Music comes from many different places. Some of it comes from happy accidents; a lot of it comes from the programmed, laboratory environment of a hit factory. Very occasionally, great pop music comes from somewhere deeper within the soul. So it is with The Orange Lights. Their epic, widescreen guitar soul has melodies that scare the sky and words that come laden with meaning and tug at the heartstrings. One listen and there's every chance you'll be hooked. This was definitely the case for fabled Coldplay producer Ken Nelson, who ignored the pile of lucrative offers from major artists and chose instead to work with The Orange Lights when they were still unsigned. Nelson felt - and responded to - the band's music and their passion. It was a similar case for Richard Ashcroft producer Chris Potter, who worked on the album initially, and Chris Lord-Alge, the LA-based award-winning mix engineer who polished the record with his trademark 3D sound.
It's been a similar tale as the band have begun making live appearances: blowing people away as far apart (geographically and spiritually) as Newcastle, Los Angeles (where they appeared at Musexpo, LA's In The City) and Ibiza (Ibiza Rocks supporting the Editors, and broadcast on Channel 4). When the band performed acoustically in front of the BPI / The Brits committee at an industry gathering at The Staples Center in LA, Steve Redmond stated: "I was knocked out. Four out-of-the-box radio records".
America seems to love them too: the band have stacked up 56 plays on Indie 103 in Los Angeles, and 17 plays to date on KCRW - the two most influential radio stations on the West Coast - before even releasing a record! And now Nic Harcourt is championing the band on his hugely influential Morning Becomes Eclectic show with strong support of Let The Love Back In.
In one sense, The Orange Lights are the vehicle for the enormous, emotional vocal chords of Jason ("Jay") Hart - a deceptively quiet, unassuming man with a big, big voice. Which makes it quite ironic that his previous claim to fame was as a touring guitarist - in Jason Pierce's Spiritualized. Jay hasn't quite put the guitar down - he still plays in The Orange Lights - but is mostly concentrating on his vocals. Still, it's unsurprising that The Orange Lights have been compared to - along with New Order and Primal Scream circa Damaged - "a mainstream Spiritualized."
Co-creator of The Orange Lights is Newcastle-based songwriter Paul Tucker, who had had considerable past success but was at a loose end when he came across Nottingham-born Jay after a mate gave him a CD. At the time he'd just been looking for a guitar player, but was struck not just by Jay's distinctive fretwork, but that voice. It sounded then as it still sounds now: wounded, fragile but powerful, soulful. "I was blown away, transported," says Paul. "There was this huge landscape of guitar... and somebody singing. I just had to meet this guy." Even now, Paul is in raptures as he tries to describe what it felt like when he heard that voice for the first time. "It was very warm... but there was something almost ghostly about it."
They met and bonded over music, as mates do - spending a lot of time playing each other differing influences from old soul to Echo And the Bunnymen, and all points in between. In fact, if there is an Orange Lights sound it's the collision between soul and indie or alternative guitar music. "In many ways we're a soul-rock band,' muses Paul, who in a previous musical life penned most of soulsters the Lighthouse Family's biggest hits. There's also something different and nagging about the music: it's hugely positive, but post-traumatic: songs which sound like they're trying to find something good after something horrendous. Which, it turns out, is exactly how they came about.
Three years ago, a family tragedy led Paul to experience what he calls "My own personal 9/11. I think the band's music was defined by that," he says, quietly, telling of a "big black cloud" that followed him around for the best part of two years. One night, he sat at the piano and wrote the first of The Orange Lights' trademark songs. "I thought about what had happened and Life Is Still Beautiful came out of my fingers in about 10 minutes," he says. "It was probably the quickest thing I've ever written. It just flooded out.
Jay was the perfect person to sing it, because at the time he was going through a similarly traumatic period involving someone he was very close to. "The synchronicity was uncanny," he admits of the way Paul would write words that seemed eerily appropriate to him. "We'd go in there [Paul's Tyneside rehearsal room and recording studio The Beach] and the pair of us were in bits. You can hear it, the processes we went through." Indeed. There were moments, Jay admits, when they were too bound up in trauma to write anything in the studio. However, usually, explosions of feelings manifested themselves in uplifting music. Sometimes, only afterwards they realised just how much of what Paul calls the "dark stuff" had found its way into song.
When Jay recruited Chris Gittins (bass) and Alex Lucas (drums) - mates he'd known and played with on and off for years - The Orange Lights became a band. Paul and Jay then saw guitarist Ewan Warden playing with London band Grand National and was blown a y. Together, they talked about what they wanted soundwise and all agreed that it should be widescreen, symphonic, like a "sound prssure wave."
The band adopted the unusual strategy of approaching producers rather than record companies, and were amazed when one of their favourite sound shapers - Ken Nelson, whose work they'd loved with Kings Of Convenience and early Coldplay. Coldplay's X & Y album was erupting just as the unsigned band's demo landed on the table. Out of the blue, the band received a message saying Ken Nelson wanted to meet them. He travelled up to Newcastle, listened to a "very rough" demo of the achingly personal My Guardian Angel - and simply nodded his head. All went quiet for three weeks before he suddenly phoned up saying he'd love to do it. It was a similar tale with Chris Potter, best known for his work on the Verve's truckload-selling Urban Hymns - who has produced no less than seven Orange Lights tracks. Both producers have captured The Orange Lights as they sound during their well-received live performances: emotional, raw, epic; in your face.
Some personal situations are ongoing, but they've clambered from the wreckage with great songs, driven skyward by the sheer force of Jay's soul and golden voicebox. "When you get a tune together and the hairs on the back of your arms stand up, you know you've got to carry on," he smiles, quietly. "I think it is something special, because it's come from a genuine place."
