Tim West and school friend, Christian Hardy, are at the helm of The Good Ship. They’re joined by a variety of other Willkommen players including Jacob Richardson from Sons of Noel and Adrian, Will Calderbank from The Miserable Rich and Christian’s partner in the Leisure Society, Nick Hemming.
The concept of ‘the album’ was important to Tim, I’m not a participant in the MP3/Shuffle generation. I consciously wrote all the songs, as an album - they all had their place in this context to make an overall piece of art. Not just individual songs that got clumped together...
The Good Ship is the product of a five year labour of unconditional love. It’s a joyful celebration of life, or, as Tim puts it, wanting to be either in your 'happy place' or away from the shit of modern existence.
This philosophy extended to the creative process. Away from windowless city studios, The Good Ship was recorded in a variety of idyllic settings. Tim put members of the Willkommen family on a bus and drove them to places like Wales, Devon and Northumberland so that we could share in a holiday experience and get the creative flow going. These were deeply happy trips for all of us, unforgettable really, Chris concurs, and I'm pleased that there is what I hope to be a worthy record to show for that time.
As such, The Good Ship is blessed with an organic, natural and warm sound. Chris and I are both sceptical of clinically clean, over produced records, Tim elaborates, hence the reason you can hear us doing washing up in the back of some tracks. The old creaky farmhouses that we recorded in added to that 'roomy' sound. When looking for firewood in an old barn on the first day of the first recording session, I came across a really old kids’ drum kit. It looked crap. But we then used it for a few songs because it sounded great.
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