West Yorkshire five-piece Embrace scored a UK Top 10 hit in early November 1997 with All You Good Good People, a track that had taken a long and winding road to reach that point. The band — singer Danny McNamara, guitarist Richard McNamara, bassist Steve Firth, keyboardist Mickey Dale and drummer Mike Heaton — had first debuted the song as a limited edition 7-inch vinyl single on London-based independent label Fierce Panda in February 1997, with only 1,300 copies pressed. That release was named NME single of the week and picked up significant radio play, generating enough buzz to earn the band a deal with Hut Records, a subsidiary of Virgin.
The song was re-recorded and re-released as the lead track on a four-track EP of the same name, eventually becoming a hit single and earning Embrace their first appearance on Top of the Pops. The band’s approach to that performance was characteristically bold. „We said we would only do it if we could record the song live at Abbey Road with a 24-piece orchestra,“ Danny McNamara recalls, „and they came back and said, ‚Yeah, alright.‘ I was terrified, though — we’d never done anything like that before.“
The song’s origins were far more chaotic than its polished final form might suggest. It grew out of a piece of music written by drummer Mike Heaton, internally referred to as Mike’s Fast. The band spent around six months trying to develop it, with the track passing through several unusual incarnations along the way. „At one point, there was a rap about World War Three in a verse, which was weird,“ McNamara says, adding that the guitar work at that stage resembled early Kasabian or The Music. The title itself was inspired by a Happy Mondays song — Do It Better — in which Shaun Ryder sings a repeated „good, good, good“ refrain. The song was originally called All You Good People before McNamara added the extra word.
The track’s melodic direction shifted after McNamara attended a Radio 1 Sound City festival and watched a band playing Beatles-inspired material. Reacting against what he felt was overt imitation, he returned to the song with fresh intent and wrote a horn line that became the vocal melody. The opening lyric, „I feel like I meant something,“ came to him at a Placebo gig.
A new version of All You Good Good People appeared on Embrace’s chart-topping 1998 debut album, The Good Will Out, produced with Martin ‚Youth‘ Glover — the Killing Joke bassist who co-produced The Verve’s Urban Hymns. Recording took place at Hook End, a residential studio housed in a 16th-century Elizabethan manor house in rural South Oxfordshire formerly owned by Pink Floyd’s David Gilmour, and at Metropolis Studios in Chiswick, West London. Additional production contributions came from Hugo Nicolson, Jonny Dollar and Steve Osborne. The full six-minute-eighteen-second version of the song features an orchestral crescendo referencing A Day in the Life, rippling piano and bluesy electric guitar. „For about six months, we were the coolest band on the planet,“ McNamara says simply.
Source: Latest from MusicRadar
