"Music You Can Grow Old To"
Morcheeba, The Art of Longevity, and the Concert of the Summer
Where to start? With how much I loved Morcheeba when they first came on the scene; indeed how much the trip-hop sound with which they became indelibly associated appealed to my overall senses in mid-90s NYC, a time at which I was still DJing and the genre’s downtempo vibes and urban British singing, combined with my adoptive hometown’s beat culture, provided a refreshing alternative to the otherwise pervasive supercharged Detroit-Rotterdam-Berlin techno trip? And how, though the London trio of Morcheeba landed a couple of years after the Bristol-based advance guard (Massive Attack, Tricky, Portishead), and in the midst of a second British wave that included Sneaker Pimps and Olive, their debut US show in 1997 at Manhattan’s Supper Club seemed a cut above, as had their debut album Who Can You Trust? the previous year? And how everyone loved their second album Big Calm and its accompanying singles, to the point that its buddha-and-turntable cover imagery became synonymous with a certain lifestyle that almost rendered their cool a cliché?
Or do I start this past May, when my South London-based friend Bleddyn told me that Morcheeba would be headlining one of the South Facing festival evenings at Crystal Palace Park, aboveDJ Shadow and UNKLE, should my summer holiday with Paula take us through until its August 14 date? And how my initial reaction – “Morcheeba are still going?” – now seems culturally ignorant given that the act barely ever stopped, but could be partially excused by the fact that the group (from which original singer Skye Edwards was excised for two albums between 2003-2008 and which did indeed “split” for a while, out of respect for the name, after founding brother Paul Godfrey left the group in 2014) has not played the USA in over a decade?
Tony Fletcher, Wordsmith, posts at least twice a week. Subscribe to get all the articles in your Inbox. Up to a paid subscription to get all the archives, the exclusives and the Crossed Channels podcast, just as I paid for my ticket to South Facing!
Maybe I should commence with how, at Bleddyn’s suggestion, I dove into Morcheeba’s brand new album, Escape The Chaos, and found it to be no less on the money, no less musically relevant, and yet no less distinctly trip-hop than almost anything being made by artists thirty years their junior operating in any sort of similar vein? With how I then worked back through their last twenty years of catalogue with guilty feelings of belated “discovery” and concluded that, though our holiday in London would end on August 12, everything about this concert – location, artists, friends – appealed to me more than anything else on the outdoor calendar in the UK or USA this summer and that I would surely only regret not attending?
Or do I start with how, sat at my Good Old Desk two full weeks since landing back in the USA, I am still buzzing off the concert, still ecstatic that I made the right decision by extending the trip? To be sure, I am buzzing about the whole event, the various circumstances that combine so that any one concert can feel so much better (or worse) for any one individual. But what I am primarily still grooving on is the sheer magic of Morcheeba’s performance, a career-leaping 90-minute set that was as psychedelic as it was smooth, as guitar-driven as it was beats-based, and every bit as loud and boisterous as it was somehow simultaneously laid-back and relaxed. [Below, the group performing “Friction” early into their set at the Crystal Palace Bowl.]
We can start anywhere along this linear line; it’s all part of the process. But if you want some understanding of how a group like Morcheeba has arrived at its current, contented equilibrium, decades after Skye and Ross first bonded over spliff at a Greenwich house party, long after the hip(ster) years as press darlings, then the global success of 2002-3 with Charango that found them headlining Glastonbury and the Hollywood Bowl, even touring China, only for Ross and brother Paul to eject Skye at the end of it; beyond the inevitably disappointing albums with other singers, the chance re-encounter, a reformation, Paul’s departure, the years under a different name, and onto their current status as proud guardians of a trip-hop flame that has otherwise lost its original flickering candles, I have a couple of suggestions:
You could look at this early promo shot of Skye with Ross in 1995, in which the singer has a guitar around her waist to hide the fact that she was five months pregnant at the time, and then take on board that that hidden bundle in her tummy, who would soon be christened Jaega, has for many years now been the drummer in his mother’s group; that the years of estrangement between Skye and Ross only makes Morcheeba all the more convincing for what they clearly are: a family affair.
You could read the accompanying Guardian article, from 2022, part of a Then and Now series in which an early photograph is recreated years down the line, and see how it reveals something else: how, while Ross has put on the predictable few pounds and lost hair along the way, Skye looks essentially unchanged after 27 years (despite her protestation of her breasts that “There’s nothing left of them!”), her seemingly eternal youth and beauty and her ability to sing so convincingly and gracefully on record having much to do with the group’s solidified popularity.
Or you could, as I did in a break between assembling this review, listen to Skye and Ross recorded live in front of an audience on The Art of Longevity, a podcast that focuses on musicians who have created life-long careers and remain atop of their game. Longevity, I must note, especially when it comes to music, is very different from legacy. A legacy act is one whose new albums, assume they make any, no longer register anything but a brief acknowledgement and are rarely featured in a live set that otherwise draws on the old hits; sad though I am to admit it, I have just described The Who. Morcheeba, however, have eleven studio albums to their name (and a twelfth as Skye & Ross), and there is every reason to argue – indeed, many others have done so before me – that Escape The Chaos is their greatest since their early heyday.
The Art of Longevity’s Morcheeba interview is especially enlightening for the manner in which Skye & Ross reflect, partly only on their hard work: Ross estimates he spent 5000 hours in his home studio on Escape The Chaos only for, as Skye puts it elsewhere, the Millennial generation’s expectation (even from her 27-year-old daughter] to distil it down to a thirty-second TikTok video. There is also gratitude that they were well placed to survive the music industry’s collapse around the millennium, having built a loyal but slow-burning international audience only on the back of their continued quality recordings and a live reputation to go with it.
Longevity is further explained, in Ross’ words, by Morcheeba’s music sounding, and I quote,
“reasonably timeless - because people still sound like trip-hop now, and it’s almost like music hasn’t really changed in the last 25 years, so we don’t sound really dated. You can pick almost any modern new artist and they almost sound like trip-hop, and there’s not any new tricks.”
This may appear as a provocatively ludicrous statement, but if one eliminates the harder edges of metal and rap, and perhaps the most mainstream of all pop, it’s a hard one to argue against: from Billie Eilish to Lil Nas X, modern acts are making blended concoctions similar to those first invented in the studio laboratories of London and Bristol (and San Francisco and elsewhere) in the 1990s.1
Clearly comfortable in his musical skin, Ross likes the idea that you can “get back from work on a Friday night, have a glass of wine, or smoke a spliff, and listen to a Morcheeba record and… all your worries go out the window” - while Skye remains not just on hand, but centre stage, to point out that her lyrics frequently have a “threat of violence” to poison that soft exterior should you choose to bite into it.
Case in point: “Far We Come” from Escape The Chaos. The line “all that melanin they say is now for hire” concerns how in the present day everyone wants to be black, but back when Skye was growing up as a foster child in 1980s London with the words “wogs out” painted on nearby brick walls, then as the chorus puts it, “they said we all look the same.”
Given such challenges of upbringing, Skye’s endearingly upbeat personality indicates that she continues to have the last laugh, her sense of humour a wonderful icebreaker with a large festival crowd. At the Crystal Palace Bowl, she demanded the stage cameras zoom in on her ludicrously hi-heeled shoes, before kicking them off to spend the rest of the night dancing barefoot. She also got applause for announcing she had made her own outfit (and there appears to be a different vibrant fashion statement every night judging by the group’s IG account) and twirling it like the fashion model she could have been in the current day.
At conclusion of one especially hard-rocking coda she mocked the NME’s damning description of them as “the Devil’s own lounge band” and declared how “we printed it on a tee-shirt and sold it for a tenner!” And mid-set, seemingly impromptu, she burst into an a capella rendition of “Maybe It’s Because I’m A Londoner,” the old music hall number last heard at this volume around Crystal Palace on the terraces way back in the 1970s, and hardly considered a template for the musically and demographically cosmopolitan city is 21st Century London.
But if it’s true that a group can be judged by its cover versions, then Morcheeba’s late set inclusion of the Dawn Penn lover’s rock classic “You Don’t Love Me (No No No)” – a song that became a hit the year the trio was coming together – guarantees a vote of approval. Add to this the 1-2 encore punch of George Gershwin’s “Summertime” (a song Morcheeba covered in 1997 for the Red Hot + Rhapsody fund-raising album) and, below, local hero David Bowie’s “Let’s Dance” (the Crystal Palace Park is super close to, and almost equidistant in-between, Bowie’s childhood homes of Bromley and Beckenham and his birthplace of Brixton) and they get a perfect ten.
Those choice covers aside, Morcheeba’s set did not so much traverse their deep catalogue, as mine the entrance and exits. The show began with 1996 breakthrough song “Trigger Hippie,” and continued with other early (only minor) hits “Friction,” “The Sea,” with “Otherwise,” the eternally wonderful “Part of the Process” and the equally melodic “Rome Wasn’t Built In A Day” interspersed with only a couple of numbers from Escape The Chaos (opener “Call For Love” and “We Live and Die)”.
Elsewhere, and amidst the inspired covers, they displayed the confidence to include “Enjoy The Ride” from 2008’s Dive Deep, one of the two Morcheeba albums on which Skye was not featured, to close out the set proper with the non-charting title single from the 2018 album Blaze Away, and follow up the encore of “Let’s Dance” with a blazingly psychedelic – indeed, even hard rock – rendition of the new album’s “Bleeding Out” which, unfortunately, came up against the strict 10:30pm curfew. As the coda reached its voluminous climax, Ross playing the guitar with his teeth a la his childhood hero Hendrix (an impersonation that got him on the That’s Life TV show when he was just 13!), the PA was abruptly cut, followed seconds later by the big screens, leaving the band to jam it out on their own with just their amplifiers and percussion, and the few thousand down the front to presumably keep grooving along much more ecstatically than we could at the back.
Would I have enjoyed this show quite so much if not for the surrounding context, those cominations of circumstances I referenced in making my decision to stay over and attend? Unlikely. My perfect awayday back home started with a train up to South London from Brighton, where we had extended the holiday with a few nights by the sea; continued through a pint of Hepcat at the West Norwood local followed by, joy of joys, a quick visit to its producer, Gypsy Hill Brewery, my fave in all of London (for its beers if not its industrial estate location). Then, a meander with my fellow gig-goers past the Gypsy Road shops where I’d head as an 8-year-old to get the Evening Standard or Mail for the Saturday football scores if we’d got home too late from Selhurst Park to catch them on TV; where I’d walk daily aged 14-16 to the Post Office to cash all those Postal Orders for copies of Jamming! and mail them out in turn. A number 3 bus ride (it showed immediately!) up the steep Dulwich Wood Park, and no more than a hop-and-a-skip into the park that once housed that monument to Empire, the Victorian Great Exhibition that gave the area its name.
Crystal Palace Park houses a famed National Sports Centre (currently under renovations) which has itself played host to shows ranging from the Sex Pistols reunion to M People. But it’s the Concert Bowl that has the international musical fame. Built with a lake - alright, a pond - out front to facilitate the acoustics of a classical orchestra, it was the scene of many a rock “Garden Party” in the 1960s-1970s, and went on to host Bob Marley’s memorable final London show of 1980, which I listened to at high high volume from my own back garden. The next year I was in personal attendance for a headlining set by Madness, for which I swam across said pond so as to be properly front of stage. I had to throw my stinking shirt out when I got home, and the stage is now constructed on top of the pond, but it remains the space of legends.
We arrived to find James Lavelle’s UNKLE performing as a duo, a set that was as much big beat as it was trip hop, followed by DJ Shadow – whose scratching over his finished releases (below) seemed a little perfunctory but appeared to give the legions down the front very much what they wanted. I enormously admire both acts for their historical musical contributions and a younger, solo me might have paid considerably more attention; we had opted for food and drink and a secure position towards the back that suited our ageing status and relaxed mood.
There followed a lengthy – arguably too lengthy – crowd-pleasing DJ set by BobaFatt that he has archived online, and by the time Morcheeba took the stage, the crowd was truly buzzed.
To be clear, it was probably not just the bar offerings and the general warm summer vibe contributing to the endless percussive sound of communal chatter: Skye quipped early about the smell of weed rising from the front rows (it’s still illegal in the UK), followed after another song’s psychic conclusion how the “magic mushrooms” were “kicking in” to which Ross offered a similar joke about the tequila tasting awful funny. To be clear, the five-piece live band was on it – rather than on one - throughout. It was the crowd that was very much the other way round.
The combination - the context - created, truly, a mutual love fest between a long-term audience and a lifer of a band. Early in that podcast about how Morcheeba have mastered “The Art of Longevity” Ross describes Morcheeba, bluntly, as “music that you can grow old to,” and he makes it sound like what it actually is: a gift of living affirmation.
“Part of the Process” from Big Calm was a blatant attempt to “mix the Wu-Tang Clan with old school country music,” the latter a genre Skye fell in love with her from her foster parents.
Tony thanks for the mention. When I interviewed Ross & Skye, I wasn't actually a fan - until I got into the prep, and listened properly to the catalogue. What can come across as "chill, lean back, pop-trip-hop etc. - well I was blown away by just how many influences the band distill into their sound. On closer listening it's all there. A revelation. Thanks for the mention of The Art of Longevity I hope you enjoy diving into the other episodes. I love doing it. Artists...love them to bits.
I saw them about ten years ago maybe more and photographed their performance at Guilfest. That was back in the old days of my music photography. I love them and tomorrow I’m going to catch up on their old and new.