‘It’s about disappointment – which everyone can relate to’: Shed Seven on Chasing Rainbows

Rick Witter, singer, songwriter

Chasing Rainbows was written on tour, which was unusual for us because we weren’t the kind of band who spent downtime on a tour bus writing new material. We much preferred to be out exploring a city. But we’d just done a big tour of Europe, had been away for weeks, and were feeling really homesick.

We’d ended in Germany: it was the last show of the tour, about four in the afternoon, and it was pissing down with rain. Paul came up with the riff from nowhere, and immediately I started humming the verse. It was weird – this has only happened two or three times in our whole career – but within 20 minutes we’d got the arrangement and most of the lyrics. I remember that when we played around with it in the soundcheck, our crew stopped what they were doing and just listened. We knew it was a winner.

We recorded it quickly and made a pretty ropey video. The original idea was to film on a real train, but in the end they built a wooden carriage in a warehouse. It looks as if I’m walking through all these different carriages – in reality I was just walking through the same one over and over. Someone stood outside spinning a light round on a pole to make it look as if the train was moving, passing places.

We rush-released the single at the end of the year, which meant we were the only act in 1996 to have five Top 40 singles. The downside was that it got a bit lost in the Christmas rush and only went to No 17. If we’d have released it even a couple of weeks earlier, I think it would have been Top 5, but over the years it’s become the song that people most connect with. It’s about disappointment and wanting what you can’t have – “I’ve been chasing rainbows all my life” – which obviously everyone can relate to. Now it ends all our gigs. It’s such a great feeling when people leave and are still singing it down the street.

Paul Banks, guitar, songwriter

I’m pretty sure we were playing the Luxor in Cologne. That clip in the recent film Get Back, where Paul McCartney spontaneously comes up with the title song in a few minutes, totally takes me back, because that’s what writing Chasing Rainbows felt like. Normally on the bus, we’d have had the PlayStation on, but I picked up my guitar and started strumming without really knowing what I was playing. It was subconscious: I just started playing the riff.

My left arm got broken when I was a kid and never set right, so I’ve got limited rotation. Because of that, I’ve never been able to play barre chords, but someone had showed me these minor barre chords lower down the guitar, and Chasing Rainbows starts with one of those. In the space of an hour, we went from Rick and me coming up with the verse, bridge, lyrics and chorus to playing the song in soundcheck. I’m pretty sure we put it in the setlist for the gig that night. Then, as soon as we got home to York, we did a demo and sent it to the record company. Going for Gold had been a big hit for us, so the label wanted to get us straight back into the studio with Chris Sheldon producing.

The single’s sleeve featured a man standing outside a bingo hall in London with some flowers, looking as if he’d been stood up. For the song’s 25th anniversary, we did a new mix and put something on Twitter asking if anyone knew the guy on the sleeve. This woman replied and said: “It’s my husband!” Then he got in touch. In the 90s, he’d kept a diary, and still had the details of the original location on Kennington Road in London. We recreated the sleeve with him still stood outside the same building, same suit, same pose, flowers, 25 years later. It’s a Tesco Express now.