"Her pelvic bone, in doing that, really started to hurt me." Says chief lyricist and rhythm guitarist of Flood In The Attic, Luke Page. He also does this website. "Erm, there’s been a change of plan", he informed me as he arrived for the Flood sessions in June 2005. "Matt has scrapped all the songs and we’re doing a prog rock concept album about fixing up an old ship, with barnacles on the outside that are streaming with tears, and that actually represents a doomed relationship, but one that eventually is repaired and sails to a port of spiritual rebirth. Oh, and plenty of reverb on the guitar solos."
With that Luke and chief guitarist Matt Cook set to work on their spawling epic that covers influences from Captain Beefheart, to Pink Floyd to Tom Waits. Recorded in five days straight, Up The Anchor is completely bonkers: there are duelling prog-guitar solos, live sampling of bits of furniture being hit with sticks, a discotheque number that sounds like German techno circa 1985, an acoustic song that descends into drunken a singalong, and the haunting epic centrepiece The Siren’s Song, which is Flood In The Attic’s answer to Radiohead’s Paranoid Android crossed with Underneath The Weeping Willow by Grandaddy, only better.
And we haven’t even got to the bit where Matt and Luke start ranting about how much rust there is on the Queen Mother.
Albums
up the anchor