Interviu cu Jake Wherry (The Herbaliser)

Interviu realizat de Alex Rosu pentru Feeder.ro

Feeder.ro: Jake, you used to play guitar and bass in jazz bands when you were younger; is that why The Herbaliser has adopted, more and more, an organic sound, something that is closer to a band sound?
Jake Wherry: We have been a live band since 1997

Feeder.ro: Yes, but it just feels, listening to your albums and to Same as it Never Was, that it’s even more so…
JW: There is more, but there are still samples involved; I’m not a jazz musician myself, I can’t read music, I’m not trained, I’m more like a funk-feel musician, I don’t know music theory, but ever since I’ve been using a sampler since 1993, 1992, I’ve always used a sampler as a musician other than taking pieces of someone else’s work and not try to do anything with it. Ever since day one we take samples and take them into tiny little pieces and rearrange them and change the pitch and process things so that you could play one thing on top of another – two different geometries of music make them sound good together.
So I’ve always tried to be very musical in the way I use a sampler. But with every record we have more… See – the problem with when we started making music, we didn’t have very good facilities to record live instruments. When I recorded a bass through a standard DI box, it just never sounded like fat and warm as a bass off of a 1969 funk record, or a 1972 soundtrack, and as we’ve been more successful we’ve been able to take the best – better recording equipment, better microphones and it does make a difference.

Feeder.ro: Ollie described “Same as it never was” in an interview as being “very different”. How is it different from your previous work?
JW: I don’t think it is. I mean, a lot of the press when we made the record, they said it’s a really different album… It’s different because the singing on it and the songs.. but musically, the influences haven’t changed at all since we started making music. I mean, our influences go back to the 60’s, the 70’s, early hip-hop, the 80’s and early ‘90s, but nothing.. no music genre like drum and bass or UK garage or grime, none of that changed the way we feel about music or influenced us to do things differently. We’re still hearing music the same as we heard it when we started it, in ’93-’94.

Feeder.ro: Speaking of UK garage and all that bass-heavy, dark, aggressive music that is flowing out of the UK at the moment, do you think the more organic-sounding music, that is closer to what you guys do, do you think it will come back in the UK at some point?
JW: It always does, there have been so many different styles of music that have come and gone since we started… Yeah, we started to feel a bit old-fashioned now

Feeder.ro: You seem to find outstanding female vocalists… I’m thinking Jean Grey, and now Jessica Darling… What’s the special thing you look for, in a vocalist?
JW: Big tits!

Feeder.ro: Hahaha!
JW: I mean, with Jean Grey, the fact that she’s female is irrelevant, she’s one of the best rappers full stop period. After we worked with Jean Grey, we worked with this UK MC, Whiteflower, and people started saying “Oh, you’re like hip-hop feminists”… No – we just want to work with good MC’s, and whether they’re female or male is kind of irrelevant, we just happened to find good MC’s that were female.

Feeder.ro: How did you find Jessica, then?
JW: There’s a guy that replaces me in the bands sometimes – unfortunately 5 years ago my first wife died and I had two young boys to look after so I didn’t tour for about two years; so the guy that played bass for me – he’s a working musician and he’s played in a wedding covers band and Jessica was in that band as well, and he told us about this fantastic young singer. We met her, heard her sing, though she was really good and it all came together like that.

Feeder.ro: Do you plan to take The Meateaters, your solo project, further? I’ve listened to some excellent tracks from that project…
JW: Probably not… The Meateaters was me and Ralph Lamb who’s in The Herbaliser anyway. On “Same as it Never Was” all the songs are co-written by Lamb, so we’re kind of working together anyway. The Meateaters.. that band had its day, and I don’t think we’ll be doing anymore.
But it was good – all the people that I worked with in The Meateaters, apart from the singer, she was called Sharon Scott – we did some instrumental stuff and then we did some vocal stuff, all of them are now involved in The Herbaliser. But we lost a lot of heart – we made about seven really good, soulfoul tracks, kind of like The Young Disciples, we made about seven tracks like that and we got so close to getting a big record deal – and then it all fell through and we said: “Oh, fuck it”…

Feeder.ro: So why did you drop Ninja Tune and moved a label on the mainland?
JW: To be fair, Ninja Tune weren’t prepared to give us enough money to make the record and we made five records with Ninja Tune, and this “Same as it never was” we felt was really special, with new vocals, and was different, and we thought that if we’d have released it on Ninja Tune I don’t think the press would’ve considered it anything different – like “Oh yeah, here’s the sixth album from The Herbaliser on Ninja Tune”. We wanted to really present it – we got a new management, a new agent.

Feeder.ro: So you’ve changed everything around The Herbaliser
JW: Yeah. But unfortunately, we did it at a time when the music business is in big trouble

Feeder.ro: Is it, though? I hear more and more people go to live shows than ever
JW: Yeah, I think so, but we don’t really make money from live shows… We can just about pay the musicians. But.. with all the flights.. we’re a big band.. 8 people on stage, then the tour manager, and the lighting guy and the sound man.. To be honest, when the band starts off they lose money touring, and we’re just about at the stage now with the band that we don’t lose money.. but we don’t make any money touring, and you can’t make any money selling records, so it’s really tough…

Feeder.ro: Yeah, it sounds like it’s really tough. Then why don’t you go for a more stripped down version of what The Herbaliser does?
JW: Because then it wouldn’t sound like us, live, it wouldn’t be us, ‘cause our sound is a big sound and you need lots of musicians… It’s not even lots of musicians – we got what – a drummer, one keyboard player, me on bass, two horns, we used to have four horns so we have stripped it down a bit, and then the singer and then Ollie on turntables. And Ollie, now that he uses Serato Scratch he does a lot on the turntables like playing guitar parts that I have recorded in the studio and he scratches them live… We couldn’t do it with any less. We used to be a nine or ten piece…

Feeder.ro: So how many people will we see now on stage in Bucharest?
JW: Seven.

Feeder.ro: It’s still a lot.
JW: Yeah, but I can’t see how we could do it with any less.. One guy on the saxophone isn’t a horn section, so two people.. I’d rather have four on the horns like we used to. But at the moment it’s two horns, one vocal, one bass, one keyboard, one drummer, and Ollie on the turntables. I can’t see which one of those you could lose. And it would be hard to lose one.
But we’re looking forward to coming, one of the reasons why we’ve put the band together is to travel around and see new places and obviously it gets harder and harder and less often that we go to new countries, so we’re really looking forward to come to Romania.

Feeder.ro: Have you toured in Eastern Europe before?
JW: Yeah, we played many times in Hungary, in the Czech Republic. I’ve DJed in lots of places, I’ve DJed in Poland and we’re about to do our first live show in Poland in September as well, but this will be the first time we play live in Romania.

Feeder.ro: I think Ollie had a DJ set a couple of years ago in Bucharest…
JW: Right.

Feeder.ro: So how does the Eastern European crowd react to your music?
JW: You can’t generalize and say Eastern Europe is one thing, ‘cause it’s different. The first time we played in Prague they were wild, they loved us, but we’ve DJed in Poland and people looked like they want to murder you, we played with a live band in Moscow, about seven or eight years ago… It was really interesting, we couldn’t get into the venue, the security wouldn’t let us in, and we were waiting outside with all the public and then the public started being really abusive and say “Fuck you English” and just saying all these really aggressive things, and then they really enjoyed the concert.

The Herbaliser canta la Tuborg Green Fest in Parcul Izvor, 4-6 septembrie. Acces gratuit.