We recently caught up with Jon from beauty-folk purveyors Stornoway
to discuss creative influences and processes, hopes for the future, bird
song and the apocalypse.
The band are based in Oxford, yet you are named
after a town in the Scottish Hebrides; both are beautiful places, but
where would you rather be? Inside the creative, intellectual hub that is
Oxford, or amongst the beauty and peace of a Scottish Island?
It’s difficult for me to speak for all of us as in fact
only half of us are now living in Oxford! If it were a choice between an
intellectual hub and a remote island, I am fairly certain that Brian
would prefer to be in the wilds (he is currently ensconced in the Gower
Peninsula). Oli is enjoying London life, where the streets are paved
with gold. Meanwhile Rob and I are still feeling intellectually
inadequate in Oxford. We’re all meeting up pretty regularly at the
moment, though, as we are working on new musical bits and bobs.
Nature is a continual theme throughout your work,
from album art to lyrics. What is it about natural science that you find
so appealing, and how do you best like to transfer this to your music?
Yes, I suppose references to the natural world are pretty
prevalent in Stornoway lyrics and titles! More often than not they are
there in metaphorical form to mirror something going on beneath the
surface in the internal world of the protagonist, but on a couple of
occasions we’ve referred to the natural world more transparently as a
subject in its own right. On the first album there’s a song called We are the Battery Human
which is really a song about spending too much time staring at plasma
screens (which I’m doing right now as it happens), instead of going
outside, connecting with nature and living a life unfettered by
technology. On our new mini-album You Don’t Know Anything, there is a
song called The Sixth Wave about mass extinction and
drawing a connection with the way we live now and the resources we are
using. On a more subliminal level, we’ve often used bird song several
times in our recordings. Oli mimics a South African birdsong in a looped
section in his bass part to The Sixth Wave, and after spending weeks in a windowless garage, we ended our recording sessions with the track Tumbling Bay
by using sampled sounds outside. You can hear the breeze in the trees
and a bit of bird song – wrens, nuthatches and possibly robins… as well
as a bit of traffic!
Many of your tracks have nostalgic, heart-wrenchingly accurate themes – for me most evocatively in the track Fuel Up.
With reference to that track in particular, which do you feel is the
best age to be, 9, 18 or 27? Or are they all perfect and painful in
different ways?
I’m glad you like it! I think it is among Brian’s better
bits of lyric-writing, in that he explores a single metaphor pretty
thoroughly, and it’s also very accessible as an idea which can strike a
chord with people. I particularly like the line “there’s no rewind, so
you might as well play” when we’re doing it live. In terms of your
question, I think 9 is a probably the best age, as that’s when we are at
our most imaginative, and instinctively know how to pretend and play.
When I was that age I was into making tapes of short, pompously titled
‘compositions’ and imagining I was making real albums, and obsessively
watching and re-watching a video I had called The Complete Beatles.
Nothing’s really changed that much so far as I’m concerned!
Focusing further on rites of passage, your new
album covers the vast expanse of everyday life’s joys and
disappointments, with perhaps as much shadow as there is light. Does
adulthood/ageing cause you concern, or does is it more of a conductor
for the band’s creativity and emotional resonance?
I’m not sure I would draw a distinction between the
creative act and the experience of ‘adulthood’ or ‘life’, as
self-evidently we don’t create in a vacuum or in a dispassionate way. I
think all of our music contains a substantial amount of autobiography,
from which you can draw your own conclusions!
You tour a lot, yet you reportedly spent two whole
winters recording your second album, Tales From Terra Firma. Do you
enjoy both performing and recording equally, or does one ultimately take
precedence? And which form gives the audience the truest version of
your music?
We sometimes think that in playing entirely acoustically we
can give our audiences the purest version of our songs. That said,
speaking for myself, on balance I probably slightly prefer the adventure
involved in recording music, because I’ve always been attracted to the
magic in layering things. One of my favourite records when I was young
was Mike Oldfield’s Tubular Bells, which as many will know was
just one-man-in-a-studio-multi-tracking in excelsis. I like to think of
the studio version of our music as a form of imaginative aspiration. But
as we all know, there is that raw element of spontaneity and immediacy
to playing live which cannot be equalled, nor that instantaneous, living
bond you form with fellow musicians and the crowd on any given night.
And of course there is a stirring hint of danger that everything could
disintegrate at any minute! In any case, we would never seek to merely
emulate a recording for the benefit of an audience, as they deserve
something special.
I think in the past the studio and the live gig used to be
entirely different beasts, but we now live in an era when they are more
blurred, so perhaps there is no such thing as a “true” version. Studio
recordings no longer exist as definitive versions of any given song as
you can always find a recorded live version online, and a lot of
performers use pre-recorded backing live as well (for the record, we
haven’t ever done this…yet!).
What are your favourite musical elements to use and
why? Loop stations, effect units, certain time signatures or
instruments/timbres…?
For me it’s the search for setting a song and helping it
fulfill its potential, as it were. Personally, I find looping stations a
bit of a yawn – especially in a live context, unless someone’s doing
something truly creative with it… Time signatures and changes are
something that need to feel natural in order to work, rather than a
mathematical point of reference – I’ve always enjoyed Field Music’s work
in that respect, as the cerebral aspects of their music don’t feel
laboured or showy to me. Trying out new sounds, instruments, textures
and so on are pretty much the thing that I’m most excited by, even if
those things are ultimately slightly peripheral to the general sound of
Stornoway. Quite often you don’t get it right first time – it’s a bit
like feeling your way in the dark, and you can end up with something
implausible that still suits the song for whatever reason.
What is next for Stornoway? Are you already looking
towards album number three, and if so, what could it cover musically,
lyrically and conceptually?
It’s almost certainly too early to comment on this in depth
too much, but yes, we are scratching around with some new demo ideas
and beating them into shape. Musically, we are hoping it will sound like
the aural equivalent of mid-winter oregano on a fresh bed of rocket,
with a hint of crepuscular basil, orange peel and bonfires, at dawn on
Blackpool harbour.
See this at MTTM at: http://www.morethanthemusic.co.uk/stornoway-qa-october-2013/
