“This is our biggest sounding record and we've done it with our bare hands, just blood, sweat and tears the whole way.”  
As dramatic as it sounds, Fightstar vocalist and guitarist, Charlie Simpson could almost be accused of underestimating the challenges the band faced during the recording of Be Human, their third album and first self-funded release.

After parting company with Gut Records, who released the band's previous album, 2007's One Day Son, All This Will Be Yours and the b-sides collection Alternative Endings, at the end of 2008, the band decided to release the Be Human in partnership with their management company, Raw Power, on a brand new label – Search And Destroy. “The music industry is changing and bands have to change with it,” says guitarist and vocalist Alex Westaway, “We realised we needed to be in control.”

That new found control has extended to the recording of the new record. After working with Colin Richardson  (Funeral For A Friend) and Matt Wallace (Faith No More) on their previous two albums, the band opted to co-produced Be Human with long time friend of the band, Laruso guitarist Carl Bown. Simpson says, “We were incredibly lucky to work with two of the best producers in rock. We learned so much from them that it felt like the time to try doing it ourselves. Carl did an exceptional job.”

The bulk of recording for Be Human took place at Treehouse Studios, Bown's studio, a small wood cabin in a field just outside Chesterfield in Derbyshire. Recording took place between August and December 2008, taking over seventy days in total – the longest the band has worked on a record so far – interrupted by touring and promotion. The record was almost not completed at all when drummer Omar Abidi broke his wrist almost halfway through the process.

“It was a full break, there was no touching bone,” Abidi says with a wince, “I had to have an emergency operation a week later to put two pins in my wrist.” Drums had only been recorded for six tracks – recording had hit a roadblock. But rather than recruit a replacement or delay recording, the band decided, as Simpson puts it, “to keep it in the family”.

Simpson immediately began training and took to the drum stool. “Omar wrote the parts and used me as the body,” he says. Abidi affably describes the situation as like “a director guiding a really good actor” and on one memorable occasion, the pair performed in tandem. On the album's most incendiary track, Damocles, Abidi handled the kick and snare drums while Simpson played the rest. But while the band coped, the loss of Abidi's powerhouse presence on drums was by no means easy. Westaway reveals how desperate things were: “We were running out of studio time. Charlie's hands were bleeding but we had to get it done.”

But while recording was a physical struggle, Be Human was free of the artistic frustrations that dogged the band's previous albums. Simpson says, “It was great to not have anyone breathing down our necks. With our second album [One Day Son, All This Will Be Yours] I didn't like some of the mixes the label had done and all hell broke lose. Carl was the one who redid them. On this record, we've nailed the sound we wanted to create when we started as a band.” And what a sound it is…

Already being touted as the band's most 'pop' album, Being Human grafts the group's trademark gift for darkness and ability to write killer hooks with a newly developed cinematic sensibility. Bassist Dan Haigh says: “We've always wanted to transcend scene. We're hoping the music reflects that. Our greatest influence in the last year and a half has been the music of [film composers] Hans Zimmer, Vangelis, David Mansfield and John Williams. Everything we've done musically has been about translating emotion in a filmic sense.”

To help them capture their vision of creating truly cinematic music, the band turned to celebrated arranger Audrey Riley (Muse, Coldplay). Simpson says: “Working with Audrey was a dream come to true. We had these ideas but she brought them to a whole new level. I sat in the studio thinking, how did we get to do this? It was an ambitious feat to get sixteen string players on the record.” Appropriately, given the band's filmic inspirations, Be Human's strings were recorded at AIR Studios in North London, Hollywood's home away from home when it comes to recording movie scores.  

Working with a 16 piece orchestra was the culmination of one of the band's biggest ambitions. Simpson says: “We'd always wanted to work with one. We grew up listening to album's like Silverchair's Neon Ballroom and knew how massive rock can sound.” But without the benefit of a label's deep pockets, the band had to use their initiative to realise their grand ambitions. To record the heartbreaking choral harmonies on the anti-war lament, War Machine, Westaway and Dan Haigh returned to their alma mater Rugby School to rope in the Sixth Form choir. Simpson says: “We stole them halfway through their homework and set up a recording rig in the chapel. It was guerrilla album making.” Meanwhile the boys of Lichfield Cathedral Choir supplied the soaring backing vocals on the anthemic single The English Way. Simpson took on the role of conductor for the first time but found himself dealing with a slight language barrier: “They're taught musical phrases from an early age and I was undermining all of that. It's built into their brains to sing a certain way but they were brilliant.”

Be Human also finds Fightstar in a more positive place. Its title is a call to arms. Haigh says: “It's about core human behaviour. Core morals seem to have been eroded in favour of the pursuit of material possessions and some kind of elusive cool.” But rather than focusing on the darker elements of life, Fightstar are trying to offer solutions and encourage their fans to ask questions. “This time our messages are wholly positive. There's a lot of negativity around in society but we're singing about coming together,” says Simpson.

And the triumph of Be Human is itself about a group of people coming together to create something great against the odds. As Abidi says, “Sometimes big budget records can really cloud things. When you have these constraints people are doing it for the love of music.” 

For those people who mistake gender for a clumsy misspelling of genre, Marina & The Diamonds is bound to be confusing. From behind that deliberately pluralised name (she is Marina, you are her diamonds), Marina Diamond is creating some of the most arrestingly and original pop music since Kate Bush first howled about Heathcliff.

The 23-year-old songwriter creates music as multi-faceted as her gemstone namesakes, flitting nimbly from the heart stoppingly beautiful piano pop of Obsessions to the artful and anarchic sound of Mowgli's Road – memorably described by Popjustice as “a Siouxsie-fueled cross between Personal Jesus and [Girls Aloud's] Biology” – with an ease that must enrage her rivals.

And where once, trapped behind her keyboard, she introduced herself witheringly as “Kate Nash”, Marina has recruited musicians to translate her sparkling songs live, freeing herself to pursue dreams of a show augmented by Kanye West style gold lame dancers and a giant onstage diamond. This is a performer that takes the prosaic nature of every day life and splits it open to reveal the colour inside, producing songs that glitter like gems from a distance and reveal sharp edges and odd angles on closer inspection.

Marina is also entirely naturally occurring, a talent forged by the intensity of her own ambition and the peculiar stresses of modern life. After her parents divorced when she was four, she spent her childhood moving between Greece, South Wales and London. After studying for her A-Levels in Greece, she pitched up alone in London at aged 18. After dropping out of four universities (much to the chagrin of her father – “He wanted me to go to Oxford!”), she threw herself into a whirlwind of auditions searching for a way to satiate her untapped ambitions. She even turned up to a casting call for The Lion King. “I'd never even done ballet before,” she laughs. Eventually she found an outlet for her bubbling creativity – songwriting.

“I was never massively musical,” she claims unconvincingly, “But since I was about 15, I've known I had to be a singer.” After an ill-fated stint in a sock shop (“I worked there for about three days and spent the whole time planning what socks to buy next”) she supported herself by selling vintage clothes on eBay – “I used to find granny dresses and make them look good.” – and set about composing her first demos with the aid of her laptop, a keyboard and a copy of Garageband. Despite their rough and ready sound, those early bedroom compositions revealed a natural gift for nagging melodies, unusual harmonies and vivid lyrical imagery replete with visions of monkeys, angels and marching spoons. Live, her intensity drew interest from a riot of record labels but it was longtime supporter Nick Worthington at 679 Recordings who finally snagged her signature.

With a taste for whiskey straight, a love of fashion that can find her sashaying into a bar in a tasseled jacket that looks like it's been borrowed from Dolly Parton and rocking it, Marina might seem like quite the wild woman. But she's a bundle of contradictions too – a performer with a distinctly dark side and a strong streak of shyness that's at odds with her confident stage show.

One of her recent Twitter updates simply read “depressed” and, for all their pop polish, her songs often hide a creeping sadness beneath their shiny exteriors. Obsessions, her first single, released earlier this year on much fancied New York label Neon Gold, has been misinterpreted by some as the dissection of a one night stand (“I've never had one,” Marina says categorically) but is an even more unusual beast.

Morphing from plaintive piano chords into a bouncy verse, Obsessions draws on Marina's past obsessive compulsive tendencies to enrich its tale of a love affair gone wrong. The subject of her woes? Crackers. “That part is autobiographical,” she laughs, “I used to go into the supermarket, pick up the first packet and think there was something wrong with it. I'd go through the lot and keep finding things wrong with them.” As the song says, she'd often leave the shops empty handed.

Meanwhile behind its fairytale imagery, the glorious cacophony of Mowgli's Road finds Marina wrestling with her contradictory desires – the urge to be a mainstream pop act jostling against her independent streak. “I still don't know what I want,” she confesses, “So I'm going to let other people make that choice for me.” Currently recording her debut album with producer and collaborator, Liam Howe (Sneaker Pimps), and with a fistful of fantastic songs at her disposal (almost all of them potential singles) from the dancey Girls Girls Girls – a collaboration with New Order and Ladyhawke producer Pascal Gabriel – to the clockwork groove of I Am Not A Robot, it seems as if she may be able to tread the pop path without giving up the eccentric touches that make her music so compelling.

And while she's complimentary about this year's other crop of new female acts (including her label mate Little Boots), her fiery side comes out when talk turns to any notion of a nascent scene. “When Britpop was at its peak, all the bands were lumped together,” she notes. “But I do my thing; I write songs, I perform and I couldn't give two shits about what X,Y or Z are doing. If 15 girls rise to the top this year and they're all super-talent, brilliant. But good music is good music; who cares if you're male or female?” Given that this is the woman who socked a sozzled stage invader on the jaw when he tried to push over her keyboard during a show, you ought to think carefully about how you answer that…

“When we started out I liked the ridiculousness of a small group with acoustic instruments defiantly playing as if we sounded like an orchestra – we were like a team of arctic explorers in t-shirts and normal shoes joyfully pressing on. But this time, we needed to think bigger.” Charlie Waller, lead singer and guitarist in The Rumble Strips, is understandably excited about the band's second album, ‘Welcome To The Walk Alone’. Recorded in a legendary New York studio with one of the world's most in demand producers, it is the result of a band bringing their big ideas to life. “This record sounds like how we've always sounded in our heads,” Waller says proudly.

In December 2005, before the latest strain of '60's style soul stormed the charts, The Rumble Strips arrived like a band of pop prophets with their debut single, ‘Motorcycle’ – a soulful brass-enhanced slice of ramshackle rock'n'roll. It was thrillingly out of step with the times. “In the early days, our fans seemed to be a lot of middle aged men who'd latched onto the Dexys Midnight Runners comparisons,” laughs multi-instrumentalist Tom Gorbutt. But soon the band had built a far broader fanbase, headlining the NME New Music Tour and gigging relentlessly to promote their 2007 debut album, ‘Girls And Weather’.

“We spent a long time on the road,” says Charlie, “We toured the songs on that record for so long before we were even signed and by late 2007, we were ready to move on but you kind of get out of the habit of sitting around and writing songs.” Tackling someone else's tune kick started the band on the road to recording ‘Welcome To The Walk Alone’. “We got asked to remix Amy Winehouse's ‘Back To Black’ but we'd never done one before,” continues Charlie, “So it just seemed easier to learn it, play it as a band and put her vocal on top. We recorded a version with me singing too but we didn't want to use it. The record company did.”

Enter Mark Ronson. Having made his name reinterpreting other people's songs, he was impressed with the band's twist on his work with Winehouse. He invited Charlie to sing with him at the Electric Proms and took the band out on tour with him. It was on that jaunt that he first suggested working together. “We didn't have any songs at that point!” laughs Tom. But in January 2008, the band returned to London and began to write new material.

“On the first album, we all did the music but I wrote the basic songs,” says Charlie. This time, he shared the burden, with trumpet and piano player Henry Clark contributing roughly half of the new tunes. The band also swelled to a five piece, recruiting Sam Mansbrige, who had toured with them throughout 2007, as their permanent bass player. Sam had previously played with Charlie and drummer Matt Wheeler in an earlier band, Action Heroes. The move meant Tom could focus on playing sax and additional guitar. “Sam had never even played bass before,” he says, “He actually played guitar and hadn't even done that for a few years!”

Sam also brought a love of French chanson music with him, introducing the band to Jacques Brell and Charles Asnavor. “It's like soul music but very un-American,” says Charlie, “It's passionate but so different from the kind of soul that had become popular again while we were promoting Girls And Weather.”

“The first album was a collection of songs written over a long time,” he continues. “This time we had to sit down and write an album so we were listening to things knowing we were writing. I listened to a lot of Harry Nilsson and The Beatles, who I hadn't properly listened to before. I put on a lot of Paul McCartney's songs and thought to myself, Bloody hell, these boys will do well!”

By the time the band reconvened with Ronson at The Joint rehearsal studios in Kings Cross in October 2008, they had a clutch of songs they were confident to play him. He was impressed, so much so that he told Q Magazine they'd make “one of the best records of the early 21st Century.”

Recording took place over three weeks in November 2008 at Avatar Studios in New York, which had recently played host to Bruce Springsteen, following the band's first headline US tour. While both producer and band have a reputation for horn heavy arrangements, brass is a more muted presence on the album but the introduction of strings has led to a fuller sound. “Before it was exciting to use a lot of brass but we've got over it a bit now,” Charlie confides, “I feel like there's a lot of bad soul music about and I didn't want it to sound American.”

The band had a clear vision for the album: “I wanted a cross between ‘Barafundle’ by Gorky's Zygotic Mynchi, and Adam And The Ant's ‘Kings Of The Wild Frontier’ – achingly sad melodies and baroque brass but with an instant sound,” says Charlie. Though the plan largely went out of the window once recording began, the finished product closely resembles that description. The album's strings were composed and overseen by Owen Pallett (Arcade Fire, The Last Shadow Puppets) and recorded in January 2009 in Prague. Charlie says of Pallett's startling arrangements: “I'm glad we went with Owen. A lot of people sent us strings that sounded cheesy, like the songs had been dipped in money. His were more inventive.”

‘Welcome To The Walk Alone’ is actually a more anguished album than the band's debut despite the fact that most of the band has settled down (Charlie and Tom are both married and Sam has a longtime girlfriend). “Being domesticated doesn't necessarily mean happy and bored,” sighs Charlie, “In fact, being married has opened up a whole lot of new things to write about.”

Such as giving a glimpse of just how tough his wife can be on future single, ‘Not The Only Person’. Though it's a summery Tom Petty-ish pop song, it recounts a distinctly darker tale – an attempted mugging in Shoreditch. “We were in the middle of an argument and my wife sent the muggers packing. She had a go at them and they ran away!” Charlie felt sorry for them. “It must have hurt their pride. At the end of the song I tell them I'll come back the next night and give them the money anyway.”

Sadness and the city is a theme shared by several songs. ‘London’, with its fizzing strings and galloping drums, finds the Capital getting in the way of love with Charlie plaintively asking, “Why can't I love you in London?”. Meanwhile on the dramatic ‘Daniel’, a song that owes more to the soaring strings of John Williams and Ennio Morricone than it does to old fashioned rock'n'roll, the stars are blocked out by the streetlights. And while he's now settled in Tottenham, Charlie can still feel like an outsider – an experience typified by ‘Douglas’, a song he sings to his Jack Russell.

“Douglas is from Tavistock [in Devon] just like me. We're both country boys out of place living in Tottenham,” he says almost wistfully, “The song is an apology for making him live in the city. He's happy now but moving was a shock for us and a shock for him.”

With striking piano and a beautiful guitar line that evokes Springsteen's ‘Hungry Heart’, ‘Douglas's deliciously sad singalong melody takes up residence in your head and refuses to budge. Elsewhere, the album's anxious and lovelorn mood is lightened by ‘Sweetheart Hooligan’ (which Charlie calls “a proper love song”) and reinforced by ‘Backbone’ (“Paranoid and edgy with twanging guitar and strings that give it a strange quality as if you've just taken bad pills.”)

“People always talk about the 'difficult second album'” Charlie says, “but second albums should be better.” That's unquestionably true of ‘Welcome To The Walk Alone’, with its nagging melodies and soaring choruses testament to the band's big ambitions. “I want this record to mean something to people,” Charlie says, “We've been doing this for a long time and we've put our lives into it.” While the orchestra is real this time, the most important part of any Rumble Strips song is still the passion with which they play it.