Spotlight On... Lloyd's House

Glasgow non-conformists Lloyd’s House are opening all their doors, windows and cat-flaps to the public with The Masochist, their first full body of work as a five-piece. Frontman Lloyd Ledingham’s enchanting songwriting is given the TLC it deserves by top-dog producer Chris McCrory and is brought to life by the whimsical synth of Reece Robertson, the buoyant bass of Aaron Bisset, the twangy guitar and twee backing vocals of Eilidh O’Brien and the impassioned drums of Sean Mitchell. We catch up with the band at their rehearsal space for a track-by-track dissection of the new EP and the manic, mystical world it explores.

The Lloyd’s House family has grown a lot from its days as a one-man operation. What has it been like getting to this point and how has it affected your music?
Lloyd Ledingham: Lloyd’s House started out of lockdown, when there was no possibility really of having a band. When things started opening up again, I realised I needed a band to play gigs. Now that we have the band and it’s more of a joint effort, I feel like the music is so much better in terms of what we can do – live and recording-wise.

Reece Robertson: We’ve all got our own little bit of ourselves in the music now. I think Heather was the first song that we started individually contributing a little bit more to.

Aaron Bisset: When we were starting out as a full band most of my bass parts came from “oh, what are you doing on guitar?" but now it’s more of a two-way street.

Eilidh O'Brien: Five-way mega highway. What’s the one in Germany called?

Sean Mitchell: Autobahn?

EO: Autobahn.

Lead single Ribbons is a beautiful display of your prowess in writing catchy, overlapping melodies. How did this track come about?
LL: It started with that guitar riff. I play in the same tuning for all of the songs on the EP, one that lends itself well to open chords, you can just play two frets and it sounds lovely. It frees up some space to add wee frilly bits here and there and that’s how I came up with the riff. We just messed around with it a bunch and for a while it was a bit longer. We did a lot of cutting down and trimming the fat before recording.

AB: I think that was a big part of the process for a lot of these songs because we’d been playing them a certain way at gigs, testing them out. They were all around five minutes, maybe more, and if we wanted to go heavy on the pop production then we had to make some cuts.

RR: And now, with Eilidh joining the band, we have four vocalists so we could do those massive-sounding pop harmonies and really flesh the songs out.

EO: ABBA!

In Houses is a really fun one – it feels very manic and paranoid, especially with the vulnerable lyrical content. What's the story behind this one?
LL: That song came about from a horrible thing that happened to me, like a lot of the songs I write do! But yeah, that one in particular.

EO: It came from a very real place rather than being just a wee story to tell. 

LL: Yeah. I never write songs with "this is a song about this" in mind, when I write lyrics it’s whatever comes out becomes the song.

EO: If you wrote with something so solid in mind it would probably do a song like this a disservice. 

LL: Exactly. I could have just written a song about an ex who cheated on me, but I feel like I took it more from the perspective of you never know what’s going on behind closed doors, what people are thinking, who they hang out with when you’re not with them. I was paranoid about these things for so long, that’s why the song feels the way it does.

Back of My Brother – is that literally about your relationship with a sibling? Why the back of your brother? Why is it such an ugly sight?
LL: This is the only song where I don’t actually know what it’s about. I got the title from something someone said when I was having a pint after my shift. They were like, “do you want to see a picture of the back of my brother?” I thought it was a funny phrase, so I wrote it down. I guess it probably is about something to do with my family, probably my brother, but exactly what that is I’m not sure. 

RR: We did come up with somewhat of an idea for what it means: turning away from someone who isn’t good for you.

LL: Which I think is a general theme for the EP – bad peeps. Not to say that my brother is a bad person because he’s not. I think more and more, though, I’ve been moving away from solely personal lyrics about things that happen specifically to me. Writing lyrics with Reece has helped make things a bit more ambiguous which I think is a good thing because it’s more accessible. 

Image: Lloyd's House by Oli Erskine

The title track feels like everything coming to a head. What was the process of crafting this grand finale?
AB: That song has always felt like a big one. From the beginning it sounds happier, more electric. Especially towards the end, which wasn’t even intentional.

SM: Eilidh added that 'free' backing vocal part in the end section which really lifted it.

LL: That was Sean’s idea, but he wanted it to sound like a monster truck advert. We had to calm him down and say we couldn’t do that.

RR: It’s kind of like the answer to the rest of the song, maybe the whole EP?

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The Masochist is released on 20 Oct via Wish Fulfillment Press

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