| They’ve dabbled in dreamy pop music, trip-hop and dub-flavored psychedelic hip-hop, changing up styles and experimenting on each new album. With the release of Parts of the Process, an 18-track record that collects the hits from their four albums, London’s Morcheeba find themselves at a crossroads. Founding member Paul Godfrey looks back on the band’s career.
Fast Forward: Have you thought about the implications of Parts of the Process – that Morcheeba has actually been around long enough to put out a greatest hits record?
Paul Godrey: I have since people started asking me questions about it. I thought, "Shit, what the hell is it all about?" We didn’t sit around and go, "What we really need is a greatest hits album." Obviously, that comes from the record company and they pay us to do it and we don’t have to do that much work, so it kinda makes sense. (He laughs.) But yeah, it is interesting. It makes me feel quite old….
Do you see a logical growth in your recordings?
Yeah, I do, and it’s good to see. I’m weird because I don’t like to put too much emphasis on my recordings, really. I don’t know why. In years to come I may look back and see them as the golden years, but at the moment I just feel like there’s still so much to explore and so much to do. And that was like going to school for me, and the best was getting my exam results and I’ve kinda scraped through, y’know?
You were initially thrown in with Massive Attack, Portishead and the whole trip-hop scene....
Yeah, I don’t know whether that was a good thing or a bad thing, because we kinda got lumped in anyway. But it really doesn’t bother me. And one thing that’s happened is that I’m not so serious about it and I’m not so precious about it, because really, it’s just the music we make, it really isn’t us as individuals. But I think we proved ourselves with our touring. As a live outfit we’ve done extremely well, and as songwriters also. When you consider that "Who Can You Trust" and "Big Karma" are two of the first songs we ever wrote, it was really sort of quite an achievement – it was above average. That paved the way for a strong career for us and we’ve made the most of what we’ve got.
You’ve mentioned in other interviews how you’ve turned the corner from a studio act to a live act.
A lot of these fantastic records, you see it live and it’s just two blokes behind keyboards. You think, "(What the) fuck is that all about? That’s not live music!" It might have been novel in about ’77, but it’s a crap show. The thing with a lot of these studio guys is that they’re really not at home on a stage, and I know I suffer from that.
What do you do to get around that?
Get drunk.
That’s helpful.
Yeah. But, y’know, we’ve developed into... we didn’t want to even be a live band for that very reason. Then we thought if we’re going to be a live band we should be a proper live band and we should be a good one. We should get good musicians and come up with material that works well and invest a lot of money in doing it. And after eight years we’ve got a fantastic crew and a great band – there’s a lot of love when we’re doing it and I think that comes across. A lot of people come to our shows and we have a good reputation, and for a band that didn’t even want to play live, I think that’s quite an achievement.
Morcheeba’s Parts of the Process arrives in stores July 1. |
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