Published in Shindig! Magazine
From nocturnal notes to residential studio time, Matt Berry talks to Greg Healey about his new album, the alchemy of creativity and the power of a live band.
“I picked the studio because there aren’t many left that have the two inch tape and the old analogue desk,” says Matt Berry of his decision to record at Kent’s Rimshot studios. With its 60 year old Decca mixing desk, impressive spaces and quiet rural location, it was the perfect place “to do the album’s backbone of bass, drums and acoustic rhythm,” whilst enjoying some of the old school seclusion that was once the meat and drink of the record industry. “It’s in the middle of the countryside, so it’s similar to the way people used to make albums, when they’d go to residential studios in the country.”
A step change and an evolution from 2013’s Kill The Wolf, this album benefits again from Matt’s thoughtful approach. “I’d written songs over the time since the last album Kill The Wolf and I’d pretty much worked up demos of the songs, and extra songs,” he says. “I used to do absolutely everything and then, at the end, get the drummer to put live drums on. But this time I wanted the whole thing to feel like a band and have that feel that you can only get with human beings.” Once the core was recorded Matt then returned to his established practice and worked on the album at his home studio.
Those human beings he refers to come in the form of his touring band, the Maypoles, and collaborators like Ben Castle (sax, bass and clarinet), Steve Jourdonas (trumpet) and Cecilia Fage (backing vocals). “It’s just that you want to do something different. They’re such great players that it just made total sense to use them on the album,” explains Matt. “It was all pretty much set and everything was demoed to quite a detail. Even ‘Night Terrors’, if you listen to the demo of that, with the live instruments, it’s me doing everything to demonstrate what I wanted it to be and they just bring it to life.”
The nine minute long ‘Night Terrors’, with its strong freeform electric jazz vibe, serves as the black heart of an album that explores his established themes of night time despair through an impressively coherent suite of potent and beguiling songs. Discussing ‘Night Terrors’, and how the whole project crystallised, Matt describes an album that was, very nearly, much, much darker. “There was one point when, and the record company would’ve gone mental, but it was going to be both sides: you know the kind of journey through the night, when you wake up with a start and you’re kind of worried about this or that. That was the first idea I had. But I knew, after doing Music For Insomniacs, that they didn’t want another of those for a while. But it all sort of made sense. It’s kind of like all these things, they’re always in the back room somewhere and it’s doing it, doing itself on its own.”
Despite the beauty of the album, with tracks like ‘One By One’ shot through with melodic sunshine, a bleak and Stygian undertow stalks the carefully crafted sonic landscape. Matt elaborates on the reasons for this: “No one wants to hear me sing about how things have gone well or if you’ve won something. So I’m not interested in writing anything about that. It’s just when you feel at your most raw and real, I suppose. And from Kill The Wolf till now, that’s what it is: it’s times where you might even be with someone, yet you feel more alone. It’s all of those kind of feelings. Because I suffer from insomnia, I try not to make it the centre of things, because then it’s won, it’s taken over. But it’s a good thing to hang this on, because the course of a night time, with all the solitude and the grey light and what comes of that, is a thing that it became all about.”
The balancing act between the personal and the universal, the challenge of maintaining the uneasy gestalt between many different elements, allowing concepts and themes to emerge, is a conundrum Matt understands only too well. “These things are always unintentional and only become apparent afterwards. If you’re feeling a certain way, or you are only writing about those things that are going on at that time, it’s only when the thing is an album, in a literal sense, that you think, oh right, they’re all linked. It’s the same with anything with me: I can look at episodes of Toast and I know what I was interested in, or what was going on at the time, because of the writing. There could be a turn of phrase, or the fact that I was into the moon landing at the time; you can kind of follow what was going on in your life through your work. If you let go of the reins, in terms of subject matter, it will do itself.”
Matt describes working practices that see him making notes from his bedside on his iPhone or “getting up at 4:15am” to fire up his home studio. From there, his years of experience and fascination with engineering sound allow him to achieve those “subtle things,” like “the use of a certain reverb that can take you back to sound of records from a certain time.” In this way The Small Hours is replete with inflections and influences, but never once becomes pastiche. Many influences, including film and TV composers of the Sixties and Seventies, like Laurie Johnson, Barry Gray and Johnny Pearson, are hinted at, but any presence is found only in terms of atmosphere and expression. As this modern day composer explains: “When you’re right in the middle of it you don’t know what you’ve just referenced, you’re not doing it on purpose. You want it to sound like something, but you can’t remember what that exactly was.”
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Published in Shindig! Magazine end of 2016
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