MORCHEEBA - WRITTEN FEATURE

MELANCHOLIC music masters Morcheeba have left us waiting long enough. After selling over six million copies of their albums since their formation in the mid 90’s, the trip-hop duo are back with their sub-aquatic sounding sixth album ‘Dive Deep’.

In a candid interview, SMHTP’s Olivia Classey speaks to Morcheeba man Ross Godfrey to discover the depths of the production process behind ‘Dive Deep’, as well as why they decided to take the plunge and go solo with no permanent vocalist this time around.

You’ve been around since the mid 1990’s would you say your rise to success has been quite gradual?

“We purposefully stopped ourselves from developing too quickly. We didn’t really ever want to be in the limelight in any way and want our photos of the front covers of the records or anything. We weren’t really interested in fame or anything like that - we were interested in making music. So we had to do certain things to be able to make enough money to make music and have a recording studio. We purposefully took it pretty carefully. I think we’d  read enough books and seen enough documentaries about rock stars only lasting three years and then dieing in a hotel room. We didn’t really want to do that, that wasn’t our aim. We wanted to have a really long career; my heroes are people like Neil Young and Ry Cooder who are still making records today at the age of 55, 60. My favourite kind of music is blues and that tends to be played by old men but probably until I’m 50 I won’t be that good at it (Laughs).”

Would you say the music industry has changed quite dramatically since you first started out?

“When we first started it was still like the 70’s where it was all about taking a big advance, then you make a record and then you go on the road for as long as you can possibly stand it. Things started to change, the people that run the record companies didn’t really adapt quick enough and they’re paying the price for that now. But what I really love about the modern music business is that the power is taken away from the people with the money and it’s more about the creative people. With things like MySpace even though they are manipulated by the record companies - what it’s really good for is communication between different musicians and different producers. You can just get in touch with someone on the other side of the world and say we like your music would you like to do something together. Where’s before you would have to speak through a manager or a record company and it would be like Chinese whispers and it would take forever to do it. You still need someone to invest some money in you in order to make a record and that’s the difficult bit because banks don’t tend to lend money to stoners. They tend to want the money back. So you need to find some sort of investment. It’s okay with bands that are already established to sell their records on the internet. But for bands that are just starting they do need the initial leg up into it.”

You’re famous for refusing to be categorised musically, do you think that’s true of Morcheeba today?

“I don’t know. Music is just music really and it all links up. Hip-hop music is derived from blues and everything is from the same place. It only seems to be journalists that are obsessed with telling people where it’s from. When we started and everyone called us trip-hop, it was more like we just wanted to mix things that are hip-hop did and electronica with folk, blues and psychedelic rock. So it was more like us reaching out to loads of different genres as opposed to us trying to define one new one.”

You’ve sold a massive six million albums over the years worldwide. Do you feel like the pressure is on this time around to have the same success with ‘Dive Deep’?

“The only pressure we have is from ourselves to make good music more than anything. We judge our success in the albums that we make as opposed to how many copies they sell. Especially with things like the charts, it’s about how fast you sell records not about how many. ‘Big Calm’ never really troubled the Top 40 but it went onto sell two million copies. So it’s all kind of irrelevant. Our heroes like The Velvet Undeground and Nick Drake only sold about 20,000 records when they were alive and 25 years later they’ve sold millions. We’re really into longevity of music.”

Obviously Morcheeba has longevity having been around since the mid-90’s. Have there ever been moments where you have doubted working in the music industry?

“Not really. We don’t get on with some of the attitudes that people high up in the music business have, but we don’t really bother with them that much. We are happy to stay on the peripheries of things, to be reasonably underground. We’re very self-sufficient, we have our own studio and we produce our own records. We don’t really need to be part of the establishment as it were.”

How would you describe the sound on your new album ‘Dive Deep’?

‘Dive Deep’ has got a big aquatic, psychedelic sound. We’re obsessed with being underwater for some reason. It’s a mixture of old English folk music, electronica, a little bit of good hip-hop and vocally there are some really lovely mellow moods.

Judie Tzuke who’s a singer that we’ve been a fan of since we were little kids does a splendid job and Thomas Dybdahl a singer from Norway brings his weird sound with him too. It’s an amalgamation of different stuff really and the thing that sounds consistent is the emotion.”

You’ve got quite a variety of collaborators on ‘Dive Deep’ from a French singer to an acclaimed singer-songwriter.  How did you go about tracking down these guest vocalists?

“Most of the vocalists on the album we found through MySpace or through friends of friends. We wanted to just write with a lot of different people and let people contribute what they thought to our music. Ordinarily my brother and I would write all the music and lyrics and tell people what to sing. But that puts a bit of a barrier between the singer and the song. So bringing the singer into the songwriting process was an interesting step for us and I think the music really benefits from it.”

Was there any particular reason why you decided to use guest vocalists instead of one permanent singer on ‘Dive Deep’?

“We wanted to make an album as though we were directing a movie and we wanted to have lots of different characters to tell the same story from different points of view.  In a way we wanted it to be a bit like an Almodovar movie where it’s a little bit improvised and you gave the characters enough freedom to say what they wanted, instead of really scripting it all. It was really interesting to see how they interacted with one another. We’d been working with one singer for four albums and it was putting a limit on what we could express. You wouldn’t really make four films in a row with just one actor. We’d done collaborations with Kurt Wagner from Lambchop was on ‘Charango’. We’d worked with a lot of other rappers like Slick Rick. We wanted to use what we’d learnt from that and bring it into Morcheeba and diversify Morcheeba’s sound.”

Do you have any favourite tracks on the album?

“I like the song ‘The Ledge Beyond The Edge’ which is an instrumental and the title is from a sketch that Bill Hicks does about Keith Richards. He says that Keith Richards would take loads of drugs and all his friends would die, he’d jumped off an edge and land on a ledge and shout, ‘I’m alright, I’m down here there’s a ledge.’ And then he’d climb back up and he’d still be alive.”

How did the name for the album come about?

“I think we were always interested in the water side of it because there are tracks like ‘Washed Away’ and ‘River Bed’ and there’s definitely a sub aquatic theme going on. A lot of old blues records have this obsession with being underwater like Lead Belly would sing about jumping in the river to drown and Muddy Waters would sing about being a diving duck in a river of whisky and Jimi Hendrix sings a song called ‘1983’ where he wants to go and live underneath the ocean. We really liked that and we wanted to make a record about wanting to live under the sea.”

Can you tell me a bit about the lead track on the album ‘Enjoy’?

“I’ve just moved to Los Angeles, I’ve got this house in the hills in Hollywood and it backs on to this huge park which is called Griffifth park. I would go hiking in there quite a lot, it’s like being in the Wild West and there are coyotes in there, lions and rattle snakes. There’s a big sign that says, ‘The Gates Shut At Sunset’ so if you’re in there and you get lost, it’s really hard to get out. A couple of times this has happened to us and we were talking to Judie Tzuke who is the singer on it and she had just been to L.A. and had been to Griffifth Park as well. We started writing the song and the first line is, ‘They shut the gates at sunset and after that you can’t get out.’

You’ve got quite an interesting video to accompany the single. Who was responsible for the animation of that?

“It was a guy called Joel Trussell. We looked for ages and ages on YouTube trying to find the best young animator out there. We loved his stuff when we first saw it we thought it was amazing. We just gave him free reign. He’s just starting to make the next video for us which is really cool.”

What sort of technology did you use to make this record?

“We play all this old equipment from the 1950’s and 60’s and then we put in our computer in the other room. With modern technology we just chop it around and make it sound modern. The best sounds you can get are from old instruments but with new technology you can create really amazing new effects. And just do things that musically were not possible before. We’re strong believers in the theory; you could make the best record ever made, now. It would be easier to do it now than it was for The Beatles to make Sgt. Pepper’s. Everyone always thinks the best records have already been made, that’s pathetic really they should be striving to make better records.”

Are there any new artists around today that you particularly admire?

“I went to see a really amazing band in California called Brightblack Morning Light and they are a ramshackle collection of hippies who make the most amazing groovy music. Also there’s a band called Trilobite - which means the funny little fossils that you find on beaches - and they’re from New Mexico. I met them on MySpace and I went to New Mexico to meet them and ended up getting very drunk and playing a gig with them. We’re going to get the singer from Trilobite to feature on the new Morcheeba record.”