Finding Their Voice | The Blood Choir's First Interview

Blood Choir Interview

The Blood Choir are Robin Maddicott and Joe Mountain. Based in Bath, Southwest England they produce a mix of Folk, Country, Blues and Americana with an experimental edge.

You guys have been playing together an awful long time haven’t you?
Joe: 11, 12 years
Robin: Yes something like that. We celebrate like an anniversary every year really [laughter].

So you’re like an old married couple then [laughter]
Joe: We get a box of wine and some food [laughter]

You’ve been through a number of different names and styles. Can you tell me some of the stuff leading up to The Blood Choir?
Robin: I think there have probably been 5 or 6 incarnations. Starting from when I was 14 or 15 and Joe was around the same age. Starting off in the Britpop era which was…
Joe: …interesting
Robin: The first kind of music we got into. Pretty much a bad pastiche of garage bands of the time like Oasis and so on. Then kind of steadily evolving, and getting better, and then leading up to The Blood Choir.
Joe: Yeah a lot of different bands.
Robin: Afterglow, Levin, and Maddicott Mountain. About 10 different drummers. It was a really good thing in retrospect, helping us to find our own sound. The way I always say it is that we perfected the art of pastiche, [laughter] but not in a knowing way [laughter]. Writing songs in the past we’d listen to say Neil Young and say lets write a song like that. We’d do that and it might be a great song but there was still something about it, which was lacking something. Because it’s not coming from you, you’re trying to do something else. But what happened with The Blood Choir is that we started writing stuff that we couldn’t pin on any particular influence. There are obviously elements of different things in there. But it had come from somewhere that we like to think was completely original.  
Joe: We were playing as Maddicott Mountain for a while; we perfected the art of pastiche with that really. And then it started off as an experiment really, to do something different for a start, to stretch the perimeters with our song writing. Then it took over really and became what we are now.   

Its sounds like when you were Maddicott Mountain you were already getting a kind of Blood Choir sound.
Joe: Yeah We were.

So what I’m hearing today is not a million miles from what you were doing then.
Robin: We had the two running simultaneously at one point.
Joe: Yeah We had two bands. [laughs]. Very Schizophrenic [laughter]
Robin: We had gigs where we supported ourselves.

That sounds interesting but there must have been some difference between the two bands.
Joe: Yeah there was.

So what was the difference because it sounds like The Blood Choir really gelled your sound?
Robin: The Maddicott Mountain songs were a lot more kind of obviously commercial. They were good songs. I stand by a lot of the old songs that we wrote. But when we became Blood Choir we culled about 50 songs. We said that doesn’t fit into what we are doing now.  
Joe: There were a few songs that did…where it did crossover, they were…
Robin: Borderline…
Joe: Yeah borderline. But it wasn’t that specific. It was more organic.
Robin: Something we call the spook. [laughs] The Blood Choir songs had the spook. When we finished a song you knew it had a little something different. Couldn’t always figure out what it was, and that was something we just pursued.

How did you get to name yourself The Blood Choir?
Robin: It was actually an old friend of ours. It was around the time when we were starting to come up with the Blood Choir songs. At The time on MySpace you could only have four songs on your site so we decided to create another site and we needed a name. This friend, who I was with at University, well one of our lecturers had written a book of poetry and the title of the book was The Blood Choir. Good title. It seemed to chime with what we were producing. A lot of people, when we turn up for gigs, expect us to be a heavy metal band. Which is weird because I never thought of that until someone mentioned it. To me it had much more of an old otherworldly quality to it.

I first came across you guys in the Bath Fringe booklet, earlier this year, and I noticed the word Blood Choir. To me you were some kind of otherworldly Americana off the wall kind of band.
Joe: That sounds about right [laughs].

Kind of Willard Grant, Neil Young with a bit of Garth Hudson thrown in for good measure.
Robin/Joe: Yeah yeah.

So there’s no chance of you in spangled jumpsuit then? [laughter]
Robin: Well never say never [laughter].

How are things going with the debut album?
Robin: We’re getting there slowly but surely. It’s just a case of knuckling down and getting it done. We’ve done about 11 or 12 tracks. The problem we’re having is giving it a kind of final thing because we are constantly writing stuff. All the new stuff we write we think oh we’ve got to have that on the album. But you’ve got to have some cut off point…
Joe: …or it’s never going to get finished [laughs]

That does kind of suggest the discipline of working with someone.
Joe: Exactly. I think our plan is to get the album out quite quickly and follow it up with something else. It’s better to have too many songs than not enough.
Robin: It’s also really important to us to balance the album. There quite a few different styles in what we do.  The heavier stuff and the more, off the wall, crazy stuff. Which, I really like. Then there’s the acoustic more melodic stuff.  
Joe: It’s going to be about pacing it. Putting together a bunch of songs that really work as an album.

And the importance of the first track.  
Robin/Joe: Exactly.
Robin: We’ve got a few options there.
Joe: At this point in time we’re favouring Wellwisher.

Sounds like an excellent choice to me, at this point. It works for me. [laughter] The other thing that seems very much part of The Blood Choir that its just the two of and you seem to be able to produce what you have on record really well live. What is your feeling about using drum machines and other stuff?
Robin: We’re getting massively into it.
Joe: Were more into electronic music than many people who listen to our music would think.

Have you ever thought of taking a band on tour to flesh out your sound?
Joe: Yeah
Robin: We’re in the process of trying that out now. Although, as you say, it’s going to be very much a touring band; unless, at this stage, we meet someone who really strikes as having something very special creatively. So it will still be me and Joe writing and creating songs. If we have a pick up band we’ll keep it casual.

Because you’ve been playing together so long it must be difficult to include others.
Robin: Exactly. When we play together we have an almost telepathic communication with each other.  
Joe: And if someone goes off the other can follow.
Robin: Also we are control freaks and if someone comes in and we don’t feel they are adding to the sound why bother.

Also when I’ve seen you live you got a very big sound that doesn’t really seem to need augmentation. I also like the experimental nature of the band.
Robin: Experimenting is key to what we do. I don’t see the need to replicate other people's sound. Or just sticking to a sound that’s already been done. Because it’s probably been done better by someone else. There’s obviously a limit. I don’t think you should experiment for the sake of it. The reason I think The Blood Choir is working so well is that we’ve been through the stage of learning song writing and song craft by copying other people. We’ve now got to the stage where we can take all that and mess it up a bit.

There seem to be a kind of Blood Choir DNA emerging, which is always a good sign [laughter]. I can imagine a few years down the line saying this band sound a bit Blood Choirish [laughter]. You’ve reached the place where you’re playing yourselves.
Robin/Joe: Exactly.

If you could do two covers what might they be?
Joe: Well we’ve done Black Eyed Dog [Nick Drake].
Robin: It’s quite dark and finger picking and we cut quite a lot of the lyrics. So it’s a bit different. That’s one we’ve done, so Joe why don’t you pick one you’d like to do.
Joe: I’m going to have to think about that.
Robin: Well I’m going to say Daniel Johnston. The song would be The Power of Love. A lot of people probably won’t have heard of him and those who have see him as a manic-depressive after that documentary recently [The Devil and Daniel Johnston]. I personally think that his writing and lyrics are quite extraordinary. Tom Waits covered one of his songs and Kurt Cobain was massively into him. Lyrically because he’s slightly insane he doesn’t have the barriers in his head, which a lot of people would, which can be a bad thing on some songs. On this particularly song it just flows out of him, it’s just extraordinary.

OK coming at this covers thing from a guitar angle. I’m looking at you Joe [laughter]. What guitarists light your fire?
Joe: I dunno, there’s so many. Neil Young’s one of my favourite guitarists in both his acoustic and electric stuff. It’s just totally free and there are no boundaries to his playing. It feel like it’s coming from him and not that he learnt a few licks. All sorts of people Robbie Robertson, Peter Green, George Harrison, The Edge…  

That’s an interesting eclectic mixture.
Joe: Yeah I listen to a lot of different people.

Is there a song that you like to cover?
Joe: As A guitarist?

As a human being [laughter]
Joe: I’ve always wanted to play a Peter Green thing called, I think, The Stumble, from that John Mayall album Hard Road. I’ve always thought about having a stab at that.

I’m wondering about videos. We feature a lot of videos in ElectricGhost. It seem that the video is an important part of the publicity package. What are your plans in this direction?
Robin: Well we were just talking about that the other day.
Joe: Our first attempt was just a glorified slideshow [laughter]

Well you’ve got to start somewhere.
Robin/Joe: Exactly.
Robin: I think videos are becoming very important and lot of the video-makers go onto make films. That’s absolutely something we’d like to get involved in. We don’t to want make standard rock videos; we want to bring creativity to everything we do. We want to fit well with the music we’re producing. We won’t accept anything less.

Joe: I’ve just thought of two more guitarists. [laughter]

Go for it.
Joe: John Martyn and Mike Campbell [Tom Petty band]. And I’d like to change the track I’d do… I’d Rather Be The Devil, the old Skip James song.
Robin: I’m going to add a guitarist as well, Richard Thompson. He’s my favourite guitarist.

Along with Neil Young mine too.
Robin: I think he’s one of the most underrated guitarists about. And his songs are outrageously good.

Also for me its good when songwriters turn me onto others things like writers like Kerouac and poets like Baudelaire and Rimbaud.
Robin: Well for us a massive direction on The Blood Choir is the literary influences.

So tell us what you guys read.
Robin: We read a lot of poetry ranging from Thomas Hardy to Milton to Dylan Thomas. TS Elliot, Ezra Pound a lot of different people.
Joe: We are inspired as much by that as we are the musicians, certainly lyrically.
Robin: We take a lot of time with lyrics.
Joe: It’s painstaking sometimes.

What about other writers? Any English or American novelists you are drawn to?
Robin: I have to say Thomas Hardy. I relate to him a lot because he’s from the West Country. Plus his writing is just extraordinary. It’s crystal clear the way he can pinpoint emotion. He’s got a kind of razor edge to his writing.
Joe: I’ve read quite a lot of Cormac McCarthy. He’s pretty special. And they make great films.

Talking of which how about filmmakers or films?
Robin: Well the Cohen brothers obviously.
Joe: The recent Jesse James film [The Assassination of Jesse James by the Coward Robert Ford ] and There Will Be Blood.

There seems to be a whole range of literature art and music that guides what you guys do.
Robin/Joe: Exactly.

So it seems that New Year will bring your debut album.
Robin/Joe: We are certainly are aiming for that.