Lost and found Embrace are back again for the first time BY MAC RANDALL

When singer Danny McNamara, guitarist Richard McNamara, bassist Steven Firth and drummer Mike Heaton, collectively known as Embrace, flew from England to New York in the spring of 1998, they had no idea of the ironic twists fate was keeping in store for them. They were an up-and-coming Yorkshire band with a stately, sincere rock sound that earned favorable comparisons with the Verve and a single, "All You Good Good People," that had nestled in the upper reaches of the British charts. The main purpose of their four-day American visit was to have their picture taken for the cover of their debut album. "We hadn’t scheduled any gigs," Firth remembers, "and that was because we had a 30-city American tour booked for a few months down the road. All we were doing in New York was setting the scene for when we came back later."

Things didn’t turn out as planned. Embrace did pose for photographer Mary Scanlon’s camera in Manhattan, and when The Good Will Out was released in June 1998, the front cover did show Firth and his mates strolling down Christopher Street in Greenwich Village. Further shots of them on the New York subway adorned the CD booklet’s inside pages. And, boosted by three more hit singles, the album went to #1 in their homeland. But the return trip to the US wasn’t to be.

With a tinge of resignation in his North Country accent, Firth recounts the sad details. "Just as we were finishing the first album, we got a deal in America with Geffen Records. And then, about two months before we were due to come back to the States, Seagram bought Geffen and cleared their roster of everyone except the big names." Since Embrace hadn’t been around long enough to have much of a sales track record, they were prime candidates for the chopping block. Their album was deleted from Geffen’s catalogue, their tour was canceled, and that spring photo session in the Big Apple, which was supposed to have been the first salvo of a lengthy campaign, ended up being the last time they’d see America for seven years.

Fast-forward to 2005. Now a quintet — with keyboardist Mick Dale added to the founding foursome — Embrace are, for the second time, an up-and-coming British band. Their most recent disc, Out of Nothing, debuted at #1 in Great Britain last fall and has sold more than half a million copies there. In May, Lava Records released it in the US; for the first time since 1998, you don’t have to search the import bins to find a copy of an Embrace album. Last month the band returned to New York, playing their first-ever show on US soil, and they’ve followed it up with the American tour they thought they were embarking on seven years ago.

"We’d kind of given up hope about coming back to the States," Firth says. "Nobody picked us up after Geffen dropped us, for whatever reason — I think a lot of American companies assumed we were already signed to an American label — and so we figured, well, we’ll just stick to being an English band playing in England, we’ll do all right. But you don’t feel you’ve been in a proper rock-and-roll band until you’ve been across America in a tour bus. It’s like a dream to finally do it."

The US tour is the latest chapter in one of British rock’s most heartening comeback tales — which makes it all the odder that Lava’s press releases are referring to Out of Nothing as a "debut." Okay, for this particular American record company, it is a debut. But by any other reckoning, it’s the fourth album by a band who’ve been together for a decade. Still, for Firth, this fresh-start notion isn’t just a marketing line: "We do feel like a new band at the moment."

The process of becoming a new band took a while. After The Good Will Out, Embrace made two more albums for their British label, Hut. Drawn from Memory (2000) was more eclectic and ambitious than its predecessor; If You’ve Never Been (2001) included too many sound-alike mid-tempo ballads and sold poorly, whereupon Hut cut the band loose. Although Embrace soon forged a new deal with another British label, Independiente, it was clear a rethink was in order. "We realized we’d made some wrong turns," Firth says, "and that helped us focus our minds on what Embrace should be about."

The band opted to reconnect with producer and Killing Joke founder Youth, who’d been behind the control-room glass for two of their earliest singles. The match proved ideal, Firth says. "We weren’t really ready to work with him the first time around, because we didn’t understand what a producer did then. Now we don’t want to work with anyone else. He’s a genius. In the studio, he always pushed the tempo of the songs as fast as he could and pushed the key as high as he could, which gave Danny nightmares because he was so worried that he wouldn’t be able to sing them. Then he realized about three-quarters of the way through that Youth had been right 95 percent of the time."

On Out of Nothing, the feeling of renewal is palpable. Danny McNamara’s warm, guileless singing suggests a younger, less pompous version of Tears for Fears’ Roland Orzabal, and the songs he wrote with brother Richard have an epic sweep and an easy approachability; they’re constructed for mass sing-alongs. Propelled by a restless U2-style groove, the opening "Ashes" puts it plainly: "Now watch me rise up and leave/All the ashes you made out of me/When you said that we were wrong." Take that, all you doubters.

Even as they were recording this uplifting material, however, Embrace continued to struggle. This time last year, they were flat broke, and Firth was working as a pipe fitter in a water-treatment plant, an experience he describes with a chuckle as "character-forming." But within weeks, everything changed. Added at the last minute to the line-up of the V 2004 festival in Stafford, England, they found themselves in front of an adoring crowd of 60,000 — and with enough money in the bank to leave the day jobs behind.

The impetus for all this was a Top 10 single, "Gravity," written by Coldplay’s Chris Martin, who’d become friends with Danny McNamara after Coldplay opened for Embrace at the Empress Ballroom in Blackpool in 2000. Martin had written the song for Coldplay, but he ended up offering it to McNamara because, as Firth puts it, "he thought it sounded too much like Embrace."

Let’s pause to appreciate the irony here. Embrace first emerged on the British scene at the tail end of the Britpop movement, which had made a virtue out of donning mod clothes and aping old Kinks and Small Faces records. The music was great fun, but many of the genre’s leading bands (Blur being a prime example) exuded a self-conscious cleverness. By contrast, Embrace offered straight-faced rock anthems with big, boisterous choruses and lyrics just vague enough to feel universal. Back in the late ’90s, that was a refreshing change. These days it’s the status quo. There’s a battalion of contemporary British bands who sound a whole lot like Embrace — and the most successful, of course, are Coldplay. Martin freely acknowledges the debt.

So one of Embrace’s followers became their commercial savior, a concept that Firth admits took a little getting used to. "We weren’t even sure about recording ‘Gravity,’ and then we didn’t want to put it out as a single — we didn’t want to come back after three years with a cover version. But in the end, it was the right decision." And was it annoying over the last few years to see Coldplay rocketing to stardom while Embrace languished on the sidelines? "I’m a massive fan, so I don’t begrudge them any of their success." Especially not if a little of that success rubs off on his own band. So far, that’s just what’s happening.