In a story that could only come from a band that formed in Hounslow while trying to sound like Crosby, Stills & Nash in the 1990s, the Bluetones' Mark Morriss has revealed the slightly chaotic origins of their biggest hit, Slight Return. The song was the fourth or fifth they wrote, back when they were still a three-piece without a drummer, and guitarist Scott Morriss had to resort to a rudimentary two-cassette-player recording method to layer guitar parts. 'We liked it, but we weren't skipping around the room going: 'My God, we're going to be millionaires,' Morriss admits. 'That came later.'
When the band finally got signed to A&M, the label was keen to release it as a single, but the band hesitated because they'd already sold a demo version on blue 7-inch vinyl at their gigs to their fanbase of roughly 200 people. 'We felt like it would be short-changing them,' Morriss explains. The label had to talk them around, insisting they could hear it on the radio, but also wanted to change the song's name because 'Slight Return' isn't actually in the lyrics. (The title is a sideways tribute to Jimi Hendrix's Voodoo Child (Slight Return) and refers to the last line: 'I'm coming home but just for a short while.') Eventually they relented, and lo and behold, it went ballistic - entering the midweek charts at No 2. Morriss was in a launderette in Wimbledon, sans washing machine, when his manager called with the news. 'I don't think we were ready for it being so successful,' he says.
Thirty years on, the band has learned to embrace the song, even if they got so bored with it on one tour that they didn't play it, which turned out to be a mistake because 'people thought we'd gone up our own arses.' Morriss now plays it at three times speed or in reggae or funk style when rehearsing, but notes that live, 'the audience loves it. And if you're doing something the audience is digging, what more do you want?' He also clears up a persistent confusion: people often think the song is called 'Where Did You Go?' - a misunderstanding he encountered just recently at a farmers' market. 'Yes, but that's not what it's called,' he told the stallholder.