Amanda Applewood - I Love Boys

Up until now, Amanda Applewood has been best known as the keyboardist, recorder player and cake thrower with indie-
pop favourites The Boy Least Likely To. While she was sitting on the tour bus to Cardiff one afternoon, she realised that
she had written enough songs for her own album. She hijacked the band’s studio, and began recording the very next
day.

Two singles have already been released as limited edition seven inches on the Too Young To Die Label, ‘Pretend (We’re
In Love)’ and ‘Still Smiling’, and both are included here on cd for the first time.
From the obsessive rush of that unobtainable office crush, through to the quiet despair of lost love on the album’s final
track, I Love Boys might not be a fully blown concept album, but the theme of the title remains present throughout
its thirty-four minute duration. The album embraces the low cloud and light rain of a June afternoon in England, with
many of the lyrics written near Frenchman’s Creek where Daphne Du Maurier’s heroes lurked in the moonlight. It was
produced by the legendary Bobby Charm, with help from the Voluntary Butler Scheme’s Rob Jones.
This is a very English piece of poetic pop. Amanda grew up in a village in Oxfordshire, and spent her formative years
reading Nancy Mitford and Richmal Crompton, listening to The Sundays and daydreaming about Anthony Andrews in
Brideshead Revisited. Taking inspiration from Kirsty Macoll, A A Milne, Emiliana Torini and Strawberry Switchblade, I
Love Boys is awash with electric piano, accordion, synths, flutes, close harmonies and softly strung acoustic guitar, while
the lyrics reference the Blackwall Tunnel, Hever Castle, Cluedo (lead piping and all) and Enid Blyton. Elsewhere, inspired
by the Armada Book paperbacks of her childhood, Amanda contacted 84 year-old million-selling children’s pony book
author Diana Pullein-Thompson and gained her permission to use the title plus a spoken extract from the book I Wanted
A Pony - to illustrate the curious moment when girls transfer their affection from horses to boys.

I Love Boys is a bitter-sweet album about growing up in the British Isles, a record that stays with you like a faded
polaroid, long after it finishes playing. It’s a record for when the whole world seems contained in the smallest of spaces
- a rock-pool on a beach somewhere in Cornwall, or a cramped dance-floor in Leeds - when all that you need to know
and understand can be glimpsed through the moving carriage of a train.

TRACKLISTING:

1. Daybreak Heartache City
2. Still Smiling
3. Far From Here
4. Song For Kent
5. Rockpools
6. I Wanted A Pony
7. Pretend (We're In Love)
8. Daniel, I Love You
9. I Want To Go Back (Song For Kevin)
10. 1983

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