Their first UK Top 10 hit, Follow You Follow Me also marked their entry into the US charts. So we thought we’d just try without it and see.” “Well, I wasn’t a lead guitarist, and I remember discussing getting in another guitarist, what with Steve’s fluidity and style, but I think we felt at that stage that we’d been together quite a long time as the three of us, and to bring a new person in, to make them understand the way we worked, to make them fit, was quite a big ask. Recording for their first album without Steve Hackett since 1971’s Nursery Cryme, did they miss their former guitarist in the studio? “When you go away somewhere you definitely get in the zone.” “What we used to do was go away for three or four weeks, just the band, and immerse ourselves in the recording process,” Rutherford recalls. It sounds convincing.”įollow You Follow Me was recorded at Relight Studios in the Netherlands. It’s the way Phil sang it the combination of everything. “It could so easily have been a little bit soppy. “It’s one of those songs you hear now on the radio and for some reason it’s not sugary,” Rutherford offers. But then you look at and realise that’s the charm.”Īnd yet, for all its engaging qualities, the song was far from sappy. “Normally lyrics take agonising over and developing. “I thought, ‘God, this can’t be any good,’” he adds, laughing. And so you write it from the heart, quickly. It was such a simple sentiment, unlike, you know, all our other words at the time. We were away a lot on tour, and I wasn’t seeing her an awful lot, as happens with bands in the early days. “It was the first time I’d written such simple words. “Not quite ten minutes,” he says, bristling slightly. Once that guitar figure was in place, Rutherford knocked out the lyrics in 10 minutes flat. “Trevor Horn once said the intro is the most important part of the song,” Rutherford says.
The unusual guitar sound at the start was done with an MXR flanger effects pedal. But this one had a natural life as a short song. And it’s quite an art to write a song that works in three and a half or four minutes. “We were never really good at writing short songs,” he says, despite having grown up “with The Beatles, The Kinks and The Small Faces as inspiration”.
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