Features Track By Track: The D.O.T - Diary

Mike Skinner has teamed up with The Music’s Rob Harvey to form a new band: The D.O.T. Their second album, ‘Diary’ is due next week (6th May) following the release of debut ‘And That’ last Autumn. It’s streaming online now. To celebrate, the duo have walked us through the release front to back: from opening track ‘Make It Your Own’ to closer ‘How Hard Can It Be’.

1. Make It Your Own.

Rob: We did this over the internet actually, Mike sent me the instrumental while I was up in Leeds and I wrote the melody and lyrics. I guess I felt it was the perfect statement to open the record with. You can call it what you like - things are quite different for both of us with this record and this band and we wanted to make a bit of a statement of intent with the opening song.

2. Don’t Look At the Road

Rob: This track was written with Secret Steve and Stuart Coleman, friends of ours, Steve was in The Streets’ live band and Stu was in The Music with me. The chorus line is about car sickness but of course it’s actually a great allegory for life. You need to look far down the road if you want to get to somewhere. There’s a lot of metaphors in The D.O.T.’s writing and this is one of our favourite songs on the record.

3. Blood, Sweat And Tears

Both: Actually this is definitely our favourite song on the record. It was written with two of our friends Wayne Bennett and Chris. It’s about the relationship internally with yourself and all the anguish that can come with being in love. It just feels like the most timeless song we’ve written.

4. How We All Lie

Both: This was inspired mostly by the sports section of the newspaper actually. There’s a lot of references to being on the bench and the benefits of playing for a good team, and again it’s finding metaphors for life’s daily struggles in everyday things. A lot of these songs were a lot less planned and a lot more abstract than a lot of the stuff I’ve done before. I think there’s definitely a sense in the world as a whole that we all have to lie in order to keep civilisation is working. Without these lies, it would all fall apart because the world is based on these false constructs.

5. Under A Ladder

Mike: This was pretty much written by me on my own. It was started in a similar way to ‘Left At The Lights’ which was begun by Rob on his own. I sort of wanted it to sound like Badly Drawn Boy actually, the melody but obviously with the drums from the drum machine.

6. Makers Mark

Rob: This was originally an instrumental created by Mike and one day I was in the studio just with Magic Mike’s engineer, we were just having fun mucking around, and I remember seeing this thing that said a point suspended in nothingness, and I thought that was amazing, so I stole that and that’s actually the first thing you hear but on a vocoder.

7. Left At The Lights

Rob: This was started in my house at Leeds, I did the verse and the piano riff and then I sent it to Mike. Again this is classic D.O.T. with ambiguous lyrics that we try and imbue with at least two different meanings. We like the fact that it can say different things to the listener depending on their moods. With this track there’s a definite sense of something really dark and bad which then tunnels it’s way out into the light and shows hope. It feels like a real festival song already this one, we can’t wait to play it live.

8. Left Alone

Mike: This was started as a track a long time ago, we were just messing around really with Wayney and Chris Brown who were in The Streets old band. We used to do these sessions where I would just start the drum machine and then tell the keyboard player to play the first thing that came into his head and then we had a bass player who also played guitar and I’d say the same to him you know, right now play whatever it is you feel. Things would come together really quickly, you’d do like three or four songs in a day and throw away two of them, but then every now and then one of them would be really good and this was one of the winners. Rob came in on the track and laid down his vocal and we all loved the mix of the groove with his usual psychologically twisted lyrics.

9. Wherever You May Be

Mike: This started as a full on acid house thing and then gradually became more and more of a pop song really. If you listen deep enough you can hear sort of s-express type things going on, and it gradually sort of got layered and layered, with rhodes on top and then a real piano, and then it starts to sound a bit more like a pop song. I like the harmonies and the melodies on this one, they’re sort of slightly not normal, slightly dark and twisted.

10. Most Of My Time

Rob: This was the first song we ever recorded which turned from being a totally random jamming session that Mike invited me to, to a proper song. It was so exciting just feeling a song come together like this. From then on we thought this was going to pretty special. It’s about psychological time and how i spend a lot of time in the past and the future and not enough in the present which isn’t a very good way of being really. It’s a bit of a lesson to myself really.

11. What Am I Supposed To Do

Mike: When Oasis split up I was in Edinburgh with the Streets and I went into a shop and bought a gibson 355 which is the guitar that Noel Gallagher played and it sort of started out as an Oasis-y type thing but on an R&B type drum pattern. So the verses are sort of a nod to that sort of 70s bar chord britpop vibe and then to sort of turns into an old soul sample from a Prodgy album or something - not The Prodigy, the rapper. And it’s not an actual sample either.

12. How Hard Can It Be

Both: This was part of a session we did at Snap studios which is an amazingly plush facility and we got a load of musicians together and jammed some tunes out. We were on such a creative high we even got Ted, our manager into the booth and he contributed to the lyrical content of this. Ted is resolutely left wing and at the time the Coalition were being voted in and this is a very political song actually though you might not get that at first listen. The red rose, oak tree and bird of liberty are the three symbols of the main political parties in this country.

The D.O.T’s new album ‘Diary’ will be released on 6th May via Cooking Vinyl.