Diary Of A Songwriter: Arliston’s Jack Ratcliffe

Arliston’s Jack Ratcliffe: “We jumped on that moment, and over the four weeks wrote 47 songs…”

With the duo’s stunning debut record Disappointment Machine out now, vocalist Jack Ratcliffe delves into the album’s Jaws-heavy writing period

To write this article, I went back and looked at my calendar from November 2023 when we wrote the album. It was a strange time for me. I was (badly) processing a failed romance, and emotions were running higher than the usual levels of repressed British neutrality. We jumped on that moment, and over the four weeks wrote 47 songs (this is a MASSIVE departure for Arliston; we are generally detail-obsessed pedants who will merrily spend a week tweaking a snare sound, only to later declare it unusable).

So, a typical week of those winter days in the home studio in Brixton went something like this (also, apologies, I have written this in the third person – almost certainly due to delusions of grandeur. I’m Jack, and George is George [Hasbury])…

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TUESDAY

10:30 am: George arrives at Jack’s house on his motorbike. He is zipped up in his enormous full-body raincoat thing (we call this ‘the body-condom.’ The manufacturer does not). Over the course of the 45-minute journey from Watford to Brixton, water has managed to seep into every crevice of the suit, and like all excellent waterproofs, it is great at keeping water in as well as out. A small puddle forms as he steps out of his rubbery chrysalis.

10:45 am: George will spend the next 15 minutes oscillating between (rightly) complaining that his head, hands, and, somehow, elbows are numb and (wrongly) claiming that a bike is the superior, premier method of travel. Tea is made and drunk, and we head upstairs to the converted spare-bedroom studio.

4:00 pm: An insanely late lunch takes place. This is usually because, after hours of Jack chopping and changing between George’s production ideas, he has finally caught onto something. We both have felt this is an idea we need to capture now, and lunch can wait. Around this time, we coined the regrettable phrase, ‘blood-in-the-water’ to describe the feeling that the idea we are working on is almost complete and has huge potential. I’m not sure why, maybe Jaws was on Netflix at the time (in this analogy, we would be the saddest apex predators that nature has ever witnessed).

6:30 pm: George zips back up into his chrysalis and begins his journey home. Today, the lyrics all happened to come out at once, in the vocal booth. So later, while watching TV (probably Jaws), Jack edits and adjusts parts of the lyrics to make them more cohesive. While all the lyrics coming out in one blob is very creatively exciting, it’s often not perfect, and some knobbly bits need to be sanded down.

Arliston. Jack Ratcliffe: “George is a lover of all foods beige. Jack pretends that he is not.”

WEDNESDAY

10:30 am: The motorbike ritual repeats. Tea is drunk. Stairs are mounted.

11:30 am: George has brought in a wonderful new piece of music, and Jack puts a mumble melody on it. While this is definitely progress, both are wary of what this could mean… We’ve encountered a problem in the past where Jack gets so attached to the nonsensical mumble that he refuses to replace any of the words in the line, ‘The butterfly waters plants in my tummy.’ He doesn’t know why his subconscious has chucked that out, but it has, and now we are stuck with it.

12:30 pm: Jack goes for a walk around Brockwell Park with a bounce of the instrumental track (and very deliberately without any lyrics). He’s gone for 45 minutes, and by the time he comes back, he has written out new lyrics that, to George’s relief, are not butterfly-centric.

1:30 pm: A more sane lunchtime. There is a food dynamic between George and Jack that’s maybe worth describing here. George is a lover of all foods beige. Jack pretends that he is not. George will buy a normal person’s meal, then a family-size bag of crisps, eight donuts, and some kind of cake. He will eat half of it, then leave it in Jack’s house throughout Thursday. After heroically resisting eating it for up to 30 minutes, Jack then eats it all in a guilt/pleasure frenzy and gets angry at George. The cycle continues to this day.

6:30 pm: George is back on the bike.

10:00 pm: Tonight, (after Jaws), Jack feels the new track needs some harmonies and wants a more intimate vocal on the main, so he sets up the mic and records them into Logic X for transplant into Ableton tomorrow morning.

Arliston. Jack Ratcliffe: “Feels as though it’s a ‘just Jaws‘ kind of night.”

THURSDAY

10:30 am: Motorbike. Tea. Stairs.

10:45 am: Usually, Jack writes lyrics in response to the music, but over the last few weeks, he has been writing lyrics out in poems on the Notes app and then draping them over the music, like some kind of miserable wet scarf over a chair. This is huge because it means I was finally (oh, I am back in first person again) able to express the subject of the songs properly. Before, it was always an exercise to try and artificially nip and tuck the ‘organic’ lyrics into something resembling (and often only resembling) a meaningful subject.

11:00 am: The song is finished in about 10 minutes (this one is called Sleep Well Bean). It’s a song partially about Mr. Bean, but also, for any National fans, a nod to their Grammy Award-winning Sleep Well Beast album. We love that song, and it’ll be released with the album on January 24, 2025.

3:00 pm: After lunch, we try something we’ve never done before: a chordless song. Just a single drone note echoing out into infinity. I was feeling inspired that day and just happened to come out with the entirety of the song Raft, which is an almost Gaelic melody that jumps out and dissolves back into the eddies of the single hypnotic note. That’s a lovely one too, also out with the album in January.

6:30 pm: George leaves, and Jack, happy with the two-song day, feels as though it’s a ‘just Jaws‘ kind of night.

Arliston’s debut album Disappointment Machine is out now. News, gigs, merch and more can be found via arliston.com

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