Goldfinger

Song Notes

“Goldfinger” is one of the bands most famous songs and a constant in their live set. It remains of one Tim’s favourite songs:

I was really proud of this at the time because of the chord sequences and melodies. It’s a long way from three-chord punk rock and was a big moment in our development.

Tim when asked about the unique key changes in a 2008:

I guess this comes down to what I was just saying about having more experience and trying new things. I’d been listening to a lot of Beach Boys, and Brian Wilson is the king of nutso chord changes, he gets away with it because they perfectly support his melodies and he’s a genius at making it all sound simple.The clever thing is that the average listener doesn’t realise that the chords are unusual for pop music, it’s only when you try figuring them that you end up going what the fuck?

At the time, I was also really into John Barry, the songwriter and arranger who did all my favourite Bond themes and his chords are strange, sad, beautiful. He uses a lot of bittersweet melancholic minor chords.I was writing the melody for “Goldfinger”, with vague ideas of where I wanted it to go. The melody would lead me then I’d try loads of different chords until I’d find the one that seemed to fit underneath it.

I wrote it over quite a long time. I can actually remember where I was when I wrote which bits. I started it in my bedroom in Downpatrick in September, feeling a bit confused and out of it after the psycho summer we’d just had. There, I came up with the main verse pattern. I couldn’t figure out where to go next so I left it. I probably tried getting the next part every time I picked up the guitar but it didn’t come until we were in Japan. It was our first trip there and I had crippling jet-lag insomnia. It was my first experience of jet-lag. We were only there for around 5 days. I had my 1961 Les Paul Junior (SG) in my hotel room and I was wide awake after going to bed exhausted round midnight and suddenly waking up 2 hours later and feeling totally wide awake and very frustrated. I tried playing some guitar to chill me out and I was playing the verse I had. When I got to the place in the song where I was stuck I tried an E Minor and then an A 7th which were in some whole new key entirely. It made for a really interesting melodic diversion and then I returned to the regular verse key. I thought wow that’s cool, I’d better not forget it. Still I didn’t know where the hell to go next.A few weeks later we were on tour somewhere in America, sharing a bus with China Drum. I was killing some time during the day playing my guitar in the back lounge of the bus when the chorus came to me. I got the first couple of chords and the rest just flowed out.

For a while this made me think writing was some sort of divine thing, that you just have to be patient and the good stuff will come to you, like a gift. It felt like it all was given to me out of nowhere. In reality, I’d been working hard on this fucking song for a few months, every time I picked up my guitar I was trying to figure out where it should go. So if you ever hear me getting all mystical about it again just remind me I’m bullshitting.

This left me with a really nice verse and chorus, but I didn’t know where this song would fit, it seemed very different for Ash, I thought it might just be a cool B-side In December we had 3 weeks off at home to write stuff for the “1977” album sessions that were going to be kicking off in January. I didn’t really have that many song ideas, we actually had no complete songs. Owen came over to Northern Ireland to stay for a few days and run through any ideas we had. I remember we rehearsed “Oh Yeah” and “Lose Control” with him and he helped us get the arrangements into order, but he wasn’t that sure whether we had enough other material. We were sitting in my old bedroom, he asked me to go through all the ideas I had, I played through everything I thought was good. He wasn’t too excited by anything, so finally I went… all right this is the last idea I have, it’s a bit weird and probably would be nothing more than an interesting B-side. I played my weird little verse and chorus and all of a sudden he got really excited, it was the one he’d been looking for.

We went out to the freezing cold cottage we used to rehearse in and played it through for the first time as a band. Owen got us to play round the chorus instrumentally as an intro and it really worked, it sounded powerful and different. We got Rick doing some cool drum fills during the breaks in the verses. By the time we got to the end of the second chorus we realised we needed somewhere else to go. As I said earlier, I’d been listening to a lot of John Barry stuff

Rick McMurray during the Tim Burgess Twitter listening party for 1977 in April 2020:

“Goldfinger” was the first song we recorded on the main album session, which started on New Year’s Day 1996. I always felt the song was something special. The previous year’s singles had been a big procession in our sound but for me this one took a leap.

We’d done quite a bit of work on “Goldfinger” during pre-production with Owen in December, which is where the title came from. The chords under the solo were mistakenly attributed to the Bond film. Turned out to be a different John Barrie song but Goldfinger sounded way cooler.

We were already on a tight schedule as the album was slated for a spring release and we needed a new single in the bag straight away so we could meet the deadlines for mixing and artwork. It was a pretty stressful time which was eased by our regular working practice of starting the day in the local pub. Tim wrote the song in different sections in various different countries around the world while on our first world tour in support of Trailer.