Morcheeba

JOY. Concerts Present
MORCHEEBA
+ Alex Cornish

Thirty years ago, a chance meeting at a South London party led to one of the most enduring and creative partnerships in British electronic music. After that first encounter, the budding multi instrumentalist Ross Godfrey from Kent, only 18 at the time, heard that Skye the East Londoner sang and wrote songs, so he invited her round his flat share in Dalston. 
“Ross asked me who I sounded like. And I said: ‘I don’t sound like anyone.’” Not, Skye clarifies with an apologetic smile, in an arrogant way. “I didn’t know who I was. So I just wanted to present myself. I played a song on my guitar, very quietly, and they loved my voice. And the rest is history.”
That’s a three-decades-deep history. One that’s encompassed 10 previous studio records, over 10 million albums sold, countless world tours, solo albums, film soundtracks and the inevitable spins of the line-up carousel. You don’t become trip hop royalty without some interesting detours along the way. And you don’t become enduring artists, beloved of multiple generations and lauded across the music industry – see, most recently, last summer’s invitation from Chaka Khan to headline her Meltdown Festival at the Southbank in London – if you don’t learn how to Escape the Chaos. And if you’re Morcheeba, a musical byword for comfort and calm, you’re taking your fans with you.
“Absolutely,” affirms Skye. “We’ve had a lot of people say to us over the years that our music has changed their lives or got them through something that was really difficult or traumatic. It’s a good feeling that you can help to heal people in your own small way.”
Introducing the 11th studio album from Morcheeba. Escape The Chaos is 12 tracks of balm and boldness, familial strength (that’s chosen family and actual family), community solidarity, exquisite electronic-meets-organic production, and the instantly recognisable and always reliably shivering power of Skye’s vocal. The album’s opening shot is the single Call For Love. The simmering, rootsy anthem, released in these worryingly turbulent times, the song’s themes of inclusion and support and tolerance resonate with importance. As Ross puts it: “Call For Love is very grounding, musically and emotionally. The world is so confusing and complicated these days. An apocalypse is always on the horizon, both personal and global. It is comforting to take refuge in music and love with those close to us."
For Skye, that came from acting personally. “When it came to writing lyrics for this song, I thought to myself: 'What would I like to hear from a certain someone, if and when they were ready to say sorry?’” she explains. “As it turned out, it was also what I needed to say to them.”
There’s similar sweetness-in-strength in We Live and Die. Pegged as the album’s second single, it sounds like David Axelrod doing a Bond theme. Soaring with clarion brass and electric guitar squeals, it’s lent wings by another ear-tingling Skye vocal – and we’re unlikely to hear this year a more trenchant lyric than “been a wicked little bastard on purpose”. Following 2021’s Blackest Blue and it’s extensive international tour, Escape The Chaos took two years to write and record, with Ross producing the 12 tracks, sometimes with a little help from friends. At a key early session in Dublin, with songwriter/producer Alex O’Keefe (SISTRA, Bobbi Arlo), they were joined by Skye’s son Jaega on drums and her husband Steve Gordon on bass, both mainstays off the live band. “It felt more like the old days of recording when we laid down those tracks” says Godfrey, “we were actually in a room playing the song together as opposed to staring at a computer screen on our own. I find the modern way of making records quite sterile and dull.”
Those sessions produced two tracks, the elegantly chill Elephant Clouds and the tough, beat-driven Bleeding Out.
“Alex had that beat already,” explains Ross, “and it’s not the sort of beat I would programme, so I was quite keen to start jamming on it. I don’t think we had any music when we went into the studio and we came up with the whole thing in about an hour or so. Skye had the melody, Steve was playing the bass, I was doing the guitar and keyboards. It all came together really quickly. Sometimes with songs you need about a week to work out what it is that you’re trying to play. Other ones just click straight away and that was one of those.”
There was similar group energy back home, in the South London studio where Morcheeba’s live band helped bring the vibes for Hold It Down, a co-write with Jordan Hadfield, a young writer whose demo inspired Skye to come up with another personal lyric reflecting on a “helluva journey…”, the story of someone close to her, once estranged from the family but now on a “journey back to the fold”. Other guest contributions include rapper Oscar #Worldpeace on the riveting Peace Of Me, a succinct plea to fix the world’s obsession with conflict. Ross heard Oscar’s ‘Never Know’ on the radio and thought his mellow vocals would sit well on a Morcheeba record so endeavoured to contact the laid back London MC. Australian musician/producer Hugh Counsell co-wrote the old school hip-hop-esque Cooler Heads, a tight, concise, sunny instrumental at the album’s heart, a “palate cleanser” after the emotional heaviness of some of the other tracks.
“We’ve not had DJ scratching on our records for ages so I phoned my good friend Mr. Six – he used to DJ live for us on the road – and asked him to come over to rock the turntables. We had a great day of making silly noises with decks, the track sounds great.”
They looked across another ocean but also closer to home on the shamanic blues and psychedelic wah wah of Pareidolia, named after “the tendency for perception to impose a meaningful interpretation on a nebulous stimulus, usually visual, so that one detects an object, pattern, or meaning where there is none.” So, that’s those moments when you spot a face in wood or an animal on a rock face. Ross admits that “I do that all the time. If I’m looking at a tiled floor, I’ll see faces or little cartoon characters.”
“He’s done too much acid in his time,” jokes Skye. The vocals and lyrics are by Ross’ wife, French singer Amanda Zamolo, a previous collaborator with the band on the albums Dive Deep and Blaze Away. Then Skye suggested another player: Colombian musician El Léon Pardo.
“I’d seen him play at The Railway in Tulse Hill, where my son ran a jam residency under the name Slick and Bobby. They did a dub-meets-cumbia night, and this guy was just incredible. So I said to Ross we should get him on the record.”
“He plays a Gaita,” says Ross, “which is a traditional Colombian flute. He’d gone back home to South America but I managed to get hold of him and asked him to record over a backing tack. He sent back three or four takes, which I edited together so they worked in harmony. Then I played along on the guitar – the combination is some sort of weird, Latin American version of Electric Ladyland.”
And, then, ultimately, in terms of its message and its position closing the album, is the title track Escape The Chaos. As Ross puts it: “This whole record is a process of trying to reconnect with what really matters, whether it’s what in your heart or with the world, putting your feet on grass and feeling the earth beneath you. It’s about not being distracted by all the bullshit.”
“The song Escape The Chaos is about being able to press play and switch off,” says Skye, touching on the ageless vitality of her band. “I love being able to do that with music. It can be a bit of therapy. It won’t bring about world peace, but it can bring about inner peace and calm.”
Morcheeba have been around for 30 years now and they are still bringing the calm in a big way.