Shed Seven are in the running for a Number One record in the UK Album Charts this week, a triumph that would cap off a winning 2024 for the Britpop veterans from York. Earlier this year, they hit the top spot with their sixth studio album A Matter Of Time with their latest, Liquid Gold, seeing Rick Witter & co. rework some of their classic hits with added orchestral flourishes. One such song to be given a sumptuous makeover is their 1996 hit Going For Gold. The song has long been one of their biggest anthems but, as frontman Witter told this writer a few years ago, when the group originally wrote it, they didn’t even think it would be a single.
“I remember it being one of the more difficult songs to complete off that album,” Witter recalled. “There were certain songs that were more of a struggle than others but around the time we were writing Going For Gold, we were also writing Getting Better and On Standby and Parallel Lines, which flowed a lot more easily. But with this particular track, it took a while. We were writing bits of it but we just couldn’t work out a way of completing it, making it a whole. When we eventually did demo it, I actually remember saying to the rest of the band, ‘this is a really good B-side’. We sat on it for a while and then re-recorded it and added all the brass, which then made it start to feel a little bit more like a single. We’d written a lot of the other songs by then and it seemed to fit better after we’d re-recorded it. Before that, it felt weirdly out on a limb compared to all of the other songs we were writing.”
