Writing and Recording
The songwriting session—held at Absolute's studio located on Tagg's Island near Chertsey—did not seem to go well at the beginning, as the duo was heavily into R&B music at the time, while the group according to Wilson was "always very poptastic". After two sessions the duo phoned their managers and told them that the musical association between them and the group was not working. At this point, the duo heard "Wannabe" for the first time, Wilson remembers: "We listen to it, and we didn't get it at all. It was so different to what we were doing. We thought, 'How's this gonna work? We're not the right people to be doing this band.'" For the next session the group wanted to write something uptempo and a bit more fun. A full-on disco backing track came up, and "Who Do You Think You Are" evolved from there. Wilson commented about that session:
The thing is when they wrote they were also writing the dance routine, constructing the video, all at the same time as writing the song. And that's when the penny dropped. They say that the mother of invention is copying somebody and getting it wrong. Their sound was actually not getting R&B quite right.
"Who Do You Think You Are" and three other tracks written by the group and Absolute appeared on the Spice album. The songs were produced and recorded for the most part at Olympic Studios in Barnes, London. At this time, the Autotune facility was not available and most of the vocals were recorded with few adjustments made afterwards, as Wilson remembers: "Because of the fact we were not using computers, we had to work them very hard. They were in that recording booth for hours because we just had to get the right take".
Read more about this topic: Who Do You Think You Are? (British TV Series)
Famous quotes containing the words writing and/or recording:
“The human head is bigger than the globe. It conceives itself as containing more. It can think and rethink itself and ourselves from any desired point outside the gravitational pull of the earth. It starts by writing one thing and later reads itself as something else. The human head is monstrous.”
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“I didn’t have to think up so much as a comma or a semicolon; it was all given, straight from the celestial recording room. Weary, I would beg for a break, an intermission, time enough, let’s say, to go to the toilet or take a breath of fresh air on the balcony. Nothing doing!”
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