Starsailor are back, with strings attached.

L-R: Barry Westhead, Ben Byrne, James Walsh, James Stelfox. Image: Andy-Earl.

Starsailor are singer and guitarist James Walsh, bassist James Stelfox, drummer Ben Byrne and keyboardist Barry Westhead. They formed in Warrington in 2000 and met with success almost immediately, their debut performance at Glastonbury leading to a record company bidding war. Their critically acclaimed first album, Love Is Here, appeared the following year; in 2024, they released their sixth, Where the Wild Things Grow. This autumn, they celebrate their 25th anniversary with a headline UK and EU tour and the release of Starsailor with Strings: Live from Liverpool, a recording of their greatest hits performed with orchestral accompaniments by composer Joe Duddell.

They had previously worked with Duddell on last year’s Music Feeds Live show in aid of the Trussell Trust, as Walsh explains. “He arranged a load of strings for bands like James, Slow Readers Club, and he was able to do it under so much pressure to get it all together, get the band rehearsed up, the orchestra rehearsed up, with all the different artists. I was really impressed.” So when Starsailor began to think about marking their quarter-century, they realized it would be an ideal way to revitalize their repertoire. “We thought it’s going to be great to go around the country revisiting those songs, but we need something in addition that’s a little bit special and different.”

They visited Duddell’s studio in Buxton to listen to his initial demos, recorded on Logic using “some really nice sounding string samples”. To give them a sense of the direction he was going in, he first played a couple of tracks from their debut album – “Alcoholic”, which he’d already arranged for the Trussell Trust concert, and “Poor Misguided Fool” – which both sounded quite different from the original recordings. But he had also made demos of later material – several songs from Starsailor’s second album, Silence Is Easy, already featured string arrangements in their original incarnations, which made the transition to Duddell’s orchestrations less dramatically different.

As Walsh observes, the arrangements have been successful across their back catalogue, from the early hits “Good Souls” and “Four to the Floor”, which close the new album, to last year’s “Where the Wild Things Grow” – a trio that he rates as among their best work. “Luckily, it kind of worked on all the songs that we suggested, maybe with a couple of slight changes to the tempos or the arrangements, or whatever. But I think because we approached the project in terms of, ‘Well, we’ll work around you – we don’t just want to chuck strings on top of the existing arrangements’, that made the process so much easier than if we’d gone in and gone, ‘Right, we’re not going to adapt these songs at all, or change the arrangements.’ He came up with something absolutely magical that just sits on top. I think in the end it resulted in something pretty good.” Starsailor with Strings also benefits from the excellent acoustics of the University of Liverpool’s Tung Auditorium, where it was recorded during matinee and evening performances on a single day in February. “It was a great couple of shows – a really good experience and the perfect venue for it.”

“But the only way it’s going to work is if the artist, the labels, the streaming platforms around the table are going, ‘Well, this is what we need to pay our rent.’ ‘This is what we need to run our business.’ ‘Where’s the compromise so we can move forward in a better way”

— Walsh

Walsh sees both good and bad in the changes wrought in the industry since they started out at the turn of the century. “I think what motivates me is how quickly things can come together now and be out in the world. For the band it does take a little while to get things together, get into the studio and get stuff done. Whereas when I’m recording stuff on my own, or releasing stuff on my own, I’m sort of my own boss. And that is kind of a new thing where you can just go through a distributor or whatever and get your music out there fairly quickly. That’s definitely an attractive part of the modern-day thing.”

Such autonomy comes at a financial price, however. “The terrifying thing is that hardly anyone is making any money out of it, or able to sustain it as a career. I find it amazing that a band as good as Field Music, I was reading recently that they’ve formed a Doors tribute band to basically supplement their income as an original band, which is pretty novel and a good idea. But in an ideal world, they would be able to get a proper income from being a band, because they are a great band. One of the bands that Prince was really into before he died, which seems crazy – someone who Prince was so enthusiastic about has to do that to keep things afloat.”

While he sees the benefits they offer to both listeners and musicians, he’d like to see structural changes to streaming services. “As a consumer, they’re amazing because you get all this music at your fingertips. As an artist, reaching such a wide audience – like, there are unsigned and unknown artists that will get on a couple of decent Spotify playlists and snowball from there. But the royalty rate is so poor that there’s a lot of work to be done, especially for songwriters, because they’re quite low down the list of people who need to be paid in that respect.” His idea is a direct-to-consumer model, where if someone’s listening to only one artist then the subscription goes directly to them. “But the only way it’s going to work is if the artist, the labels, the streaming platforms around the table are going, ‘Well, this is what we need to pay our rent.’ ‘This is what we need to run our business.’ ‘Where’s the compromise so we can move forward in a better way?’”

Having released Where the Wild Things Grow last year before returning to their archive for Starsailor with Strings, the band are now beginning to work on new material again. “I think once you get to a certain stage in your career, it is a constant balance between recognizing how much your legacy and your old material has brought you, and the value in that, but also creating new material almost for your own sanity and your own sense of self-worth that you’re still capable of creating good stuff as well as just performing.” Alongside the new songs, Walsh says the experience of recording a live album with a string ensemble has given them a taste for further innovation. “We had a really good time making this record. The longer you do it in the conventional way, and tour as a four piece or a five piece, and record albums like that, the more appetite there is to try different things, experiment a bit more.” Ideas he’s playing with are swapping out the strings for a brass section or even completely handing over the songs to someone else to “let them go to town on it”, in the style of Andrew Weatherall’s remixes for Primal Scream’s Screamadelica. “There’s loads of ideas as to how to keep things fresh, keep trying to honour your fanbase, but try to challenge things, push the boundaries as much as you can.”

Author: Rachel Goodyear

Starsailor with Strings: Live from Liverpool is available to buy and stream now.