Subways make the most of 'O.C.' stop: Brit band hopes TV spot leads to success in US
by Marc Hirsh

[photos by Stuart Nichols (courtesy of  Warner Bros.)]

originally published in The Boston Globe, February 12, 2006

As a young boy, Subways guitarist Billy Lunn was never interested in learning to play the old acoustic guitar his father used to strum on the stairs of their home in Welwyn Garden City, north of London. Preferring instead to express himself in short stories and poetry, he was content to be an engaged listener. All that changed when he first encountered Oasis.

“I heard Definitely Maybe,” Lunn says, “and specifically the song ‘Supersonic,’ in my friend’s car, and I asked him to stop the car and take me back to my house and also if I could borrow the CD. I just remember running in the house waving the CD about in front of my parents going, ‘I found the band of my life!’” That’s when the guitar came back down from the attic.

What started with the E major chord taught to him by his father is now manifest in the explosive Young For Eternity, which hits American shores this week eight months after its British release. The Subways arrive riding a wave of success in the U.K., where the album has already spawned three top 40 hits and turned bassist Charlotte Cooper into a fashion plate. Their unofficial U.S. debut came three months ago with a performance on The O.C. and their song “Rock And Roll Queen” kicking off the fifth volume of the show’s popular soundtrack CDs.

The trio going through this together is a tight-knit group: drummer Josh Morgan is Lunn’s brother (Lunn is their mother’s maiden name), Cooper his girlfriend. Lunn fell in love immediately upon seeing her for the first time at a local swimming pool. “It took me five months to work up the confidence to go and talk to her,” he says, “and when I did, I just said, ‘You’re the one I want to be with.’” Cooper’s response? “She just went all giggly, man.”

The two have been inseparable ever since, and when Morgan was given a drum kit by his parents (“They thought it might calm me down”), Lunn turned his attention on teaching Cooper to play bass. One version of Nirvana’s “About A Girl” later, and the Subways were born. Lunn says he never considered forming a band with anybody else. “I think it was really important for me to be comfortable with the people that I was playing with, and there’s no one more trusting than your brother or your girlfriend.”

Their mutual inexperience at the time proved beneficial. “We developed our instincts on the musical instruments as a band, as a unit,” Lunn says. “Whenever we develop a song or come up with ideas, it’s usually as a band. We’ve never really been individual musicians. Obviously I learned to play the guitar before the others learned their instruments, but I never was in a band before this one, so rather than developing our own unique styles on the guitar or the bass or the drums, we did it all together.”

That was five years ago, and despite their youth – Lunn, the oldest, recently turned 21 – the Subways have spent that time wisely, not only honing their musical skills but capitalizing on every opportunity to get the word out. After winning the 2004 Glastonbury Festival Unsigned Performers Competition, the band refused to sit back and enjoy the victory. “We’re totally appreciative of the showcasing that it did for us,” Lunn says, “but it was important that we followed it up with a lot of hard work.”

That’s a strategy encouraged by Keith Bakin, Assistant Program Director at WFNX, which has been playing “Rock And Roll Queen” since late October, three weeks before the O.C. appearance. A lot of British bands, he says, “don’t come here and put in the time that they need to do. You can be huge in England. It’s such a small country. To really overtake America, you’ve really got to be here for months at a time and really work at it and be everywhere you can be.” Lunn agrees, saying “We’ve always said that when we go to America, we’re going to work really hard. America has got to have its own special time, because it is such a big country and we have so many people to play in front of.”

When it came time to distill the band’s songs (which by some accounts numbered in the range of 200) into their first album, the Subways decided on former Lightning Seeds frontman Ian Broudie (Echo and the Bunnymen, the Three O’Clock, the Coral) to produce. What sold the band on him was the fact that, unlike other producers they’d spoken with, Broudie didn’t know how he wanted the album to sound. Says Lunn, “We knew that we could go into the studio and gain a little perspective, embellish a little on the songs that we thought needed a bit of work, experiment with different instruments and different sounds and not just make this typical one-dimensional rock album that everyone else wanted us to make.”

The decision paid off, as there is more to Young For Eternity than the blazing rockers that marry Lunn’s voice (which combines Kurt Cobain’s scream and Liam Gallagher’s drawl) to the fierce but bouncy Britpop beat of Morgan and Cooper’s rhythm section. The album also features the psychedelic acoustic pop of “Lines Of Light,” the plaintive skiffle of “No Goodbyes” and the “Wonderwall”-like “She Sun.” The introspective “I Want To Hear What You Have Got To Say” covers the full spectrum, with the beginning acoustic shuffle giving way to a jagged electric rumble that captures the tense ebullience of the Subways’ live shows.

It’s an auspicious debut, written by Lunn in the laundry room of the hotel where he was responsible for sending dirty linens off to be cleaned. He lost the job, he says, “because I didn’t hand a receipt in. I wrote the lyrics to ‘Young For Eternity’ on the back and decided that I would take the receipt home with me instead of hand it in, and they lost a lot of money because of it, so I got fired. But it was worth it, because I came out with a song.”

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