‘It’s really saying you’re not gorgeous at all’: how Babybird made You’re Gorgeous

‘In the 70s and 80s, you’d regularly see images of women in bikinis draped over car bonnets. I wanted to flip that – and see how a male photographer would feel if he had to lie over a car in a thong’

We’d released five lo-fi albums that had got us noticed in NME and Sounds, but we were yet to be signed to a record label. You’re Gorgeous was one of around 400 demos I’d recorded on a four-track over five years on the dole in Nottingham. I lived above the Victoria Centre and they decided to replace all the windows, which took a year, so I was trying to record while people were pulling out windows.