‘Valerie changed my life,’ Dave McCabe, frontman and guitarist of the Liverpool band The Zutons, tells M about their biggest single. ‘Financially, it made everything for me and the band easier. Everyone got a cut — we split it as evenly as possible at the time.
‘It’s been a mad song [for us]. Imagine if you had 20 songs like it? You’d be a Vegas legend with a residency at a casino.’
Now with four UK top 10 albums — including 2006’s Valerie-featuring Tired of Hanging Around — under their belt, The Zutons are still hugely grateful for the longevity of the hit song. After peaking at number nine in the UK singles chart, Valerie enjoyed a tremendously successful second life after being covered by Amy Winehouse and Mark Ronson in 2007. It has since gone four-times platinum, according to the BPI.
‘What I like about Valerie is how it appeals to your aunty or cousin — they might sing it at karaoke,’ Dave explains. ‘When I was into Metallica, Pantera and Guns N' Roses as a kid, I never thought I’d write a song like it.’
'Imagine if you had 20 songs like Valerie? You’d be a Vegas legend with a residency at a casino.’
Hailing from Knowsley, a large village outside Liverpool, Dave’s first foray into music came after he invested in a bass guitar: ‘I got into Nirvana and started learning their bass lines, then Santana — anything, really. I was like a sponge. Anything I thought I could play I would play along to, and I'd normally come up with my own version of it. It wasn’t always 100% right and that was fine. It was enough to keep me going.’
While he started attending gigs in Liverpool as a teenager (‘I fell over at a Smashing Pumpkins gig four or five times and nearly got stood on… I learned a lot that night!’), not living in the city itself meant Dave had more time to hone his guitar skills at home. In between stints working at various factories, Dave devoted himself to music.
‘I just lost myself in [the guitar], and that still applies now,’ he tells M. ‘When I play I forget about any bad feelings — I just channel everything into the instrument.’
After several early bands came and went, Dave co-founded The Zutons in 2001. Guitarist Boyan Chowdhury, bassist Russell Pritchard, drummer Sean Payne and saxophonist Abi Harding completed the line-up.
‘The Zutons formed from socialising, being young and hanging out in certain places at the right time,’ Dave says. ‘I’m a lot more anxious about meeting people now that I’m older, but I wasn’t back then. I was out all the time.’
‘When I play my guitar, I forget about any bad feelings — I just channel everything into the instrument.’
After signing to the Liverpool label Deltasonic, the band released their debut album Who Killed the Zutons? in 2004. A record filled with pop psychedelia, The Lightning Seeds’ Ian Broudie served as a producer on much of the LP.
‘Ian is lovely, straight-up and blunt in the best possible way,’ Dave explains. ‘He demonstrates what might work with the music in the studio, and you [often] go along with it. He knows deep down what you don’t want to sound or come across like. He’s a great producer.’
The Zutons’ prime motivation at that time, Dave explains, was to make music their livelihood: ‘Back then, we were all so hungry to make it happen. When someone gives you the opportunity to go in a room and try to create a sound for yourself, it’s the best feeling ever — especially when your band are all on the same page.’
The Zutons' debut broke into the UK top 10 and gave the band the chance to tour around the world, where they further refined their chemistry. When they returned to the studio in 2005 to record album number two, the Stephen Street-produced Tired of Hanging Around, they were a well-oiled musical machine.
‘People talk about “difficult second albums”, but for us, making our second album was, if anything, easier,’ Dave says. ‘We had [songs like] Valerie and Why Won’t You Give Me Your Love?, so we really knew what we were doing. We weren’t thinking too much about it, either. Those songs just fell out of us as we were committed and put the hard work into making it happen. Being together, listening to music and hanging out as friends is where the joy is and the best songs came from.’
Valerie started with Dave and bassist Russ jamming together in the studio, but its creation really took shape as the frontman sat in a taxi home from the studio to Knowsley.
‘I didn’t have a phone or anything to record it, so I kept on singing it in my head,’ he recalls. ‘Then it came to me, the “since I've come on home” line and the rest of the lyrics. I kept singing it, although I thought, “Surely this is another song. This can’t be right”. When I got home, I wrote it all down and played it. It was just so simple. If we hadn’t been working [in the studio] until the end of the day it wouldn’t have happened — the work was done there.’
This process informs a key piece of advice that Dave now dispenses to songwriters — if you want to succeed, you need to continually turn up and put the work in.‘You have to keep plugging away at your music,’ he continues. ‘Valerie was written in 20 minutes in the cab, but a lot of effort had [already] gone into [our songwriting]. We’d had this success [with the first album] which gave us the time to have some fun in the studio.’
‘Valerie was written in 20 minutes in the back of a cab, but a lot of effort had [already] gone into [our songwriting].'
While he acknowledges that, in subsequent interviews, ‘I got too used to saying Valerie was a gift from God’, Dave is keen to stress that the song was indeed written about an actual Valerie.
‘I met her on tour,' he explains. 'She’d been done for drink driving. [The song is about] me just asking her if she’s OK — “Come and see me if you’re feeling bad”. That’s it, it’s that simple. You don’t think about [the writing] too much, and there’s a beauty in that.’
The track cracked the UK top 10 in June 2006, but a subsequent cover version by Amy Winehouse and Mark Ronson — which peaked at number two in October 2007 — ensured Valerie became ‘even more massive’.
‘Radio 1 DJ Colin Murray said at the time that, in 20 years' time, people will still be singing this song. I think they’re singing it more than ever,’ says Dave.
‘What happened to [Amy, who died in 2011] sadly happened, but [her cover] cemented the song even more. It’s now like its own thing. About two months after she died, I walked past a pub in London, and everyone was singing it. It made me really sad; [her death was] such a shame. But the song has this timeless quality to it. It feels like people will still be singing it in another 20 years’ time.’
'Valerie has this timeless quality to it.'
Following Valerie, The Zutons scored another UK top 10 album (2008’s You Can Do Anything) before disbanding in 2009. They reunited for a tour in 2018 before releasing The Big Decider — which was co-produced by Nile Rodgers — in 2024.
Away from The Zutons, Dave has explored collaborations (including with Robbie Williams songwriter Guy Chambers, who he ‘learned a lot from [in terms of] how I need to strengthen my songwriting’) and released his own solo music. He’s set to follow up his 2015 solo debut Church of Miami later this year with a new album, and remains as curious as ever about the art of songwriting.
‘I learned Fantasy by Earth, Wind & Fire on guitar the other day,’ he says. ‘It’s crazy, the chords and the melody. As writers, we need to be like a jukebox of records and really get to know music chord-for-chord. They’ll sink in and, over time, their influence will come out in your own writing.’
Dave McCabe is currently on a solo acoustic tour of the UK — you can see his remaining tour dates and find tickets here.
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