (vocals, guitar, keyboard), Joe Margetts (bass guitar) and Bruce Renshaw (drums). The Lodger released a handful of singles and EPs and three studio albums during the latter half of the 2000s, before taking a hiatus in 2010 and then reforming in 2019. In that time, Siddall concentrated on other musical projects including producing records for other local bands and a stint playing guitar, touring and recording with This Many Boyfriends. Siddall met Renshaw when he moved from Pontefract to Leeds in Yorkshire in his 20s and he knows Margetts through mutual friends. Their name was inspired by the period Siddall spent living in a bedsit in Leeds: ‘I didn’t have a band at the time but I thought of calling it “The Bedsitter”,’ he laughed. ‘Soft Cell went to Leeds uni and he (Marc Almond) lived close to where the bedsit was. I’m a big fan of theirs, so that was in my head a bit.’

Cul-De-Sac of Love marks a change of direction for The Lodger, who continue to embrace their 60’s and 70’s influences but have created a more layered and nuanced album than their previous work, which Siddall attributes in part to the production skills he has learned in recent years: ‘I’m a bit of a 60’s geek,’ he said. ‘I like that production style, it’s quite layered. We’ve been told we sound like a 60’s band mixed with The Housemartins! One of the reasons this album sounds different is that I produced it myself. Our old EPs were all done by the same person, we recorded everything quite quickly then and mixed it very fast, we didn’t have time to mess about with it. There are more layers on Cul-De-Sac of Love because I know how to do it, I can program a synthesizer now. I’m not perfect at record production but I’ve got a bit better at it.’

‘I needed my song mojo resetting, I needed some new inspiration’

The break from the band has also enabled him to become more creative again: ‘I needed my song mojo resetting, I needed some new inspiration,’ he said. At the beginning of last year, they felt the pull to work on some new songs Siddall had written and got together in Renshaw’s shed with a handful of mics and spent a few days rehearsing and recording the rhythm tracks to 13 new songs. In isolation, Siddall then added the guitars, keyboards and vocals in his spare room at home in Ilkley: ‘It was amazing, like going back to days in the 60’s,’ he said.

The opening track ‘Black and White (Pete’s Song)’ is a tribute to a musician friend who died suddenly at the age of 30: ‘When I was spending the last 10 years producing bands, one was a three-piece indie band, Men Only, which Pete was in and we got to be good friends. I had a few songs that I’d written that I played to him and he’d really liked this one. After he died, we found out that he’d written a list of his favourite songs and this one was on it, so it became a song for him. I asked his mum’s permission and she is really appreciative of it.’

As the song goes: ‘I’ve never been the hero or the fighting kind, ’cause I’m unrefined and left behind. Why can’t someone explain why the ending to the story won’t be Hollywood, where the great and good are understood and nobody is really to blame.’

‘I wanted to do a synth album, like Vince Clarke in the 80’s’

Some of the songs on the album are 15 years old, although the title track, ‘Cul-De-Sac of Love’ is actually the newest of the bunch: ‘I didn’t want to call it that but I got outvoted by the other members!’ Other tracks, such as ‘Stop That Girl’ have a gorgeous 80’s feel to them: ‘I wanted to do a synth album, like Vince Clarke in the 80’s. People have said it’s very different. I have a tendency to be nostalgic, this one’s drawing on relationships starting to happen in your teens. I sung various tunes over the top to pick one!’

One defining characteristic of this album is the unusual and inventive chord progressions that Siddall uses, particularly on tracks such as ‘Dual Lives’: ‘I’m a guitar and music theory teacher so I know a lot about chords and harmony,’ he said. “I try to make them sound accessible and poppy even though they’re not that easy to play, they’re full of weird jazz chords and funk rhythms! If you look at The Smiths, Johnny’s guitar is hard to emulate, it’s complex to play like that, it’s the same with the songwriting of Prefab Sprout. Their songs are musically complex but not in an obviously muso way, they still can be super poppy.’

‘Dual Lives’ kicks off with the Em chord before switching to A6, Em and A6, in itself an unusual but very harmonious combination. As the lyrics go: ‘It’s like these dual lives that never come together. It’s been like this forever, we simply can’t decide.’

One of my favourite songs on the album is ‘I Don’t Wanna Be It’, which is a gorgeous amalgamation of 60’s-infused pop elements and really fresh indie pop. ‘Lyrically, it’s about imposter syndrome – the days when you wake up in the morning and don’t feel like performing the character that everyone expects you to be in your working or personal life. you just feel like you want to hide,’ Siddall said. ‘I guess it touches a little bit on depressive tendencies.’

Siddall says he had a lot of songs to choose from for the latest album, having made a Google drive last year of songs they hadn’t released: ‘It was 40 songs that we whittled down to 13.’

‘I like the cinematic sound of Bond songs and Ennio Morricone’

Earlier in the week, Siddall had told me a story about Paul McCartney and John Lennon taking the bus to the other side of Liverpool as kids because they’d heard that someone there knew how to play at B7 chord. I tell him what a brilliant story that is and how I really hope it’s true: ‘I think I read it in Mark Lewisohn’s books about The Beatles. He’s the Beatles oracle. I like the innocence of that story.’ (The Beatles: All These Years is a three-part series of books about The Beatles and their cultural impact, written by English historian Mark Lewisohn.)

We chat for a bit about truly great songs and he says he wishes he’d written ‘The Kiss’ by Judee Sill, whose life was marred by tragedy. ‘The way the chords and melody work reminds me a lot of J.S. Bach, another of my favourite songwriters, if you can call him that. Also her tragic life story adds some gravitas to it maybe.’ (After a series of car accidents and failed surgery for a painful back injury, she struggled with drug addiction and dropped out of the music scene, dying of a drug overdose aged just 35.)

Lennon and McCartney have been a massive influence on him, as have other classic songwriters such as Carole King. He’s also a big fan of The Beach Boys’ founder, Brian Wilson, as well as The Jam and The Buzzcocks when he was younger. ‘Our first album was influenced by them,’ he said. ‘I like the cinematic sound of Bond songs and Ennio Morricone. I could talk to you about music all day!’

(Photo from left to right: Ben, Bruce and Joe)