We like to include a song that’s very different from our usual style on each album – for example ‘Goodnight England’ from London Underground, ‘Advance Britannia’ from Punk Rock Radio and ‘Hallelujah Karma’ from Cardboard Country.
We’d already recorded a version of Elgar’s ‘Nimrod’ as an intro to the title track of ‘Battle of Britain’ but felt that we needed a particularly dramatic song for what was originally going to be the final track.
One Sunday we came up with 3 song ideas, 2 were conceived and born really quickly, ‘Ruination’ and ‘Born In A War’, but the third, ‘You Can’t Fool All Of The People’ ( Originally ‘You Can’t Please All Of The People’) took a LOT longer to get right.
I think we recorded it 3 times, altering the tempo and first trying to manage with a de-tuned guitar. I then bought a Baritone guitar as the tuning was going out on a normal guitar but Paul didn’t like the recorded tone on some parts of the song so we had to try another.
The first version we recorded is quite a lot faster than the one on the album and in my opinion it sounded wrong. I found this song pretty hard to sing, or rather I sang it fairly easily but didn’t like how I sounded so tried various different approaches and voice placements.
Paul: YOU CANT FOOL ALL OF THE PEOPLE was a challenge to say the least. It was written originally on a guitar synthesiser that had the tuning switched really low. When the song was to be recorded, ‘for real’ I found that our guitars could not be tuned as low as the synth so we had to buy a specific guitar in order to achieve the low, throaty sound we needed.
After trying a couple of guitars we finally settled on an ESP baritone guitar tuned really low with heavy strings. I think the guitar tracks were recorded three times before we were happy. YOU CAN’T FOOL… is quite an epic song by our standards and it took a few months of shuffling parts, arranging and trying different tempos before it was finished