I remember the first time I heard “Desperate.” We had driven to Skegness, to stay in an old holiday house that has belonged to my neighbour’s family for years. Originally built for employees of Boots to convalesce in the sea air in the 1920s, if I remember correctly. My neighbour, Kate, had offered it to us rent free but for "something towards the heating." Which was the ideal situation for us scrappy kids, still working part-time in retail to make ends meet.

We arrived at the big black and white house, with its big balcony and subsequent veranda beneath covering the front of the house. It was late, so we pootled off to explore the seaside town, eerily deserted in late February, in search of food. It wasn’t until we had settled in, pushed all the dining room furniture back to line the walls, and had set up our instruments in their places that we heard the song.

“Here’s ‘something I’ve been working on.’” I snapped a photo of Luke’s notebook with the large illustrated title "Desperate" across the top of the page.

It must have been close to midnight; I can only remember playing music in that room when there was black on the other side of the big windows, overlooking the golf course. By day, you could sit and watch the golfers dragging clubs behind them, decked out in fluorescent pinks and oranges like a scattered pack of highlighters.

From the first listen, I adored it. We were all listening to a lot of Pinegrove, as their album "Marigold" had just come out. I loved the kind of Evan Stephens Hall vibe it had, whilst being so beautifully Luke Andrews. Later, I asked him about the origins of the song, which had begun a few weeks earlier. Let me set the scene…

It’s early February 2020, The Choco La’s are allowed to freely move around the UK and work in clothes shops, Corona is a popular beer, gigs are still a thing. The Andrews family are watching something about musicians on the television. Young Luke, sat innocently on the sofa, is struck by a feeling.

“Great! I’ll write a song called Desperate” he thinks. It is an unusual occurrence for Luke to have the title in his head before picking up the guitar, but as any well-versed songwriter knows, they come as they come.

He heads into the music room, grabs a guitar, and the chorus comes without much fuss. Then continuing the theme of breaking the usual routine, forgoing the usual tip tap of lyrics into a notes app, Luke reaches for a notebook. He explained to me, that writing with a pen and paper meant that he could concentrate solely on the lyrics, as if they were a piece of writing that could maybe have been a piece in its own right.

When I asked Luke what he was feeling so Desperate for at the time, he said “Since Jake and I were, let’s say six years old, I’ve basically known exactly what I want to do. I want to be a full-time musician, and in the grand scheme of things, I want to be in a band.”

“So, writing original music,” Jake interjects.

“Yeah, in an originals band. When we were younger, before we had even picked up an instrument or anything, we used to make album covers with track lists, because we really liked coming up with band names, coming up with album names, coming up with song names. I’ve always known what I want to do. So, anytime I’m not doing that, I’m kind of desperate to be doing that. For example, in the context of working in retail and being in lots of different music projects, that were all, in the grand scheme of things, reasonably low-level, not full-time. There is always the thing that I’m not doing but I want to be doing. So that’s the context of what I was desperate for.”

It is a weird, closed, shivery feeling thinking back to those long nights working on songs in Skegness. I feel feverish thinking of it. We were ready to rebel, create our own rhythms. With no sleeping parents upstairs, we played music all night, rose late, with early spring sunlight streaming through our windows, and bought Toblerones and cream cakes from the supermarket a little too often. I was falling in love with being in a band, and with the boys I took endless photographs of.

But the song I heard that day in Skegness, wasn’t what made it on to the Emerald EP. Jake, fuelled by teaching classic guitar hits to local children, was yearning to write an iconic guitar intro, the type that a sixteen-year-old guitarist could sit down and learn. During our trip, we would often split off into different parts of the house to write on our own, and with a head full of reference and time stretching out, Jake set about writing the guitar part.

“I was drawing on things like John Mayer, John Frusciante of the Red Hot Chilli Peppers, even Guns and Roses and Jimi Hendrix. I wanted to put some harmonics, à la "House on The River" by John Morgan, because harmonics seem immediately flashy in their way, but also that would mean that I was pushing myself which is a good place to start. I was doing hammer ons and pull offs whilst barring the strings, kind of like "Hey" by Red Hot Chilli Peppers.” Jake explained to me.

“As I write guitar parts, often if I’ll accidentally hit notes I wasn’t intending on writing, and if that sounds almost acceptable then I’ll use that instead. Then I’m not only using my own formulas and shapes that I’m used to. That’s how the semitone I go to – when the Bass has just come in – happened.”

Far from the cold blue walls and coastal skies of Skegness, we set about recording "Desperate." The lockdown announcement had resulted in a snap decision to move all of Jake and Luke’s musical gear into my parents’ house, along with the two Andrews themselves. Three weeks soon became months, and our "Emerald" EP began to take shape. "Desperate" didn’t put up a fight, we recorded it pretty much how we play it live, and it might be one of my favourite recordings because of that. Jake’s carefully crafted guitar solo finally settled into a flow, and as Luke would say: “If I could bottle the feeling of going into the solo section of this song, playing live as a band, and I could sip it every morning as part of my daily routine, then I would be the most confident scoundrel in the gaff.”

You can listen to "Desperate" on our debut EP "Emerald" here: https://snd.click/pwma5jlb

Bryony Dunn is a musician, writer, and one-third of indie pop group “The Choco La's”. You can find their music on Spotify here: https://open.spotify.com/artist

"Desperate" : A Song Story