Bandits singer Wille Edwards was night fishing on Cornwall’s Fowey River when he passed a silent Sawmills Studios and felt a flush of righteous fury at its imminent closure.
When The World Stood Still is most likely the final album recorded at this institution, the frontman having hectored producer John Cornfield to run the tapes one last time. Perhaps because of that sense of occasion, it’s also, by some measure, the Cornish band’s best.
From the title on, the pandemic lightly informs When The World Stood Still, with these songs channelling both the public spirit (the AC/DC crunch of In This Together) and the political slither (the tight funk of Broken Words, with its stuttering chorus, is an open swipe at Boris’s meandering lectern sessions).
But the Bandits are too vital to be bogged down, and as the music roams from the New York soul braggadocio of Move Too Fast to the John Martyn-esque whisper of Solid Ground – complete with gossamer Greeny solo – this is an album you sense will outlive its context.
When The World Stood Still is available from the Wille & The Bandits website.
