1)
Firstly thank you for taking the time out from your busy schedule to
complete this interview. Could you tell us a little about yourselves
and how you started your musical career?
P:
I grew up in Plymouth but left for the bright lights of London as a
teen at the end of the nineties and have been a bit of a wanderer
ever since. I've been obsessively writing and recording music since I
was 13, and have had some good chances at a succesful career but
unfortunately bipolar disorder (although contributing the untramelled
creativity of my music) has made forging real success impossible. The
rise of the internet, self-publishing, and streaming, and meeting and
working with Mo has really brought things into focus, however, and,
just when I was ready to hang up my hat in this game, it seems things
are finally looking up. We've been gettting quite a lot of acclaim
and attention.
The
funny thing is that Mo and I fell in love and married before we even
thought about songwriting together. Mo, who is from Detroit in the
USA, always loved music and comes from a musical family, had never
even thought of herself as a singer or songwriter before we started
messing about with it about 6 years ago. I had pretty much given up
on making music at that time. When we made “Caramel” as our
second ever song together, we knew we were on to something special.
2)
How would you describe your sound and what are the main influences
behind it?
P:
Labels are so reductive and a real bane for me in my life as a
musician, but I would go for “art pop” if anybody really wanted
to categorise us. I don't care about the genre, but what turns me on
are those irresistible pop songs that seem to come out of nowhere,
and sound fresh and yet somehow as if they have always been around. I
want to make songs which are punchy, concise and somewhat avant garde
without breaking the accepted boundaries of contemporary pop music.
My
production sound is a coming together of the elements I love most,
gleaned from three decades of obsessive exploration in modern music.
in my wide-ranging musical tastes. I love 1970s funk, soul and
Jamaican roots reggae; principally the smooth, heavy basslines,
played on real bass guitars rather than synths, but also the funk
guitar parts and general warmth of the sound. So, although we produce
quite a lot of dance tracks, the nod is to the days when dance music
was played with “real” instruments and involved a degree of
musicality, rather than today where it is largely driven by Djs who
aren't musicians running Garageband on a laptop. Sure, there is some
great music around, but the majority of it feels a little clinical
to me. Modern dance music , almost exclusively, relies on a “four
on the floor” kick drum that I have always found tedious and
irritating. Before drum machines, in the case of a funk or disco
beat, the drummer never hits the kick with the snare, and this is a
rule I have with our music.
I
like to give our music a warm, human quality by throwing real
instruments into the mix, using emulations of vintage reverbs, echoes
and compression, and adding my own tricks which introduce a certain
organic unpredictability to the sound. Tightly quantised synth parts
will be contrasted with loosely played bass or percussion, for
example.
I
would love to give some advice at this point to budding producers and
composers: You want to make house music? Great. Spend half of your
time listening to anything but house. This will expand your
musical horizons and inspire you to bring distinctive elements into
your compositions.
True artistry is about being restless and never satisfied with what you do. Experiment. Take risks. If you get an idea, no matter how crazy it seems, record it. Don't be complacent, and constantly seek new skills and technical understanding. Music making is an infinite, life long exploration – provided you don't build walls around your creativity. It's for these reasons that pigeonholing in music is anathema to me. If you publish something to, say, Soundcloud, I think it is hilarious that you have to choose from dozens of genres for your music, when so many of them seem completely arbitrary. We have made disco tracks, 60s psychedelia, Aphex Twin-like meltdowns. On our new album there is a pastiche of 1980s “hair metal” and a dub reggae song. What bloody box are we supposed to tick? But I wouldn't feel like a real artist if I didn't push myself like this all the time to do new things and step out of my comfort zone.
3)
How does the creative process work? Are the lyrics applied to
the music afterwards or is it more of a spur of the moment, work in
progress until the final production?
P:
Inspiration for music seems to begin in several ways; a little “hook”
or riff might suddenly appear in my mind, unbidden. If I'm lucky, I
hear a whole, finished arranged piece, like a band playing in my
head. The whole “feel” of the track is already there. Other
times, Mo & I will chat about doing a certain kind of song, a
ballad or dance track for example. Sometimes we are moved to write
about something and this suggests the character the music will take.
In almost all cases, I'll come up with some rough chords, and maybe
start building a beat and a bassline with it, while Mo works on the
lyrics and vocal melody parts. She then records those parts and I go
about mixing and arranging the final elements in the song. I like to
get vocals recorded at a stage where the music is still only sketched
out, so I can respond to the singing with my production and
arrangement.
4)
You’re primarily a studio based set up, arranging the
instruments you play to form the completed piece and there has been
some re-mixes of your work. Although it can open doors to new markets
I’d imagine it’s an apprehensive process to allow someone to put
their stamp on your work. Is it something you actively encourage
going forward?
P:
We are signed to Emerald & Doreen Records, a German future
pop label who have always given us not only complete artistic control
of our music, but our cover designs as well. I'm a total control
freak when it comes to our own studio recordings (I even perform all
of our final mastering, even though most artists and labels outsource
this). We decide exactly what we do and when we release it, and we
are lucky to have that level of support.
Remixes are actually great fun; I love hearing what other people do with the songs. Sometimes the remixes are fantastic, sometimes not so hot (the “musicality” of our songs can be quite challenging for DJ producers, I think; we certainly don't produce your average EDM tracks. Sometimes there are more than fifty audio channels for remix artists to wrestle with!). Because my own dance beats are quite idiosyncratic, I'm more than happy to have people steeped in particular genres build a version more in keeping with what their audience will respond to.
I
love creating remixes myself, although I stopped a couple of years
ago to focus on our own music. I tend to put ridiculous amounts of
time into my work and some remixes could end up taking weeks to
complete. Emerald & Doreen released a compilation called “Crazy
Trips” which has all my best remix work on it.
5) You went to extraordinary lengths to produce the video for the single ‘Brand New’ could you tell the readers more about it?
M:
When I created the music video for "Brand New" I knew I
wanted the visuals to go from dirty to clean. The only way to do
this, in my head, was to have the video going backwards. I didn't
want it to just be another video done in reverse, though... I wanted
it to have something extra about it. So I had to sing it in reverse,
too.
I
started by reversing the audio, and then writing down how I would
need to say it to look right. I honestly didn't think it would be
hard to do, but when I began I realized that the shape of your lips
don't always line up with the word written backwards. It took several
rewrites and video tests to get it right. It took me a year to
finish, because I gave up a couple of months in due to frustration. I
really wanted to complete this idea as a music video, but I honestly
didn't think it would happen.
Something
like 8 months later I was still Drawn to the idea, so I picked it
back up. The final music video used was the second take, and it
turned out better than i thought, so I kept it. There's quite a
feeling of accomplishment that comes with completing a project, and
going from an idea to a completed visual piece of art.
6)
What’s in the pipeline in terms of releases or live shows for
you guys in 2019?
Lots!
We released relatively few singles last year – Freedom Fields/A
Real Boy on E&D Records, and Detroit/Houses Of Fire on our own So
Gateeaux label because we were also working on our second album. We
hope to have completed it by this Spring. It has become a really epic
recording process, involving many guest musicians and a dizzying
array of styles and genres – often in the same song. I think there
will be about 20 songs on the album when it's complete. It's called
“Stabler, Tabler, Out Through The Window” and is a psychedelic
pinata of contemporary music. Something like that.
We
have a fantastic single called “Dinosaur Glass” which we are
putting the finishing touches to. It'll be out by March.
We'll
be doing some gigs and hopefully we'll get a festival slot or two
this Summer. We also have several radio shows waiting to have us on
as guests, and we are arranging to do a session for the people at BBC
Introducing.
Links
