“Paul has two teenage kids who are really into dubstep and he mentioned Skrillex – and it wasn’t like we were gonna go off and start doing dubstep, but we did take that on board,” says vocalist Skye Edwards on the phone. “We kind of listened to what our children were listening to and took tiny little elements, which you can hear in songs like To The Grave and Make Believer – a bit of a new production style.”
It’s early morning in Surrey, England – just gone quarter past ten to be exact – Edwards hasn’t had breakfast yet. She’s just gotten the kids off to school and she’s sewing a winter coat. It’s not very rock’n’roll, but it’s refreshingly homely and the antithesis of the glamour you see from Edwards on stage and in the video clip for latest single, Gimme Your Love.
The making of this album and their previous 2010 record, Blood Like Lemonade has fit around their individual lives and families. With Paul living in France and Ross in Los Angeles, the process of writing and collaborating has been a mostly online affair and very different from their early days spent smoking weed in the Godfrey’s London apartment.
“Before we started writing anything new we had a few meetings and when me and Ross were on tour and over near where Paul lives (Paul doesn’t perform in the live shows) we would talk about tempos and the kind of album we wanted to write,” she explains. “We all agreed we wanted it to be more up tempo – Paul described it as ‘Morcheeba with a pulse’ and so he went away and got together with the drummer and recorded lots of different rhythms and beats and then edited those and sent us copies of 20 or 30 or so.
“Then Ross would put the guitar and chords on them and I would write a melody for it and it would go back to Paul and he would write lyrics and then I would record a demo version. So there was a lot of emailing and passing the baton until we were happy with each song. Once we had about 15 or so tracks we went into the studio. Paul came over to London and Ross now lives in London (he moved back to the UK) so we hired a studio and probably over a period of three weeks recorded everything.
“I guess we communicated more because it was really important to keep on emailing each other and letting each other know what we were thinking. In the past, going back 18 years now, Ross and Paul lived together. I would go over to their flat and it was just getting stoned with a guitar and writing that way. But we all have our own lives now outside of the band, so it works well this way.”
After a falling out with the brothers, Edwards departed Morcheeba in 2004, releasing two solo albums and a third one last year. The two Godfrey brothers made The Antidote and Dive Deep with a range of guest vocalists. She talks openly about that difficult time.
“They didn’t beg me, they asked me to come back,” she laughs when I suggest that Morcheeba just wasn’t the same without her and the brothers had finely come to their senses. “After they did The Antidote they asked if I would like to do a couple of songs on Dive Deep and I said no, and then they asked again via management if I would like to come back and I said no again. It took a lot of convincing and my husband… we had a lot of arguments over it and I really didn’t want to go back, but I’m glad that I did actually. I really am happy to be back and I’m having a lot of fun on stage with Ross and its all pretty cool and I think it shows with Head Up High that the relationship is pretty strong.”
BY RACHEL DAVISON
