“The lyric was much sweeter then, it was like, ‘I love the freckles on her nose/I love the way she wears those clothes.’ My manager said, ‘I think the lyrics are too sweet. Because we were playing it live for about a year before, we got it down to the perfect three minutes that held the crowd’s attention. The first one didn’t have the middle section, so we added that, and the song used to be about five minutes long when we played it live. There’s never a right answer and it could always be better – it’s about where you draw the line and you’ve got no more. The fun bit is doing the melody and the production, and all that, but the hard bit is the lyric. But sometimes I’ll just start in my head. “I use everything: MasterWriter, RhymeZone, Urban Dictionary, a thesaurus, anything that’ll give me an edge. You do as much as you can and then suddenly you go back and realise it’s actually really good, or sometimes that’ll trigger something else. I’ll write verse, after verse, after verse… Sometimes it’s utter shit, but you don’t worry about it, because you’re just writing. With a lot of songs, I like to spend a whole day just working on the lyric. Also, I’m not a great musician so all the chords are pretty simple – there aren’t any minor fourths in there! I’ve always been a massive fan of Brian Wilson, who’s all about melody and harmony. “The ‘she’s so lov-e-ly, she’s so lov-e-ly…’, is the magic bit, which just came when I was dicking around on the piano. That would’ve been around 2005, and then we were gigging as Scouting For Girls, trying to get a deal, for two years. US chart position: –“I had a little bedroom studio in Harrow and I worked for Carphone Warehouse.

Here Roy tells the story of the irresistible pop song that launched his and his band’s careers… The song also went on to be used in numerous commercials and television series, including America’s Ugly Betty and the BBC’s Gavin & Stacey. The popularity of the band’s catchy debut single, She’s So Lovely, saw it peak at No 7 on the UK Singles Chart and stay in the Top 10 for six consecutive weeks. Principle songwriter Roy has also had cuts for acts such as One Direction, 5 Seconds of Summer, Union J and Seafret. Hailing from West London, Roy Stride, Greg Churchouse and Pete Ellard have been friends since the age of five. Over the course of the last 10 years, British pop band Scouting For Girls have sold over two million records, with four singles and four albums reaching the UK Top 10, and have racked up four Brit Award nominations and an Ivor Novello nomination. Scouting For Girls in Songwriting Magazine Spring 2018 The pop-rock band’s frontman explains how their debut hit took two years of tweaking and “dicking around on the piano”

Rob thomas masterwriter