Elbow struggle with “high energy” songs.

The ‘Grounds for Divorce’ hitmakers have “given up” on writing up tempo tracks in the past because they have taken too much work to get right, and they eventually lost their essence.

Keyboardist Craig Potter told Record Collector magazine: “It doesn’t come naturally to us.

“We’ve given up on songs in that vein in the past, as it hasn’t clicked straight away.

“The nature of in-your-face songs means that working on them for too long becomes draining.

“If you start labouring on them, what’s essential about them disappears.”

However, the group were keen for their new album, ‘Audio Vertigo’ to be “fun”.

Frontman Guy Garvey said: “We haven’t really used fun as a motivation before.

“Craig and Pete [Turner, bassist] particularly kept saying ‘because it’s fun’ about the songs.”

Speaking about the horn into of ‘Her To The Earth’, he added: “I walked in on Craig and Pete dancing around the room to it. I was, ‘What are you doing?’ which is when the ‘fun’ word came up.

“I said, ‘OK, I can go with that.’ “

And the ‘One Day Like This’ group dismissed some ballads from the finished album after they’d been recorded.

Guy admitted: “We’d finish them then say, ‘This is good, but I’ve heard us do this before, and maybe better.’ “