Morcheeba

Morcheeba are that rare thing: a band to love but also a band that keeps you guessing, that refuse flatly to co-operate with the safe maxims of stasis and repetition that make so much modern pop so damn predictable
In 1995, a twelve-inch called “Trigger Hippie” dropped into the world’s lap and slipped under the skin. It came from a trio called Morcheeba made up of two brothers, Paul and Ross Godfrey, and a singer, Skye, who could draw tears with her throat.

The album that followed, 1996’s “Who can you trust” still ranks as one of the finest suites of misery a British band had ever given us. The sublime mix of Paul’s hypnotically heavy beatscapes, Ross’ fluidly searing guitar work and Skye’s perfectly responsive voice all sounding like they’d been waiting all their lives to find each other and only had an hour to speak the truth.
An album borne out of frustrating small-town lives for the two brothers, in which only their mutual obsession with hip-hop and blues afforded exorcism.
On moving to London and hooking up with a similarly loose-ended Skye at a house-party, the trio submerged themselves in sound for three months to produce what they then thought could be their only chance of ever being heard. That the album, and the increasingly successful singles it spawned (“Tape Loop”, “Never An Easy Way”) found such a huge response amongst the public was testament to the word-of-mouth, almost secret love Morcheeba were already cultivating in anyone with ears to listen.

With 1998’s “Big Calm” Morcheeba did something bands aren’t meant to do anymore. They changed. Progressed. Moved on, blew up the template, maintained the essentially melancholic tint but expanded their debut’s blue-n-black confinement into a full-blooded riot of pop colour and warped craft. Trawling wider through the trio’s musical obsessions, diving into dub, folk, soul, hip-hop, and psychedelia but always suffused with their own uniquely intuitive songwriting skill, it was declared album of the year by those supposedly in the know, and has racked up a million sales since amongst those who know even better. The triumphant gigs and festival appearances that followed (including an unforgettable Albert Hall show) cemented their rep as one of the finest UK live bands, but the exhaustive world tour that followed broke backs and spirits. When the band returned to England in early 99 it was clear the Morcheeba story had to take another tangent. Something Paul affirms: “We just had to chill out, take a break from each other, really each individually come to terms with who we now were and what we wanted to do. Our lives had changed, we had changed, but the way we worked hadn’t. So we relaxed. I got back to DJing, Ross got a flat and started leading a normal life, we all just really needed to step off the rollercoaster, and then when it came to recording another LP we all totally got our enthusiasm back for it.”

Ross: “The initial excitement of getting somewhere had kept us on this mad ride for about four years and when you wake up from that you realize you’ve got a real bad hangover and you haven’t been paid.”

This new lease of life gave us 2000’s Fragments Of Freedom, a national treasure kicked open and ready for everyone, pop grown up enough to be both unashamed and perfect and totally unexpected! Charango is the new album from Morcheeba. It sounds like the kind of album that should always have been a part of your collection; like mood music for the 21st century. In the 60s a group of Brazilian musicians formed Tropicalia, a movement that was based on the idea of musical cannibalism. Gilberto Gil, Caetano Veloso, Gal Costa and the rock band Os Mutantes combined Brazil’s own folk and samba styles with whatever they liked from the west: rock’n’roll, psychedelia, R&B. The goal was to “eat and digest” the finest cuts of European music, and do with the rest of it what bears have been doing in the woods for a very long time indeed. Now Morcheeba have taken that idea and applied it to their own rich and strange work. “We’ve used the place that we’ve come from – that English beats tradition – and reached out to as many things as possible to make this defining sound,” says Ross Godfrey, the band’s guitarist/multi-instrumentalist. ” Skye, Pacewon, Slick Rick and Kurt Wagner can all sit on this record together comfortably” Charango is the result. The beating heart of Morcheeba ripples through every song – there is the same elegance, romance and melancholy that made the first three albums so special – but the breadth of vision has grown. It is music that has the confidence to forge its own identity while taking on board everything that its creators love from anywhere in the world.

The benign influence of library music, orchestral film scores, hip-hop old and new, country, 70s rock, blues, exotica, and the Brazilian psychedelia of Os Mutantes have all gone into the making of a thoroughly modern sound. “It wouldn’t have been possible to make an album like this ten years ago,” says Paul Godfrey, Morcheeba’s Beathead and lyricist. “This isn’t a case of us going out and looking for the exotic, but a natural result of what’s been happening to us, and what we’ve been listening to.” It’s also the result of the mixed blessings of Morcheeba’s changing circumstances. “It’s a cliche, but it’s very difficult to come to terms with success” says Paul. “You can become self-conscious about the fact that people know who you are. So the goal is to concentrate on the songwriting and the production – all the focus is on bringing those classic traditions to our trademark heavy beats and making music that we love.” There is nothing fraudulent about this record. Everything is played live, and great missions were undertaken in the search of finding the right instruments to create the right sounds. “We’ve worked really, really hard, and done exactly what we have believed in,” says Paul. “We haven’t had the usual distractions of having to worry about money, or about whether the business is being taken care of. Having completed this record, I feel completely genuine as an artist, and that’s the first time I’ve felt like that in our career.”

Another important ingredient was the choice of collaborators. On Orchestral arrangement duties was Nick Ingman, a veteran of the Music de Wolfe sound library records of the 60s and 70s that were recorded by session musicians for TV and radio, and have gone on to become highly sought for their sample-friendly strangeness. R&B bassist Pino Palladino lends his funk to a large number of tracks, and Kurt Wagner of Nashville’s country soul collective Lambchop wrote the lyrics for Undress Me Now and What New York Couples Fight About, also co-starring on the latter. Slick Rick, the hip-hop pioneer who was only recently released from jail for shooting his cousin, wrote and delivered the track Women Lose Weight and Pacewon of the Outsidaz spat venom on Charango and Get Along. Charango is the album that Morcheeba have been waiting to make. All three began to adapt to the enormous changes that success brings, and learnt to realise what matters and what doesn’t. In the spaces inbetween, they quietly formed a masterpiece. “We wanted this to be our weird, psychedelic, out-there album,” concludes Paul. “But we’ve got such a strong pop sensibility that we knew that you would be able to sing along to it. We always start by sitting down with an acoustic guitar and working out a song, and a good song is at the heart of everything.”