The second in our regular series features Emma Anderson who, as guitarist and singer with Lush, created some of our favourite ethereal (or should that be ‘Etheriel’) sounds ever. Surely she was a big pedal fan?

“I wasn’t actually very adventurous with pedals. I mainly used Boss ones (Chorus, Delay, OverDrive, EQ, Tremolo) at the beginning of Lush’s career, but the only time I digressed from this was when I bought a DigiTech Whammy WH-1.

“Whammy pedals were great in the way that they could add harmonics to chords. My favourite was when they added a fifth and I used the Whammy to write songs at home – ‘Laura’ off ‘Spooky’ being one, ‘Astronaut’, a B-side to ‘For Love’, being another. They could allow you to write quite sweet, ’60s type melodies and they’d sound quite clever when, in fact, it was all due to these harmonics being added to normal major chords.

“The best use of it as an effect was on ‘Superblast!’, also off ‘Spooky’. (I obviously used it most during this time!) The instrumental swooshy bit at the end was all created with the Whammy pedal.”