Friendship and adventure on aimless summer days are captured in the video for The Lathums’ debut single on Island Records, All My Life. Shot entirely on vintage, Super 8 film on the streets and surrounding fields of their native Wigan, the prodigious four-piece faced the cameras together to jostle between relics of their town’s industrial past to create a poignant, visual record of their hugely optimistic present.
Having landed in the UK Album Charts at the first attempt this week with their extended EP, The Memories We Make, The Lathums gracefully emerge from lockdown to excite fans with new music. Shot and edited by prolific music filmmaker, James Slater, the band’s joyful stroll through sun-lit backstreets mirrors the hopeful realism of the single itself.
Setting his and his Gen-Z contemporaries’ lives to music, All My Life was the first song ever written by 20-year old lead singer, Alex Moore. Inconceivably articulate for a voice so young, he was just 16 years-old and about to leave school when he poured his heart out into his guitar, inadvertently felling the first domino in the chain reaction that leads to The Lathums’ unassailable rise.
Recorded at Parr Street Studios in Liverpool and produced by James Skelly, the track takes on extra emotional weight as the band’s first major label release.
He says: “The message of the song is significant for me, it was borne out of desperation, pain and anger. I am not sure why. I had already had a lot of life experience by then, I was and still feel like an old head on young shoulders. When I read the lyrics it’s actually quite optimistic, so I was probably looking to my guitar to escape. Make sense of the world. Make a new version of the world for myself.”
Deep-thinking, articulate and blessed with irrepressible positivity, The Lathums’ bright melodies, taught verses and jubilant, beg-for-a-ticket live shows have become British guitar music’s worst kept secret. With songs about the French Resistance, digital culture and the materialistic age, the four talented friends from the overlooked fringes of Greater Manchester enjoyed a heady year on the road and netted streaming figures in their millions before signing to Island in March. It’s a journey immortalised in their short film; The Memories We Make.
