Forget Them Wendy’s new single starts out lazing in the sun, all acoustic guitar and long afternoons, then swerves hard into Paul Bowles territory and stops dead. Laura James calls it the sound of a good harvest running out: apples piled higher than anyone can eat, and winter waiting just behind it. She and Oliver Price told us where that swerve came from, and what’s still undecided about the album it’s leading into.
“Apple Pie” stays laid-back for most of its runtime, then turns psychedelic and stops abruptly on that Sheltering Sky reference. Was that ending there from the first draft, or did it arrive later?
Oliver: The song is set on a lazy summer afternoon that lures you into thinking life is limitlessly long and gentle, as opposed to short and perilous, which it is! Hence the abrupt ending of the song and the reference to Paul Bowles’s The Sheltering Sky, a novel about chaos and brevity. We wanted a twist in the song, so instead of a conventional 3rd chorus we went off piste, that was added towards the end of the writing process when the meaning of the song became clear to us.
Oliver, how did you approach that transition from the acoustic opening into a more psychedelic ending?
Oliver: As I remember, when we decided to go with the more avant-garde ending it meant I had to chop up a lot of parts and fiddle with things we’d already recorded to make it work, but it was worth it I think!
Laura, you’ve said you sing “Life’s an apple pie, let it float on by” without fully knowing what it means, only that it feels important. Has your relationship with that line changed now the song’s finished and out in the world?
Laura: That’s the kind of crap Olly writes in the press release – I knew what I was talking about all along, Olly’s just too simple to realise. Seriously though, Apple Pie represents the bounty at the end of summer, the apples arrive and are so abundant that you can make more apple pies than you can eat, you might think it’ll always be this way, but of course winter is around the corner…
Oliver, your production credits run from Snoop Dogg and Dr. Dre to M.I.A. and Lucy Rose. When you’re working on a Forget Them Wendy track, how much of that experience comes with you into the studio, and how much do you leave behind?
Oliver: Forget Them Wendy is my chance to revisit my musical roots. I love making all sorts of music equally but some more equally than others and 90’s influenced rock is probably the most equal of all.
Back in June you mentioned a January album, with more singles landing. Now that “Apple Pie” is out, has finishing it changed anything about the album, whether the running order or the way you see the record as a whole?
Oliver: We have all the tracks for the album recorded but probably won’t decide the track order til the last possible minute, we are Overthinkers after all…
“Dead in the Water” made BBC Introducing’s Tracks of 2025, and “Plug It In” was a Track of the Week. Has that recognition changed anything in practical terms, or brought you any closer to playing these songs live?
Oliver: Today BBC Introducing, tomorrow the world! That would be nice, wouldn’t it. I hope we can get enough recognition that we’ll have to play these songs live! Definitely looking forward to the moshing when ‘Wise Guy’ finally kicks in…
Your group name comes from Peter Pan, and “Wise Guy” was about growing older without getting wiser. Do ideas about growing up, change and impermanence keep finding their way into your songs, or are listeners joining dots?
Oliver: There is no smoke without fire, and fire too is impermanent…
