Tales of Love & Grief – Richard Neuberg Interviewed

Richard Neuberg is the front-man of English alternative folk-rock Band Viarosa. In Issue 07 We reviewed their new album Send For The Sea. In August I travelled to London to interview Richard at his home in North London. Lee Edwards

The Sick Rose
O Rose, thou art sick.
The invisible worm,
That flies in the night
In the howling storm:

Has found out thy bed
Of crimson joy:
And his dark secret love
Does thy life destroy.
William Blake

I guess what I’d like to start with is bit about the music that you grew up with, and the music that influenced you.
Well I was listening to Dylan, Joni Mitchell, Velvet Underground, John Martyn, Stones, Beatles. Pretty much standard fare I guess. Bowie, a lot of Bowie. That was the beginning, then I got very into Dylan, Joni and the lyrical stuff later. Funnily I was in a mime group early, quite early. Around ten I went to a school that was run by a guy with a very seventies vibe and he had orange hair and he used to warm up routines to Frank Zappa. We did group poems and stuff. His religion lesson were read from a book called God Is For Real Man and gospels written by American prisoners and he did it all in an American accent. He was a real seventies guy, it was a real seventies school. He had this mime group. That’s where I started performing. We did a hell of a lot; theatres and we were on television. It’s where that Bowie thing came out. The theatricality, the characters, and so on. It certainly grabbed me, and then Zeppelin [Led Zeppelin] while I was growing up in the seventies and eighties London.

You’ve been quoted in other interviews as saying that the music of the early nineties Britpop you didn’t really engage with.
No not really.

What was that about?
Well it was when I came back from University. University was its own kind of microcosm. We were all listening to Grateful Dead and the like, and we were still stuck in the seventies to a certain extent. Coming back to London and all that movement [Britpop] happening, I just didn’t understand it, I didn’t relate to it. It didn’t feel authentic. It felt like posturing and… it just annoyed me. It didn’t touch my soul. I felt quite detached from it. I just didn’t relate to it and I was busy pursuing an acting career, it felt more authentic. It was what I was searching for I suppose. In the acting process there was finding the emotion, the core of it, the meaning. I had just studied English and Philosophy. I was concerned with words and meaning and real emotion and I think the thing about this Britpop thing was that it felt like an industry creation. I think lot of people did connect and relate to it. So it was a movement. I mean the Factory records thing. People were grabbed by that it had meaning for them. But I just didn’t understand it you know. I was a kind of acoustic boy at heart. I was playing a little bit of music and there were some people becoming quite successful in that. I was also doing a bit of writing and I had to write something for some charity gig. I remember doing this performance for Fiddler On The Roof and feeling really comfortable playing in that situation. I mean I was in a band at University. We used to do solo stuff and play covers and Lou Reed things and.. not much of my own writing but it did feel comfortable just me and the guitar playing. But it wasn’t something that was really approved of at home. There was a certain amount of conservatism at home even though we were quite wild kids, my sister, and me; and music was our refuge. But my mum wasn’t a seventies kid, she didn’t have that… my step-dad had some Dylan records. They were really classical people. But theatre, on some level, was something that could more easily be approved of on a cultural level rather than rock ‘n’ roll. At that time my sister was more active in singing in a band and all that. She died when I was nineteen and it felt that if I’d gone down that avenue it would have really frightened my mum. All the drugs and stuff because my sister’s death was slightly drug related. So I was just trying to be a responsible kid really, even though going into the theatre was risky. I remember my mum turning to me and saying “Look you need to use your brain”. But I had no idea what I wanted to do. At the time I. thought that maybe I’d be a journalist.

But none of that felt right to you?
No. No it didn’t. I was just trying to keep my head above water. But the theatre, and the family that was created when we were doing a production, I really felt alive then. There was a lot of musicals and I was singing in that, and that would be great. I knew I could sing. I used to write songs when I was a kid. I wrote a lot when I was fourteen and fifteen. But maybe it was a confidence things really. I was a bit all over the place. I remember later when PJ Harvey was beginning I remember meeting Justine [Justine Frischmann of Elastica] one day and she said “you’ve got to listen to this”, she showed me Dry [first PJ Harvey album] and I listened to it and that was something that was like fuck me this is good, really good. But maybe I was in a space then where it wasn’t something that I was going to tap in to that maybe I could do this. I just wasn’t thinking music career. But certainly PJ Harvey and Jeff Buckley were happening around then [1992] and they made sense to me. They made me feel something. The Jeff Buckley stuff was loss that’s really saturated in that record [Grace]. I could feel, you know, the loss of the father. I was just busy trying to stay alive and create some purpose for my life at that time. Maybe doing music was too frightening; I just couldn’t deal with it. Maybe it was having something to say and I didn’t know what I had to say.
  
In other words the time wasn’t right.
No.

So fast forwarding to 2001. I know that you said you’ve known Josh Hillman [plays violin/viola in Viarosa] since you were kids. You didn’t really play together in a musical sense until you formed Viarosa. What was happening because obviously something happened and sparked you off?
Well I hadn’t seen Josh for a while and… Actually I think it was around the time he was getting married and I was then coming down with an illness. I was diagnosed with ME chronic fatigue syndrome. That sort of period of about four years where I was unwell and he was involved in his marriage I didn’t really see him much. Anyway it was like we must get together, we hadn’t seen each other for ages so we got together. His marriage has broken down and I was getting better. And then we started sharing music. It was like you must check out this guy, and you must check out this guy. I said listen to Nick Cave listen to Jeff Buckley. He was like listen to this, Elliott Smith. We were kind of exchanging. There weren’t that many people that I was exchanging that with and it was really exciting. Then in 2000 when I got married we said let’s play some music at my wedding. I wanted music at my wedding. So I was beginning to play a little bit and we put a few songs together and we self-indulgently played a little set. And he was playing the fiddle. It was great because I was getting into that sort of thing. And I was listening to Richard Buckner and then Willard Grant Conspiracy. We just found a commonality like we had when we were kids and listening to Velvet Underground constantly. We’d both always been into our music. So we came together and we found something together. Then I started writing. He was the perfect sort of partner, he brought something out in me and we shared a palette. That creative gel between originated the sound. So that’s really where it started.

And I understand Rob McHardy [multi-instrumentalist] got involved around this time.
Yes funnily enough he was playing with Doug…

That’s Doug Levitt?
Yes he was my neighbour upstairs back then, he lived above me. He just been staying with me here for a week. He got me back into music. There was a water leak one day and he came downstairs and we got talking. He was just beginning to play music himself. We found a lot in common. One of the main things was that his father had committed suicide when he was sixteen, and my sister had committed suicide. Funnily enough he was living in a flat which he rented off a guy called Tim Locke who is quite a famous writers these days. He’s first book was The Scent of Dried Roses, which is phenomenal, and is about his mother’s suicide. So there was this understanding going on. Something I hadn’t had up till then. I’ve since had connections in my life. There’s something very specific about suicide. It’s nice not to have to explain it to somebody. He was like “what the fuck are you doing not playing guitar”. So then I started playing and it was overwhelming. It was so tiring just playing guitar. But I started playing with him a bit and slowly he really got me into it. And Doug had met Rob at a gig at the Borderline and he they found they both played music. So Rob started playing with Doug. Then Doug left to go back to the States. Rob had started playing a bit with us. Then one thing led to another. Rob started playing bass to begin with. Rob also started out as a drummer. Rob basically plays everything [lap steel, pedal steel, mandolin etc etc] extremely well. Very worryingly [laughter]. It was a real connecting through Doug and through meetings. Synchronicity, and things in common with each other.

And your Drummer Nick Simms has been around from the start as well.
Yes well I’d introduced Josh to a Willard Grant Conspiracy CD and we were really getting into them and we went to see them at gig at the Union Chapel. It was brilliant, it was around the release of Everything’s Fine. It was great and I was particularly blown away by their guitarist, I thought he was absolutely phenomenal [Simon Alpin]. So I talked to Simon afterwards and it turned that he was a local guy living in Crouch End [London] and he said ‘yeah I’ll help you out”. So Simon introduced us to Nick and also to Barry Payne who initially put bass down. So in the beginning those first demos were me and Josh, Barry and Nick and a keyboard player Rick Carter who did a bit of stuff. Actually Steve [Ancliffe] the producer who I work with, well Doug [Levitt] had worked with him recommended him and I’ve been working with Steve ever since. Recorded both albums and co-produced stuff and we’ve just done a lot of stuff together. Yeah Simon [Alpin] was really key in the beginning and came in, and helped, and played and helped form the core of the band. Then when Willard Grant was looking for a fiddle player Simon introduced Josh to Robert Fisher.

I hear that your bass player Mick Young has left recently.
Yes. We’ve now got Caroline Lomas playing bass…

Who by some strange coincidence is the wife of Colin Lomas who runs your UK label Pronoia Records.
Yes. Well its actually not that much of a coincidence [laughter]. She also plays with a band called Helene who are also on the label.

Yeah I’ve listened to them and would love to get some of their stuff.
… and I really like Caroline. She’s a really great bass player and really nice. We feel comfortable together. I’m really close to Colin as well, it’s a really nice community.

But whilst Pronoia is a really great independent English label Viarosa seem to be very different to anything else on the label. In my mind it always seemed a label like Loose Music would be an ideal match for you.
Yes

Now your American label Tarnished seems well matched. In fact I was almost at the point of recommending you guys to Brian at Tarnished when you got signed. And I’m not at all surprised that Palodine, who are also on the label, and you should get on well.
God that’s strange. Well It’s another MySpace connection thing. Coming across Palodine somehow, and me sending Kat [Katrina Whitney] a CD, and getting a copy of their CD. I was thinking "Oh my God I’ve found a sister band”. Then through that they got in touch. The thing is that Loose weren’t interested in us. Mark [Rogers] came along to a gig once. I had a nice laugh with Tom [Bridgeman] about it recently. When we were send stuff around the one guy who picked up was Theodore from Tongue Master who were doing Last Harbour and Mark Eitzel. Also Simon from Bella Union had expressed interest. I was not well at the time and couldn’t cope with doing a gig. So it didn’t go anywhere even though there was a bit of interest around. Loose I sent the stuff to them and got a jokey email from Tom, who said something like “do you think you could make it a little bit darker”. I think it was Whiskey World he was referring to which is a really fucking dark heavy song. I remember going to the first PR meeting and the guy trying to push me into what the songs are about. And the inference was that it was quite authentic or something. So he says “What’s Whiskey World about?” So I said “You really want to know?” and the PR girl is sitting there. So I told him that it was about an attempted rape within a family. They are sitting there mouths agape [laughs] and being quite scared about asking about anything else. [laughter] You know every song on there is real; it’s about something very specific.  Maybe Poor Man’s Prayer, there are a couple of ones that are more allegorical. And more like using an external metaphor to talk about an inner feeling of impoverishment In some way. But a lot of them are about specific and very personal things.

And the whole feeling of that first one [Where The Killers Run] is about impoverishment, grief, and loss. That came across very clearly to me. I have experience of loss and that made sense to me. But the title Where The Killers Run how did you come up with that?
It was just really that we’d done the album in three little segments over a couple of years mixed in with doing bits of studio and thinking Oh God this is too expensive. So we did stuff at home. I did quite a few tracks building them up at home. Less drum driven tracks. Or we built it up at home and then went the studio to add the drum tracks and mixed it all together. Then the album wasn’t completely finished and I took quite a bad dive and it was a period when coming out of my illness I was on anti-depressants and it got me into living again. There were other issues in there. Like my wife were trying unsuccessfully to have kids. Coming off the medication led me to be off work for four or five months. So having a bit of life again it felt like it was taken away. I was absolutely paralysed; I could hardly leave the house. The fatigue came back and I had no energy at all for anything. I was just totally overwhelmed. So it was get back on the fucking pills again. That started to pick me up again. That song Where The Killers Run was the most direct song about a depression that I feel that is quite persecutory. Yeah it’s the inner persecuting voice that becomes the paralysing thing. Quite a lot of the psychotherapeutic work I’ve done is about the two minds as being the internal other and its where the internal other completely takes over. For me it’s like a paralysis. I say that Where The Killers Run was a distillation of that. In the album there’s a lot of imagery of warfare, like canons, a lot of killing. A very violent inner world. That’s brewed from various places. The violent death of my sister, the manic depression of my father, a refugee from Germany in 1939. That kind of filtered down. I lost everything, I don’t have any family over there at all. I had everything taken away. But my father was a typical refugee. But he drove himself to build up some money again. He created a business and was obsessed and that killed him a bit. The sixty Senior Service a day he was driven by. There’s something in that very strong and dark language it’s a persecution and redemption thing. People in previous interview have picked on the catholic stuff, guilt you know. Even though my Dad was a refugee from Germany I was brought up catholic. His father was Jewish but he wasn’t actually Jewish. He actually got christened the day before he died. I went to church as a kid and I was into Jesus. In the same way that William Blake saw Jesus as an artist I did as well. Of course with the catholic thing it’s the absent father thing. At that stage I even thought I might become a priest. The internal conflict of redemption and persecution, those two things were echoed a bit in the religious imagery I think. And the soldiering thing, even the album on the front cover, then there’s the girl and the child on the back cover. There’s loss there already, the soldier is probably going to die. If you’ve had death quite close it just saturates everything.

Then you toured that and I remember meeting you first at The Thekla in Bristol. Then suddenly things started to appear about his new album Send For The Sea tracks and stuff and already I was feeling that there’s a significant shift here. Being brought up by the sea in a coastal town I’m quite sensitive to things that bring that kind of feeling with them. That was the first the first visual impression that I got. It seemed to me that this new album is about resolution or something. There’s a lot of warmth in this new album and softness and tenderness. I wondered if that was reflecting changes that were going on within you.
Yeah there’s more love. There’s a lot of love in the songs in there. The home I’ve created with Emma [his wife] the resolution that I’ve felt about creating my own home. Its been not being able to have our own family. That’s been a loss but we can always adopt. That’s there for the future but I think creating our own family and some stability in there. Allowing more elemental things to come in. As well as the sea its something about the transcendence elements of nature. More of a unifying thing.  And the refuge of nature despite the madness of the world as it is at the moment. On one level there’s the outer alienation. You go along with it because you can get back to nature and more simple things. There’s more peace in there. This might be a bit of a cliché but I think the sea also represents the unconscious. Also the path of the artist as being a healing thing. That’s the way forward. The key thematic or fulcrum of the album is that song [The Sea]. To get away from the fray and hear the call of the righteous path. I know its slightly religious imagery in there but it’s also the path of the artist which is like finding your own path. The Righteous Path is about that. There’s always that urban rural conflict. I get quite oppressed by the urban thing sometimes and there’s been a real pull to go to the country. And then the pursuit; what the fuck is that about. Even in the music industry… what really makes me happy are the simplest moments just sitting in the garden with cat a cup of tea and my wife. That’s where it’s at. Obviously one needs to keep creating and playing music together there’s a lot of fulfilment that comes from there. But there is also the eternal, it’s more of an appeal to the eternal elements of nature. Something like that.

Two images that came to me, listening to the new album, were from when we were expecting my daughter Sara we had a scan done and you see the baby floating in fluid. The feeling of being womb-like. The other, linked to that, was an experience in a flotation tank, which was extraordinary. It was almost like this was a musical flotation tank. It’s like listening to Pink Floyd’s Dark Side Of The Moon in that you feel you get even more from listening to it lying down in a darkened room. I tried that one evening and it was magical.
Well that’s very interesting particulalrly in terms of the sound of the album. The sound of the first album had lots of sparse lonely elements in there. Even though there’s similarities in the production of the new one its more lush. There’s more melody and it’s less atonal. I still write in kind of Gillian Welch way with atonal melodies but there’s more resolution in the music itself. The last song I wrote for the album was Without A Cause and we recorded that and Beggars And Thieves last. Without A Cause is very lush harmonies. I always loved harmonies like Midlake. I’m also into Sufjan Stevens. I’ve always loved that lush feeling, like being held in the melodic intertwining of something. The music itself being an uplifting thing rather than a kind of calling out. A desperate kind of calling out like a wolf in the wilderness. And even Ode To Sunlight has got a folky John Martyn kind of melodic feel even though there are dark undertones in there. This impending kind of nuclear winter lets get out and lets head for the north. There is a persecuting feeling like there is something in the air. Like Cormac McCarthy’s The Road which I read last year. I think it’s one of the greatest book I’ve read in a very long time. It’s sparse, very sparse, the language is like a mantra and a bit of post apocalyptic stuff going on as well. But it’s more in terms of the outside world. I mean songs like The Old Walls, although there are internal elements, it’s more like what’s going on in the outside world. It’s more threatening and then the salvation of making or creating music is like creating your own personal home or safety somehow.

I read that when you finished writing Beggars And Thieves you were invited to go to Dublin to support REM. That must have been a fabulous experience.
Yeah it was. Very exciting and an amazing experience. Obviously on some level feeling a validation there. Even being able to play in that environment. I’ve always said that performing to a bigger audience is easier than to a smaller one. I don’t necessarily feel that now, it’s just different. It was just me and Rob there, yeah we were a bit nervous but I remember Rob saying “we will expend more pounds per square inch within that time that we do it”. The first song we played was something we’d never played live before. I was still remembering the lyrics but it was like fuck it let’s do it. We were really into it. We just let go, it wasn’t… we weren’t frightened, it was such a… your aware that this isn’t something that happens every day. I count my blessing all the time, even when I went into Abbey Road to master the first album. It was like Wow I’m here doing this and I didn’t know that I would still be alive. So I still having the sense of still doing it and being on an adventure. Obviously we toured with Robyn Hitchcock and Peter Buck and Scott and Bill and we got on really well. Peter Buck was so sweet when we went Dublin he was… he couldn’t have been nicer and more welcoming and that was really nice. Just personal connections. They were watching from the side and clapping as we were doing our thing it was really nice. It would be great if something more came from that one day, hopefully it will.

Does that mean that you might have plans to play in America?
Yeah Oh Yeah.

I mean there is a very American or rather a certain American quality to your music.
Yeah absolutely.

Although ironically bands like Palodine and Willard Grant all say oh it’s really difficult to break here and there are much better supported in the UK and Europe.  
Of course but I think the elements of space within it. There’s a lot of Celtic feel in our music. But I think it is very difficult in America as it’s such a big space. That’s what makes it difficult because creating community across such space and touring is very hard. But I also think that the bands you mentioned have an advantage of being exotic when they come over here. I mean I’d love to tour America. Hopefully we are playing  a few shows over there in October. I might go there for a bit next year. We are thinking of going, we’ve got lots of friends there, and just being there for a bit and maybe recording a bit over there. There a feeling of more space over there and more hope. America in a few years time may be cool again. If Obama comes in and it changes a bit; yeah I think it maybe’s got a future [laughs].

We hope so certainly. But back to the current album. On this one you talk about family quite a lot. About this band being like a family and I notice that your wife Emma played on one of the tracks.
Yeah. She did yeah. It was about the first time she’d picked up a flute for twenty years. It was a really shitty old flute and she could hardly get the notes out of it. But she’s now just bought a flute funnily enough. Today’s she dropping of the other one. She good, she really good. It would really be nice to play with her more often and she’s really keen to play more and its really lovely whenever I’ve sat down with her and played music. It was really lovely on Ode To Sunlight with Josh. You know we’re all old friends and just hearing the fiddle come in with the flute it’s a nice feeling. You do create a family over time. Your involved with people’s lives and you’re touring together. You going through all sorts of things. Between us there’s been lots of difficult things we’ve all been through. There’s been loss. As the bands gone on there been difficult things to endure. Over time people are going through shit things as well as good things. Just sticking with someone when your going through shit things you inevitable get closer. And yeah there is something that happens when we play music together. You're sharing and you have a musical understanding. That’s pretty special. The other element is that I don’t think I could find better musicians. Its difficult working with other people when a band member isn’t available, I don’t really want to. People are very busy and sometimes unavailable. I don't really want to work with other people but sometimes I’ve had to. I’m not, for example, going to find a better fiddle player, I’m not going to find a better multi-instrumentalist [laughs], or a better drummer its just not going to happen. I mean Rob will say “I just play a bit of music”. This guy is just phenomenal [laughter]. The guy could have just pursued a classical career, he’s that good. Or a jazz career or whatever. He’s say loves so many instruments but he plays them all so amazingly. I’ve never seen anyone play the lap steel better than Rob, he has a handle on that thing which is pretty phenomenal.
      
One of the things I always ask bands is about their name. How did you get to be called Viarosa?
Go that’s funny I’m just looking up there [at a flower painting on wall] and it says Rosa. We were searching around for a name and to begin with we were called The Violet Hour [track on first album]. We found that that was the name for the period of twilight after the bombs in World War One. But we were all battling around for a name and all the English words felt like that they had too specific a meaning about them. At the time I had been going through Italy on a train. There was something about the word Viarosa there are various elements I suppose in there. People always say Via Delarosa and course there must be something in there about that. The way of pain, you know Christ’s journey. But it’s also something romantic. Even the rose when I think about it I think about Blake I think about his poem The Sick Rose. But eventually we just said Viarosa and it just fitted. It was right you know and there was something un-English about it, something emotional about it.

Kind of sounds like a fine Italian wine with an English rose at the heart of it to me.
Oh yeah. When I first met my wife Emma she was down at Brighton doing her degree show which involved series of six angels going from desolation all the way through to faith. They were all made with different materials and they were influenced by Blake. We had a meeting then and one of then was called The Sick Rose. It was contorted and made out of metal all welded together and the sick rose was in the middle on a panel with this contorted skeletal figure turned inwards. An amazing piece of work. I think within the rose there’s the beauty and also there are the thorns and it’s a bit like the pearl. I once read that in that oyster in the deep dark place what comes out is a pearl you know. In the darkness beautiful things can come out. And they are the salvation. Sometime through your pain the chinks of light are pretty clear. But I haven’t really thought about the name. [laughter]

But it fits you like a glove.
Yeah.

That’s about it then. I could sit and talk to you all afternoon and in to the evening, but I’ve got to type this stuff up. [laughter]