Photo: Tim Topple. Interview by Kris Smith.Indie legends Salad release their first new material in two decades today with ‘The Selfishness of Love’, the first single from a new album, working title ‘The Salad Way’, due in 2019.
Packed with “hooks, crazy guitar bits and a big chorus”, the song marks a brilliantly-confident, BBC Radio-endorsed return from the band, fronted by vocalist Marijne van der Vlugt and featuring lead guitarist Charley Stone (MX Tyrants, W*llstonekraft), alongside fellow original guitarist and bassist Paul Kennedy and Pete Brown, with Donald Ross Skinner now in the drummer’s seat.
According to Marijne:
‘The Selfishness of Love’ “is a song recounting what happens when a person starts taking for granted the one who loves them, using them for their own needs: they need you in their pocket and to feel their every emotion with them. This is a person who cannot be pleased, however hard you try; whatever you do, it’s always wrong”
The track has a pre-history to its current incarnation, too:
“Paul wrote the basic track about 20 years ago and we revived it recently, adding sentiments from my own experiences of gaslighting and coercive relationships. We recorded about six tracks to kick-start the new album, this being a latecomer which once we got stuck into it just took over as a stand-out first single. It is recognisably Salad but a bit more grown up and like many tracks for the LP a bit of a departure from straight-up indie pop with a twist.”
The record will be Salad’s belated full studio follow-up to ‘Drink Me’ (1995) and ‘Ice Cream’ (1997). A wealth of unreleased recordings were compiled by the group as ‘The Lost Album’ last year, alongside a release, ‘Good Love Bad Love’, from spin-off project Salad Undressed, with ‘The Lost Album Vol. 2’ due next year as part of ‘The Salad Way’ album package.
So how does it feel to get the band back together? Charley:
“Salad is the band that I always wished I could gig with again. The musical chemistry, the humour, the oddness, the collaborative creativity, even the arguments – it was all so much fun. The very first thing we did in our first rehearsal was to work on a new song, and TBH it only felt like we’d had 5 or 6 years off, not 20.”
Marijne concurs, with a brilliant encapsulation of the “self preservatory” pull of artistic life:
“I absolutely Love, with a capital L, to be doing this again, rediscovering that creative force that’s been desperate to come and show herself for the last 15 years or so, with a square, knowing-oneself, head on my shoulders, not a skew-whiff, self-doubting head. And if it inspires others and entertains people, than that is grand. The camaraderie is the best though. You become a family; families argue, but they continue to love each other. Families laugh with abandon, until you nearly pee yourself. They remove you from the mundaneness and tricky issues in your personal life. You belong.”
Salad play London 02Academy2 in Islington on 14th November, Oxford 02Academy2 on 15th November, Shiiine On festival, Minehead Butlins on 16th November, and The Leopard, Doncaster on 8th December.
LOUD WOMEN 
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