An Interview with Rick Witter of Shed Seven
We’ve covered lots of Shed Seven shows and albums over the last few years, and interviewed frontman Rick Witter too. Steve Crabtree caught up with him again recently, as they spoke about a new album, a number of tours coming up, and a special announcement that’ll see the band play a homecoming stadium gig at York City’s LNER Community Stadium…
Steve Crabtree: Hi, Rick. Welcome back – it’s great to speak to you again. How are you doing?
Rick Witter: Hi, Steve. Yeah, good, thank you, mate. Thank you for having me…
SC: No problem. We’ve spoken a few times over the last few years, but never have you been so busy when we’ve chatted. You’ve got a lot going on; I don’t really know where to start. But…you’ve got an album coming out early 2027….
RW: We do, and it surprised even us, to be fair, because obviously we had quite a lot of success in 2024, and rightly so, we could have thought, right, so let’s do some festivals in ’25 and then just sit on our laurels for a bit and bask in the glory. But I remember early ’25 me and Paul thinking, we’re on a good run – why don’t we try and write for the next album, see what happens, no plans really as such. And within nine months, we had what is now the next album, which is quite incredible really.
So, we’re obviously on some type of good run, so to speak, and it was a really nice period of time because usually writing can be quite intense, and it can be quite painful, and it can be tiring and stressful. But it seemed to just flow out of us. Ideas were just coming thick and fast, and it was exciting. So, I found myself going to Paul’s house. You know, he’d fire over a guitar hook or a set of chords, and I’d put a melody on it, and then I’d sit at home scribbling words out. I’d go to his house, and literally two songs a month were coming out, where we’re doing what we started calling ‘posh demos’.
So, we’d go into his home studio, and we wouldn’t just record a very quick thing and move on so that we’ve got a reference. We would put a drum machine on there, and we’d put a bit of bass guitar on it, and we’d fill it out with some string sounds off the keyboards and make it into a posh demo. And I remember an awful lot of times where hairs were standing up on the back of my neck or getting goosebumps with what we were doing, which is an amazing thing because we hope that that translates and comes across to people who might hear it. If we’re feeling that, it can only be a good sign really.
So, yeah, so quite surprisingly, towards the end of last year, we found ourselves with a really strong set of songs. So, we went into the studio earlier this year and recorded it, and it’s coming out in January.
“It’s just all very, very natural”
SC: You’ve been pretty prolific in bringing out new music since the Instant Pleasures album. I think you had a period of time where you were playing the back catalogue and people were loving that, but the new music that’s coming out has been really strong. You mentioned there you go round to Paul’s house, he comes round to your house, you get excited. Is this like when you were teenagers and you were doing it before you’d even taken off, when you were in each other’s bedrooms?
RW: Totally that, yeah. Nothing really has changed in the actual songwriting form. You know, we just know what we do. We’re not going to turn into Radiohead and suddenly just go massively off-piste. We don’t sit down before writing songs and discuss what we’re going to do; we just do it. It’s just all very, very natural. And to be fair, we’ve been doing it that long now, and we’re still here doing it, that there’s obviously a need or a warrant for doing it that way.
And it still gives us the same buzz, if not more these days, because we’re not getting any younger and we still seem to be able to come up with the goods. And I think because of that, with age comes experience, we now appreciate everything that’s happening to us more than we ever would have done. When you’re in your early twenties and you’ve signed a big record deal to a major label, and you’re touring the world, and you’re getting in the charts, and you’re being played on the radio, to an extent it goes right over your head because you just expect it’s going to happen. And then suddenly it stops, and you’re scratching your head thinking, well, where did that all go wrong?
So, these days we don’t take anything for granted, but equally we’re self-managed, we decide everything that we do, and that gives us an extra thrill because it’s all off us. It’s all off the strength of what we do, and it’s kind of renewed—it’s a renewed vigour that we’ve got. And because it kind of stopped in the late ’90s, early 2000s, music’s cyclical, it comes and goes, and things come and go, but we’re still here doing what we do. So, we’re conscious of the fact that we never want it to stop again, but we’re equally conscious of the fact that it can be overkill, so we’re quite clever at stopping and getting out of people’s hair for a while, which we’ll probably do in a couple of years. We’ve got too many plans to stop right now, Steve, but in a couple of years people can have a break from us!
“Very indie-jingly-jangly”
SC: The album, as you say, comes out in January; it’s called Shed Seven. Have we got any standout tracks? What tunes should we be looking out for from that record?
RW: Well, I mean, I love it all, and I know I’m going to say that because I’m kind of a co-writer on it, but there’s a song called ‘Drifting’, which was one of the first songs that we started for this album campaign. And it’s weird when you start writing for an album, because it takes you two or three songs to get into the rhythm of doing it. So, usually the first two or three ideas you have are okay, but then the good stuff starts coming out because you’re in the zone and you’re flowing.
So, this song called ‘Drifting’ was one of the first ones that we kind of wrote for this album campaign, and if you listen to the demo, it’s very indie, jingly-jangly, 2006 indie kind of style going on. And when we went into the studio, we were kind of thinking, this isn’t really fitting with everything else. So, we slowed it right down, made it sound a bit Beatles-y, and it’s one of the best songs on the album. So, it’s these flukes, or these things that you kind of—without changing things too much, it’s these things that you do in the studio that make the big difference.
So, there’s that, that’s a particular favourite of mine. There’s a song called ‘Lost in Space’, which is amazing, which has my daughter singing with me on it, which is an added bonus because our voices go quite well together. And that was a bit of a fluke; again, she just happened to be visiting and we needed a female voice on there, and it just fits. So, that’s a nice story.
I mean, there’s so much good stuff on there, it’s difficult. ‘The Centre of My Everything’ that’s just come out, that’s a really lovely ballad that could mean so many different things to so many different people. And I think that’s why we connect, because we write for the everyman or the everywoman. Everyone can get involved with the sentiment of the songs, and we’re noticing that. I mean, we’re noticing more when we do gigs now, people are in tears watching us, and I’m hoping it’s for a good reason and not a bad one!
SC: I’m sure it is, I’m sure it is.
RW: Well, they stay, so it must be good, because they stay!
SC: So, the album’s out on the 8th of January, which, I don’t know if you knew, is Elvis Presley’s birthday.
RW: Is it now? Right, okay.
SC: Shirley Bassey’s birthday.
RW: Is it? Right.
SC: David Bowie’s birthday.
RW: Wow.
SC: And…it’s my birthday. So..a fantastic day to bring something out into the world, isn’t it?
RW: Unbelievable. Well, we did it for you, Steve!
SC: That’s just what I wanted to hear! Well, I can’t wait to hear it. You’ve got a hell of a lot more going on though as well. You’re about to jump on some more dates for your 30th anniversary of A Maximum High. I saw the show at the Piece Hall in Halifax this summer—incredible show.
RW: Oh, did you come to that?
SC: Yeah, it was absolutely brilliant, and to have that album in that order, it just…it hit. Everybody loved it; it looked like you guys were loving it. It’s went down really well, didn’t it?
RW: Yeah, it has. I mean, we did say we’d do a one-off outdoor show in the summer, and we didn’t specify that we might do some indoor shows later on the year, so it was always the plan. Because, you know, A Maximum High was our biggest ’90s album and, it’s nice to be able to—because we were never really a band to do albums in full, in order. Lots of bands have been doing that over the past 10, 15 years, and we were never really that massively inclined to do it. But when you get to 30 years of that particular album, and it was a big one, it was the obvious thing to do to celebrate that 30th year. So, yeah, Piece Hall was amazing, and we wanted to do something slightly different, so we came out and played five songs off the first album first, which I knew was going to confuse people, which is why after about song three I had to say, ‘Don’t worry, we’ve not lost our minds. It’s coming; the album’s coming.’ So, then to be able to go off and then come back on and do some other hits from after 1996 was brilliant, and I even got to do a little costume change, so I felt like Kylie, it was amazing!
SC: Were there any songs on there where you thought it wouldn’t work in a live situation, but then thought, ooh, hang on, why did that not stay in our set for years and years and years?
RW: Well, there is that. There is certain songs that we haven’t played for an awful long time, but I think the majority of the reason for that is because we’ve kept writing new songs, and we can’t play forever. So, it was brilliant to be able to play songs that are obviously album tracks, like ‘Falling from the Sky’, but equally when we played a song called ‘Lies’ that even back in ’96 people were saying, ‘Why wasn’t that a single?’ We hadn’t played that song live for such a long time, there was a big buzz about doing that because we knew people hadn’t heard it live for so long, if at all with some people that were there.
But equally, we’d played all of those songs probably in ’96 when we were promoting the album, so it wasn’t as if we’d never played any of them. So, it’s great. So, yes, over October we’re going out there and playing A Maximum High in full, get that out of our systems, and then we roll into November and December and do the classic Shedcember greatest hits kind of set, with some new songs added to it for the bonus, which is brilliant.
The funny thing is with our new stuff, even going back to the A Matter of Time album in ’24, the songs like ‘Talk of the Town’ and ‘Let’s Go Dancing’ that we play live now, and already we feel like we couldn’t not play that. Even though they’re relatively new songs, they go down so well, and they fit in so well with our back catalogue. It’s not like they stick out like sore thumbs, these new songs, and I’m kind of getting the idea that the newest songs off this brand-new album are going to do exactly the same, they’re going to fit in really well. We did a festival at the end of August called Camper Calling, and it’s the first time we’ve ever played ‘Stand Together’ live, which was the comeback song off the new album, and it instantly felt like we’d been playing it for years and years.
So, this tour in November and December up and down the country is going to be brilliant to be able to play some stuff from the ’90s, some stuff from the late teens—is that what you call them? And now some brand, brand-new songs, which will be amazing.
SC: It’s everybody’s favourite Christmas tradition, isn’t it, Shedcember? When that comes around every couple of years. So, to have a few new ‘carols’ being thrown into the mix…
RW: Amazing. Amazing, that’s a really good way of looking at it. Apart from what people don’t really understand is, because we’re doing like 25 gigs, Christmas is pretty much a write-off! By the time I get home, I’m exhausted and need a factory reset. The hips need a rest!
SC: Well, I’m not surprised. It is the season of giving, though, and there are a lot of people who really appreciate it and look forward to it coming around every couple of years.
RW: Yeah, well, it’s an amazing thing to walk out onto a stage and see a room full of people looking like they’re having the best time of their lives, which is why we still want to do it, because you can’t get better than that, to be honest.
SC: Well, I’ll be there at one of the Leeds shows, so I can’t wait. But after Shedcember you have a little bit of time off, and then you’re back on the road again to promote the new album, and I know we’ve touched on the new album, but you’re going to be knackered!
RW: Yeah, well, we’ll have a couple of weeks off over the Christmas period, and then we’re straight out because the album’s coming out on the 8th of January, so we need to be out there promoting it. So, we’re doing a run of in-stores the week that the album’s out, which we did that for A Matter of Time and Liquid Gold, and it’s brilliant to be able to just go and play in small record stores, meet fans, sign their records. It’s a brilliant way of getting up close and personal, so we’ll look forward to that after a couple of weeks off. And then we might have a few weeks off before it all kicks off again next year.
SC: Just staying on the live show thing then, as I mentioned, I saw you at the Piece Hall in Halifax, I saw you the year before at Scarborough Open Air Theatre, saw you at Project House, and at the Victoria Theatre in Halifax again as well over the last couple of years. Those live shows were really strong, really strong. And, you know, I’ve seen different eras of Shed Seven, and I’m just absolutely amazed at just how good those shows were. Do you feel that we might have the strongest version of Shed Seven at the moment?
RW: Yeah, I believe so. I think we’re in a position now, not just in our lives—I mean, as I said, with age comes experience. We know what we need to give, we know what we could lose by not caring. We’re a band that cares, and I think that comes across. Every show we put our all into it, because we want people to leave feeling like they’ve had a brilliant night out, and the best possible scenario is people leave the venue going, ‘I can’t wait to see them again.’
There’s lots of bands that walk out looking like they just don’t care, and they’re just staring at the shoes and too cool for school, but we’re rock and roll and as long as we’ve got our health, then we’re up for it. And it’s proven, because people keep coming back and we keep having to place bigger gigs, and we’re selling more tickets than ever these days. And it’s just a thrill that keeps on giving, so long may that continue.
“Our biggest ever headline show”
SC: Well, that will get you over the Christmas and New Year period. What next? Do you have any summer plans?
RW: Well, we’ve just announced we’re doing our biggest ever headline show in our hometown of York. We’re playing at the LNER Stadium, York City’s home ground, which is amazing; it’s our first stadium show. And to think where the stadium is, it’s literally a five-minute walk from where me and Paul and Tom pretty much grew up in York. So, to think back to being 14-year-olds dreaming of one day playing a stadium, headlining our own stadium show, and we’re going to be doing it literally round the corner from where we grew up!
So, that’s—it’s going to be amazing. So, we’ve got The K’s, Reverend and the Makers, and The Mersey Beatles on with us that day. We’re going to get some local acts to come and play on the little stage outside of the ground and make it a huge day out for York people and people around the country, Shed Seven fans. So, that’s happening on the 29th of May next year, which is a Saturday night.
SC: Well, I will get myself in the queue for those tickets to make sure that I’m there. Sounds like a fantastic show. But good luck with everything you’ve got going on. You’ve got a busy few weeks coming up, and I can’t wait to be part of it when I come along and watch you in Leeds.
RW: Thank you, Steve. So, after talking with you, not because I’ve been talking with you, but because of what we’ve been talking about and what I’ve got coming up next, I’m just going to go and have a quick 20-minute power nap!
SC: I don’t blame you! Pleasure to speak to you as usual, Rick, thank you so much.
RW: Thank you, Steve, mate. Nice one.
SC: Take care, speak soon.
RW: Cheers, mate, ta-ra.
Give Steve music, give him food, give him theatre, tech or travel… and he’s a happy man. He’s been writing professionally since 2003, turning to journalism in 2017 when it offered him the chance to enjoy a lot of his existing passions, and learn some new ones at the same time. Steve can be found spending many of his summer nights watching bands at The Piece Hall in his hometown of Halifax, or enjoying a bite to eat and a drink with his wife anywhere in Yorkshire at any time of year. Random fact: He does the best impression of Zippy and George from Rainbow that anyone has ever heard.
