One Night Only

Shaggy of hair, snarly of lip and with the indie god gene throbbing deep in his marrow, George joined what was, in 2003, a not-entirely-hopeful Beatles covers act from Helmsley, North Yorkshire, made up of older schoolfriends from his secondary school. He insisted on playing guitar and singing. He began writing most of their best songs. He brought in a new keyboard player. Drummer Sam Ford, presumably spotting a pattern emerging here, must have feared a putsch on his stool but was thankfully deemed good enough to survive. The signs were all there – One Night Only had been struck by their thunderbolt.

Thing is, most thunderbolts aren’t twelve years old.

“There were three of us,” explains 19-year-old guitarist Mark Hayton, “and we had literally just started to learn our instruments, we were about 14 or 15, so we were just making noise really, in a really small village. And then we met George. He was friends with the drummer’s brother who was also at the house and he just started singing whenever he was up there.”

“There was another guitarist, wasn’t there?” says George with all the glowering cool and knee-twitching enthusiasm of Richard Ashcroft, at only 17 years of age. “I kind of persuaded these guys to let me be a guitarist and a singer when they only wanted me to be a singer. So I persuaded them to let me do the other guy’s job.”

Mark: “When all of us were jamming, none of us could sing, and he could sing. So we were like ‘Why can’t you just be the singer!?’ and he was like ‘No, I want to play the guitar as well’, so we had to kick out the guitarist…”

And so began the classic tale of rock ascendancy, but told against a backdrop of age and environment that’s like The Twilight Zone gone indie. Back in 2003 Helmsley, a rural village community who’s nearest alternative heroes numbered Embrace (from Brighouse) and Shed Seven (from York), had a thriving punk-pop underground of late-teens skater bands aping Blink 182 around the local village hall and fete tent scene. Into this Royston Vasey of valley pernk back-biting sprang One Night Only: George, Mark, Sam and bassist Dan Parkin - a punk pop band with a pubescent singer who’s voice was showing its first signs of dropping. To the indie scene elders – around 20 full-fledged local bands, they estimate - they appeared something of a novelty.

For two years One Night Only paid their Helmsley dues, shaking off their novelty status by tearing the vaulted roof off the local scene with unrefined gigs that were punk bastard pop way beyond their years and lyrics that took a surprisingly accessible tack on the (usually painfully self-indulgent) art of teenage angst. George’s lyrics weren’t all suicidal grumblings about how Fiona in 3C won’t cop off with him or the embarrassment of not getting served in pubs; this stuff ran deep.

“I remember some of the first songs I wrote were about when my parents divorced and just sort of friendship/relationship based things,” he explains, “and that’s how it is for me now as well. There’s a song we’ve got called ‘He’s There’ which is going to be on the album as well. It’s about how our friend died of leukaemia. Just after we got signed I went away to Marrakesh for a week and I just got the news that one of my closest friends had died. I came back and I had all these lyrics and parts for the song. In all our music there’s nothing there that’s a down feeling. A lot of our lyrics are about being happy and having a good time, loving life.”

With George’s voice and lyrical nous maturing at a stratospheric pace and the band’s sound gradually developing from emo pop into a Kooks-y meld of classic songwriting and jaunty melodic bounce, it was only a matter of time before One Night Only broke out of Helmsley. And when George brought schoolmate Jack Sails into the band as keyboardist in 2005, that’s exactly what they did, knuckling down to write some “proper songs” like first single ‘You And Me’ and driving for three hours to play gigs in Liverpool to ten people. After all, they weren’t welcome in Helmsley any more thanks to their, shall we say, exuberant rehearsal habits.