Dare to trust the puzzle - Jono McCleery

0:10It's actually a really tricky time with social media as well. The pressure just to be constantly shouting about yourself in social media, I think, and aware of your numbers. Oh my gosh. It can really interfere with your creativity. and not just that but the general noise of the world and I think it's often talked about this with my partner you really have to protect yourself now and it's so easy to get swallowed up and all the noise and all the pressure to be something to the outside world and really you know just got to shut that out sometimes or most of the time in order to be who you need to be it's a horrible thing as a creative person feeling this pressure to present myself to the world all the time so I have to almost switch mindset to do that and then try and protect the other side of me, which is somewhere else being creative.

1:02Welcome to the Daring Creativity Podcast, a show about daring to forever explore creativity that isn't about chasing shiny perfection. It's about showing up with all your doubts and imperfections and making them count. It's about becoming more of who you already are. My name is Radim Malinic, I'm a designer, author and eternally curious human being I am talking to a broad range of guests who share their stories of small actions that inspired lifetime discoveries Taking one step towards the thing that made them feel most alive Let me begin this episode with a question Are you ready to discover what happens when you dare to create?

1:51Today I'm speaking with Jono McCleary, a singer-songwriter who bridges folk, jazz and electronic music while maintaining an unwavering commitment to creative authenticity. His discography spans intimate acoustic albums and eclectic dance music collaborations, always prioritising genuine artistic expressions and creating something deeply personal within creative limitations. In this conversation, Jono discusses how losing his hearing until age of five shaped his conscious relationship with sound how his late brother Stephen's encouragement transformed the shy teenager into a performing artist Jono also opens up about the challenges of maintaining creative integrity why having no plan B strengthens his resolve to make music work and how collaborations with electronic producers expanded his audience while protecting the intimate core of his songwriting.

2:45It's my pleasure to share with you my conversation with Jono McLeary.

2:56Hey Jono, welcome to the show. How are you doing today? I'm good. Thank you so much for having me. I've been looking forward to this one because I feel like I haven't seen you in person for quite a long time. So it's a nice way to catch up and find out about what you've been up to, what you've been doing. And I've got quite a few questions about your process, how you write, what you publish. So, yeah, for those who may have never heard of John O'Mcleary, how would you introduce yourself? With difficulty, actually. It's always a tricky one because as an artist, as a person, you always feel like you're evolving and it's hard to summarize it.

3:27But I just say I'm a singer-songwriter influenced by jazz and folk music, but also work on many collaborations in dance music as well. fantastic i remember you and i met through your brother through your late brother steve what was your way of getting into music and actually becoming what you are now today mine is steve's father was he was a jazz pianist so this is something i would have heard in the house growing up and i remember going to bed at night and falling asleep to the sound of him playing piano unfortunately he passed away when i was six and then steven adopted the position at the piano and would also sit there at night playing and it was really comforting for me because the music continues but it wasn't until and then he moved out he was nine years older than me so he moved out when he was about 18 and it was quite sad for me i was like oh the music is gone from the house it's a lot more quiet and it wasn't until i was about 17 where i noticed there's the old cheap spanish guitar gathering dust next to the piano and just thought i'd like to sing again because when I was about nine years old, my brother Stephen would get me to sing because he liked how I was singing.

4:36And we used to sing soul songs together and he would play piano for me, Smokey Robinson, Otis Redding stuff. So with his absence moving out after some years, then I thought, yeah, I want to sing again. So I just taught myself to play enough guitar, a bit of guitar just to get some singing done. And I really, really enjoyed it. So I just kept going with it. If I remember rightly, were you actually deaf to a certain age? Because I remember there was a story where you were coming downstairs and you can feel Steve playing downstairs. And have I got it right? Until around five, I think. And apparently, I don't know exactly what was wrong with me, but I did have some operations and eventually got my hearing back.

5:18And then I'm asking, what was this noise? What's that? What's this? But this is more of something that I hear about because I don't really remember it much. where my mum and brother would tell me what it was like for me. But it's interesting, yeah, and I do wonder sometimes if I was able to take a more, I don't know, if it had a more creative impact on me with listening to music more consciously and not just being used to it always being there in the background. Maybe. I can speculate. I'm not sure. But yeah, in any case, I got my hearing back. Absolutely. So that old Spanish guitar, now Steve has moved out, obviously you are looking at a guitar.

5:52what was the music that you listened that you chose to listen to yourself that wasn't presented to you every morning what was the music that influenced you to actually pick up the guitar i remember we had this big songbook of jazz songs and jazz chords there was a couple of bill with the songs in there and a couple of jazz standards that were more simple that i could copy the tabs these guitar tabs little picture boxes and i could just you don't need to know anything to just copy these pictures so i remember trying to you know ain't no sunshine by bill withers being one of the first songs I probably learned to play.

6:24As I got more interested in guitar then I started to notice it more in music. It wasn't until I discovered John Martin and Nick Drake where that really blew my mind open with what you can do with a guitar and that became an absolute obsession for me listening to their music and yeah I just I still do I think they're both incredible. They mess around with all kinds of detuning other different tunings as well. I don't dare to go there i think for live performance i don't want to be messing around with tunings and i also enjoy the puzzle of standard tuning i think it's an endless puzzle and i like the challenge of that trying to explore new sounds and new voicings with the same standard tuning i keep going with that and that's how i go this is an interesting one because this is actually i was going to ask you about unusual tuning as someone who can only play guitar in standard tuning or potentially like in a drop d and this is as far as i can go and i remember people think for example says look i play in a non-standard tuning because i don't want to sound like everybody else or what i like when you said you know what it's a puzzle this is a great subject as well if you want to talk about creativity as well because yeah i think it's too easy to sound different if you change your instrument and i've seen many performers who have all kinds of tricks and gimmicks and toys on stage and yeah they sound different but they need all this help to sound different now i i think it's much healthier creatively to attempt to sound original with just normal instruments if you can i think that's the way to go everyone's different some people that maybe that's part of their creative journey to just completely change the instruments and everything for me i prefer to keep things dead simple and i feel like i see things more clearly for what they are i think there's a great phrase and there's a freedom in limitations because i remember being a big fan a band called sound garden and they pretty much changed the guitar for every song they used to have math tuning triple c and whatever what how what it sounded heavy it sounded big and that was the thing what they did but as you said to sound like that you need a lot of help you need a lot of from behind the scenes to actually make sure that those five different guitars or six different guitars are all in unison and ready for the musicians high maintenance yeah absolutely limitations are so important and actually now i remember i'm kind of glad i got into music before technology really developed as well because now it's like everything's so easy to get going with recording and stuff i had a tape four track cassette four track and it was also very limited in what i could record and then if you want to do more than three or four tracks together you got to start bouncing tracks together forever so that you had to develop a lot of discipline working like this and and i think limitations are so important actually yeah otherwise it can be easily overwhelming what's possible to do i think we struggle with paradox of choice actually having so many possible options that you can do anything with everything i think that must be quite paralyzing sometimes so what i want to do i want to jump from you teaching yourself how to play guitar to writing your first song the moment when you put through the first few chords together and realize i can write my own music how did it feel like i'm trying to remember i think i had a knack for it to begin with because i don't think we got it recorded anyway but i remember being 11 and even though i couldn't play piano i was still able to write songs with it so i could play enough to write and perform songs and i remember showing my brother one and he was like what this is great so i think for me playing an instrument was always about trying to create something personal not just me trying to become good at it but actually i wanted to write something finished and that was mine so i do remember that feeling straight away with the piano and then with the guitar it took longer because you can't just hit the notes you've got making a sound on the guitar takes a long time to figure out but i do remember one of the first songs i wrote was called bet she does it was when i first started kind of picking the strings and i thought oh this sounds good and i'm just finding new voicings and ways to play these chords and the melody's just jumping out at me and this song was yeah the first song i think that got me noticed by a few people as well tom robinson at bbc6 i think as soon as he heard that song he was just completely in my camp and supporting me wherever he could and i remember playing that live at my first ever gigs i had this weekly gig in serbiton at a pub called the brave new world i didn't have enough songs to play for an hour so i just play like a few of my own and then the rest are like covers bill withers poor weller nitrate covers but yeah i play this song and people just loved it so i was okay i can maybe i can do this and i try and build on that and eventually i could a couple years later i could fill up an hour with my own songs what did it feel like for you to obviously first as you said you need to transfer what you've been touching with the keys on the piano obviously you've been pressing keys on the piano learning how to sort of transfer onto a guitar but then using your voice and actually putting lyrics together because it's almost like a triptych of skills you need to sort of get from one to another and then you sing it obviously you write it you write the lyrics then you sing it as you perform it feels like there's a sort of chain of skill sets that you need to put together what was it like to write lyrics and where did they come from yeah lyrics is definitely the hardest part or the part that requires usually the most discipline very often now i don't pay attention to lyrics until the very last stage until i'm assured that I'm happy with the direction or the idea in principle.

11:48What I do more often now is a lot of recorded improvisations and usually the melody will dictate the words that fit naturally and the phrases that I'm singing. Very often I can hear a theme, a lyrical theme, emerging from my improvisations, which kind of takes the pressure off me a bit to write something because there's something there already and it's just a question of me unpicking it and seeing what's kind of hidden in there and I'm able to build from that theme. But sometimes it can be very laborious finishing a song and working out a lyrical direction which feels good enough for the music.

12:21That's really interesting because I was going to ask you, what is your process? Like, do you start with the melody first, do you live the song, and then is it, as you said, sort of gobbledygook? There's this improvisation. I remember there was a conversation with Annie Clark, a.k.a. St. Vincent, and she was talking about how she worked with David Byrne. And apparently he was sending her demos with going... And she's like, are you okay? Because he was just more of a sort of content blocking, just sort of putting things in there, going anything goes. And it was quite interesting what you say that the theme of the lyrics and the song theme kind of comes through that improvisation, which is great to hear how you do it.

12:58I think I try and make the whole process as unconscious as possible. And I obviously have to be in a good place to make that happen, feel good. But the ideal scenario is feeling good about yourself, hitting the record button and just being as free as possible. coming back later to observe what you've done and then you can start to structure it. I want to ask you about style temptation because did you ever have that temptation to have a grunge era or like you know anything different were you always on that path of folk inspired sort of folk jazz soul style music or was there any sort of temptation to get a martial amp and a couple of dirty pedals?

13:34No actually yeah I've always been happy with the simple setup and And if anything, my temptation is towards jazz. And I almost have to kind of not indulge that too much because I think it takes me away from being accessible if you go too far down that rabbit hole. So it's incredibly inspired by a lot of jazz music and jazz performers, John Coltrane and people of that era. And I would love to play double bass for jazz music. I think it's such a fun, satisfying instrument for me to play. I kind of keep that as a hobby and an inspiration factor to keep things simple for my music. The other thing is also being open for collaboration has been a huge thing for me as well.

14:15So I think it was the album There Is when I first, the first one that I released with Counter Records on Ninja Tune. And that was a collaboration with Five One, who's an electronic producer. And that was the first time I really worked together with the electronics. But I don't want to learn any programming myself. So I just record, I've still got a tape four track and a few dusty old instruments. and then I'll work with people who focus on the electronic side of things. And actually, since the pandemic, collaboration has become a really, really important part of my music now. So every week I'm working on new collaborations in dance music.

14:48And again, when this circles back to limitations as well, I also feel this circling back into my own music when I write my stuff. I've got used to these collaborations where I have two chords or four chords and a beat. I like the puzzle of this. How do I represent myself with these limitations? and it still feels like it's me how do i do that so that's i've really enjoyed that i'm curious now because you've really taken a few questions from my mind already which is cool so obviously with your music you've got a lot of minor chord structures that sort of play homage to the jazz music and then there's in your music there's richness where you can explore as you said a puzzle and i like the word have you know is the word puzzle throughout all this because you can find ways of half nose and all of that stuff whereas with dance music i think as you said the limitation is there how much of a space you've got to sort of bend things and explore and do half steps and that kind of stuff because is that tapestry slightly less dense when you've got on two or three chords and a beat for sure but credit to the people i've worked with they know who i am and that's why they want to do something together so a lot of them have been quite open-minded so often when i'm recording for a dance track to get me into the mood of it or get me in the creative zone i will play instruments for it as well i will work out the chords and guitar maybe find a different way of playing them and maybe record some double bass and maybe do some choral parts as well and just really get lost in it and sort of create my own world with it i guess and then i'll say to them look i've done all this extra stuff just to help me get into it then i'll send it to them but you're not obliged to use it you can just use the vocal and very often they use all of it so that's been really surprising and so actually what ends up happening i feel like I'm doing something to bridge worlds as well just to bridge the acoustic world with the dance music world so I have a couple of collaborations off the top of my head one with Booker Shade recently called Save Me and they used my guitar which I just recorded for myself on the final track and there's another one with Dorian Craft called Set Me Free where I've recorded double bass and guitar as well and it's been really cool that they've incorporated all my ideas into their music as well.

16:58Do they ever push you into places where you might be feeling a bit uncomfortable or could it be creative dissonance that something could be unusual for you what i'm getting here is a couple of interesting dots that i'm joining that there was in your music there's no temptation to do something different or per se try to reinvent yourself or have a random album but i feel like you live in this double life that these dance collaborations giving you an outlet to explore something so has there ever been anything you're like maybe i don't want to do that i don't think so i think i like to work with people who already know about my music and then i feel like there's an understanding that they're not going to push me into or expect me to do something that i haven't done already but also i also don't like the idea of people having preconception of what i'm supposed to do i work this same way with people on my music as well if i want to work with matt kelly with the strings or any musicians that i play with i really don't like to give directions because I know I love these musicians already.

17:55And so there's this, there's a trust between us and I want to be surprised. Otherwise I just do everything myself. I work with Matt because I know he's going to come up with some ridiculous string part, which I would have never imagined. And I sort of welcome the surprise of that. And then hopefully I'm able to respond to his creative input and evolve the song into another level, which I didn't see coming. And this is the beauty of collaboration for me and try to have a similar approach with the dance music stuff as well. but they just ask me to come up with something and don't give me too much direction and I throw them a load of weird things and maybe they adjust the piece a bit to fit my idea and then we take it from there and it's a very freeing kind of experience.

18:33It's really good to hear because as a musician you can have a deep sense of ego you have an identity this is what I want this is how I want it to sound but as you said on your second album and on your first Ninja Tune album you work with 5B and he pushed you to a whole new soundscape because your first album your first self-released album was more or less a folk music right folk soul it was acoustic through and through and then this evolution happened what I'm getting from you so far that actually you're very open to it and you're actually happy to be taken on that journey and you trust people and I think that's and I use these words on the show was like self-acceptance did you already sort of feel that you are happy to be taken somewhere or did you feel like you were letting some part of you go and thinking is this going to work out or is this the right choice i think yeah i probably am self-assured in that sense that it doesn't matter what genre or production elements are happening i feel like i can put myself in that music if i like it and yeah i'm not going to be hemmed in by genres or a sound it's more about where it's coming from inside i think and trying to translate that into it sonically somehow actually this reminded me of one of your collaboration which is very southampton centric at that time which was part-time heroes that must have been i mean toby ross laura i mean again that reminds me of those really good times with southampton i felt like southampton was on the map at that time producing really interesting things what was that like because there was more of a would you say there was more of a sort of even collaboration or was ross and toby running the show it was quite even because well in terms of production they it was all in their hands but i think that might have been the first collaboration i ever did it was great because they liked my solo stuff and i said to them yeah they asked about collaboration i said to them i had an idea for a song and so i already had it this written really with guitar and they really liked it so we just went straight for it and i think it was the single of their album and I think we did a live session for Giles Peterson back then, playing that song.

20:36But yeah, production was, I knew which direction they were going with, you know, and it was already, the bits I'd heard already sounded really tasty. So I was like, yeah, whatever you do, you do what you want to do with this. I was just happy to play this song for them and it worked really well, yeah. Yeah, I mean, Realize was such a big single. I just remember, it's still, it's kind of embedded in my brain. It was such an incredible song. Absolutely incredible. So when it comes to writing your own music, you've moved quite a few years ago from london to rotterdam right and you've been very prolific and even though your album sometimes take quite a few years to produce whenever i check there's something new that comes from me how do you discipline yourself how do you push yourself to actually produce music at a time where we live in a very snackable environment like snackable society of people trying to create catchy tunes for tiktok the 30 second attention span but what you produce is very much staying true to your roots straight stay true to your formula obviously you're still very much a singer songwriter and i want to know how do you put a process of putting album together how does that sort of come together where does the where's the seedling come from and how do you do that it's almost become habitual now i don't think about it too much it got really precarious and tricky around the pandemic and i started to think can i really keep doing music since then i haven't played live much but luckily the collaborations started coming in so that gave me a different thing to focus on i don't really understand where this this need to create comes from entirely it kind of is relentless i would expect maybe one day it dies down and i think oh you know maybe i don't want to write and maybe i don't have anything to sing anymore but it's just always it feels like a endless fire inside and i just it's become a kind of way of life to just give myself the time to tap into it and hear these recordings i just really i really enjoy the process yeah it's a part of my life and i try not to dictate the terms or the direction too much and i like to see let that unfold by itself but yeah i don't know exactly where this comes from well i like your answer because you live and breathe what you do and for the part of my book based on this series of the podcast there in creativity there in forever i'm trying to understand the biological truths of the responses of our brains of how the neuroplasticity works in our brain and obviously how when we think positively when we do that one thing over and over again our brain is more adapted more susceptible to those influences those informational pieces of information that influence and then we focus more on this therefore we produce more of the motivation to actually do this because the reason why i asked you how do you feel about writing music at such times you can easily as you say you can be disconnected to it and actually do your own thing or you can react some of the musicians who are disheartened by the fact that they're not selling albums they are not getting the streams they should be playing because that's quantification of the following have i got enough followers have i got enough plays have i got enough days it can really play with those people who are not as you say as self-assured as you are because you stand firm with like this is who i am this is what i do and if the album doesn't do xyz that does it really matter because after all what really matters is what's on the album and how it sounds and what it says yeah you're right i mean it's actually a really tricky time with social media as well the pressure just to be constantly shouting about yourself on social media i think and aware of your numbers oh my gosh it can really interfere with your creativity and not just that but the general noise of the world and i think it's often talk about this with my partners you really have to protect yourself now and so easy to get swallowed up in all the noise and all the pressure to be something to the outside world when really you know you just got to shut that out sometimes or most of the time in order to be who you need to be it's a horrible thing as a creative person feeling this pressure to present myself to the world all the time so i have to almost switch mindset to do that and then try and protect the other side of me which is somewhere else being creative yeah what is it that you tell yourself when you feel like you losing towards the pressures of social media what is it that you tell yourself that you know what i'm okay i don't have to play that game because ultimately it's not the games and the rules that i've subscribed to it's just a outside noise well there even though it's difficult to get paid in streaming i do manage to get paid in streaming so that's one aspect that allows me to keep going which i'm very very grateful for so that i can check out my streaming stats and i see that people are listening and i'm able to support myself to keep making music but more spiritually it's the validation you get from people from individuals as well who just i think it's so nice when fans or anyone just reach out tell you what a song means to them or how it's helped them through a tricky period in their life for a moment and or help them celebrate something beautiful and those things really are really important for me as well because then maybe i get invited as well to a special private event to play for people whose song of mine is really important to them as well then i can get a grasp of that it's not just for me it's also other people are getting something from this and yeah that's also very important i think so would you say since you've been doing the collaborations that you actually expanded your listenership would you say that those kind of collaborations brought you new new listeners i think so i mean it looks like it i love to think that maybe people who weren't into more jazzy folk music might be checking it out because of something i've done in dance music and vice versa that excites me the idea of bridging those worlds together and i think music is just music you know it doesn't really matter what kind of is it you

26:21Jono McCleery:can enjoy any kind of music i think we'll be back after a quick break this episode is brought to you by Lax Coffee Co. The first creative speciality coffee company building a platform to shine the light on emerging global talent with a mission to make a positive impact on a creative industry and beyond. Lax Coffee Co. offers exceptional coffee sourced from around the world through ethical and sustainable practices and you can discover the current range of signature blends and single origins, coffee hardware and accessories along with exceptional apparel headluxcoffee.co.uk. You can use the code podcast to get 15 % off your first order.

27:15I think, yeah, to convert a drummer bass head into listening to your first album might be sometimes tricky, but ultimately it's still you. So I still want to go back to singers to writing albums because what i'm curious about is there sometimes a thematic meaning behind it because none of your albums are exactly the same as the one before or the one but not one after so i was just curious how these ideas and influences come together and turn into an album the last album is called reconcile and that one i recorded mostly i would do record my parts first until i was happy with them and then i would send them over to five five one and we start working together on his ideas over the top and the strings that was a nice way that that felt natural to do it like this i think i'm now putting ideas together for my next album and i think i will work in a similar way with a producer called jesse cole has in the netherlands and he's sort of more jazz orientated i could record a folk album by myself like a like darkest light but i like working with producers who can make the sound more bigger but with the sequencing that's when i will listen to the the music it's actually kind of a shame you have to go through this sequencing process because very often by the time the album comes out i don't really want to hear it anymore because of you've listened to it a hundred times and you know throughout the course of recording with other people you've listened to it thousands of times i don't know and it's hard to enjoy it at that point but i will try to go on a listening journey with the songs and try to hear the whole thing in one go and work out what feels right and in regards of the theme it's something that i would usually let uncover by itself i don't think there's a predetermined theme usually sometimes i think well with the reconcile album there are a few tracks with five one where i just wanted them to sound bigger i knew they were intimate songs the one i wrote for my brother called to see you again and it sounded really really nice with just me and the string section but i felt there could be a bit of a house beat on it and i talked to five about it and he really wanted to work on it and i was so happy with how it ended because it still feels intimate but it sounds big as well that was the goal for some of the songs to be intimate and big at the same time you mentioned your brother dave who sadly passed a few years ago and i totally knew from the track list when it says to see you again that must be about him did he ever get involved in any of your music did Did you seek his approval or his feedback, that kind of stuff?

29:49Was he sort of involved in your music? He's recorded on a couple of tracks on the Pagodes album. It was on Gymnopodist and Pardon Me, playing piano. I think when I was about, when I was starting to get into music, yeah, I would have sought his approval and wanted to know what he'd think of it. And he was always so supportive as well. I give him so much credit for me being involved in music because, yes, I'm not the kind of person who jumps on stage and wants to perform for people. I'm very my disposition is very shy so I really needed someone like that to say you can do this you're great fucking do it and he was that type you know pushing me to do my first gigs and absolutely showed me the way basically and in the beginning it was a huge influence really I think he showed me he had a band called Shine do you remember them did you ever see them play I think I saw them in Green Cellar that was my first experience of live music it was watching his band Shine in Southampton and I thought they were amazing and through them I discovered John Martin, Gil Scott Heron and people like that and yeah my brother really put me onto some great music when I was a kid but at some point when I was about when I started writing my own songs I could recognize that stylistically we were quite different and I was going into a more folk world and he was more acid jazz thing he was a bit dismissive of the folk thing I learned quickly I don't need his approval now.

31:06I'm going to go do my musical exploration and find out what works for me. But he was always super supportive, always loved to see me in music. Your paths crossed in part-time heroes, Dad. You know, your folk stuff, Ashley and the acid jazz stuff really met in the middle by you guys performing at the same time. So let me ask you, so after your first self-published album, you got signed by a sub-label from Ninja Tune. Did it feel like a pressure that you signed to a label with such weight behind them and did you feel like there was a lot of expectations to deliver or was it just a sort of vehicle to get the album out and you didn't feel like you have to deliver your best way having that sort of i don't know what the right word to use i mean that sort of anxiety about okay now this is not just my own album this is someone else's releasing it and it needs to be of certain quality it was really exciting luckily for me at that time i didn't know much about the electronic music so for me i wasn't as awestruck as some people my generation would have been in that situation because they wanted to do something experimental with me and for me to work with 5-1 and do like this sort of james blakey crossover album but actually being on their label then i got into a lot of the stuff on their label i was already a massive fan of cinematic orchestra and bonobo actually his early stuff but then but then i just found out a lot more about it as i was on that journey and yeah really the pressure was not so much on the music yeah i felt good that we could make a good album for them it was just tricky managing their expectations and they wanted something very specific and so we're trying to meet in the middle with this vocal electronica thing and the time frame it just seemed to go on forever as i don't know how many years those albums took forever because it kind of it's a political situation with a label sometimes where you need to check the boxes for them and also yourself can be really tricky it's interesting to hear and if you can expand on this because i think you use the word awestruck because you didn't particularly know too much about the label i kind of grew up with the label lots of cold cut bj vatim and like it was very much a down tempo label and they made themselves famous and then some 10 years later your album comes out and i'm like okay this is a new era the music is evolving everything's evolving but it's interesting to hear that there's expectations as soon as you a contract things change and was that a rude awakening or was that a part of the limitations how did you take it on because as you said these albums didn't happen quickly some people can't handle it at all and they will throw everything out and get out of that situation for me i wanted to overcome this yeah treat it like a limitation like a puzzle i think i wanted to work this out and get to the end the finish line with it and if that meant having 100 conversations or changing what I do slightly then yeah without feeling I'm compromising myself too much you know but I think that's also an important discipline to develop in the creative world because it's not all going to be easy and in your lap and in your comfort zone sometimes you got to meet other people's expectations and try to compromise and adapt and the same thing in relationships as well in your personal life I like the challenge of going through knowing that I can go through a situation like that and keep some integrity as well and still be happy with the finished outcome when When you think about it, somebody who listens to it, who's most likely from a different section of a creative industry, more from the visual storytelling, visual artistry, you get a brief said by someone who's going to pay for something.

34:28But most sometimes most likely you are there again, like enabler of the idea that you provide a commercial service. But to be signed by a label and then be told this is our expectations. Well, I think it's interesting to know all the shades of the creative process behind the scenes, like what really happens. because ultimately that album there is i would say it's come out fantastic i think it's a really great album i think it pushed you in a different direction and added those extra layers but when you said earlier listening to something for a thousand times how do you keep going when there must be element of endurance and knowing that you know ultimately going after a goal which hopefully everyone's got the same goal in mind yeah it takes resilience i think to keep going for me not having a plan b is quite a good reason as well i tried doing rubbish jobs and it just man i could do a rubbish job for six months and then i'm i got so much respect for people who can do that for for a lifetime oh my gosh i really not having a plan b and knowing that music is all i've got and all i want to really live for the professional sense yeah i simply have to make this work somehow that's my mindset i love the answer i absolutely love that answer because yeah if you've got no plan b you're gonna sit out a plan a very well i mean whatever it takes and whatever resilience expectations ambitions all thrown together yeah i love the answer no plan b is how you survive your career but you know i also want to touch quickly in one of the albums which was album of covers and now we talked about music sort of dance music and collaborations and stuff that album seed of a dunderland starts with cover of gabriel and when you talk about and as you've talked about for this conversation about being surprised doing things differently i don't think that ever anyone will create a better cover of gabriel because it's so unusual it's so odd so dynamic it's incredible as you can tell i absolutely love the version that you did but how did you go and cover a track like this which is obviously a huge track on a dance scene it's been celebrated for years it's kind of one of the anthems but how did you choose the song and how did you decide to rework it in a way and what goes into a cover like this thank you so much that's just amazing to hear it's a quite funny story actually with that album because i suggested to ninjjean that i wanted had this vision for a covers album with a string quartet and i just think it would be great i'd always wanted to do a covers album to honor some of the people that i've been inspired by they sort of said we'll support you to do the covers album if we can make some suggestions for it.

37:06So I said, okay, go ahead. Apparently they sent this suggestion paper around the whole, or email around the whole office. So everybody's putting ideas on it. And it came back to me, it's got a hundred suggestions on it. And I'm looking down the list thinking, oh my God, these songs, Eye of the Tiger, really anthemic, motivational pop hits. There's no way I could play some of these songs. But, you know, I sat down with my guitar and I went down the whole list. And I think the only song I felt I could cover from that was Halo by Beyonce. And I wasn't actually that familiar with it to begin with.

37:39But then I listened to it and I played it on guitar. I was like, yeah, I could do a slightly bluesier version of this. I think it's going to work. Apparently that was enough to appease them that I'd made an effort to incorporate one of their suggestions. And then I just got on with it with my list. and I think I maybe had 20 songs on my list which I recorded demos for and sent them to Matt Kelly to record to write some string parts for a quartet for and then I got all the we start to put the ideas together and yeah Gabriel just jumped out straight away as soon as I probably got a demo somewhere with his string parts on it as soon as I heard a string part I was just amazed I was like wow this is exactly beyond what I wanted for this for this project it was really exciting really exciting piece and to hear it with strings as well yeah then we went to a studio and tim brokins produced it and we got someone to play electric guitar and got the string quartet in the studio and recorded it as live as possible it just felt really really natural to play that song acoustically i think it's an amazing amazing song i mean it's incredible and that version i can literally just describe it as a gentle riot the way it just picks up and it's unbelievable i'm so grateful that you actually you know made that cover and to understand now that you had a plan a with the input of the ninja tune office can you just imagine i have a tiger being done in john mccleary style with spring quartz but it kind of shows it's really interesting because i understand albums are such an intimate expression of someone's soul writing expression what they sort of when you get that final article from a musician like yourself you're thinking is there limited input is there maximal input of other people how do these things happen and then to know that there was a card going around the offices and people having a sort of suggestion thinking well it was not their idea in the first place to be making a covers album so then why do they have to have a say but then again potentially limitations outcomes i'm fascinated by this because you're still going with the plan a picking up halo out of hundred songs and in their defense The Halo song did really well on the streaming services and justified the album quite quickly.

39:48So yeah, they'll be happy with that, I think. Well, can you imagine if you did Eye of a Time? Might have done even better. That's just a joke. So we talk about resilience and patience and discipline because Pagodes took you another four years to create. The albums are not quick, but how do you incrementally work that you know that you've got your deadline or timeline or that you know that you're heading towards something? do you put out an album when it's ready or when it has to be ready i'm quite good at setting my own deadlines for a couple of the albums that i've produced and myself where the before a record sale it was here i am and there you are and moonlit parade i self-funded them when i made them and with those i basically i just booked the studio dates with the band to record the album that was my deadline so well not to finish the album but to get it recorded and that was my deadline to finish writing the songs so there's the first headline and i'm not gonna wait until i'm ready i'm gonna give myself a fixed point that it has to be ready by and because they were quite live those albums it didn't take much to just took some mixing work to be complete with the bago's album on in tune that was really really tricky because we actually finished the album quite quickly well almost finished it quite quickly with voicewood jr the first inception of the album was just me and him working together we had a couple of singles out byron my hands and painted blue and then at some point getting towards the final quarter of the album nindy tune decide we want to take this album in a different direction now we want it to become maybe because i recorded age of self acoustically maybe that was the instigator here and they really liked it which is a robert wyatt cover the only cover on the album they then said we want to make this whole album more like that more like the acoustic one and we're like oh my gosh how many years have we just added to this project, Royceford Jr.

41:37was not having it at all and wanted to get out of it. I didn't want to drop the project with them so I finished the album with Tim Rokins and to make it more almost kind of reproduce it more acoustic basically so it's got this strange process a strange blend of electronica and acoustic which was not planned from the beginning and a completely weird process but we got there in the end but yeah somewhere in the archives is a electronic version of that album with voice for junior which i'd love to get my hands on actually and see if we can put it out again i think this is the fascinating part because sometimes you hear about albums that get shelved re-recorded this is not a unique situation to yourself you know a musician leaves then you know they have to rewrite their parts and whatever i think sometimes i would love to know what that sounded and sometimes the mystery is actually better than on a half-baked album or album that's just not quite right because in the age of streaming now you get the album that you love and you get to hear all the demos you're like this demo is a bit shit i don't want to hear it in perfect way just because there might have been a couple of different notes in a solo which i think that mystery obviously has been taken away from musicians life people have to be more transparent or feel like they have to be more transparent because one of my questions here next is that what does it feel like when you create something from yourself and then it just goes out in the open and then it meets the listener meets the fans meets the people potentially for the first time and what are the reactions like did you ever feel like you have to adjust to the fact that the music is now in their hands and they can interpret it in any way sometimes hopefully the positive way sometimes we might be misunderstood so what was it more like for you to release the music and then have a reaction i think in the beginning it's quite scary you're not quite sure if the outside perception of what you do is going to match at all with what you feel about what you do so you kind of want to try and make sure you're tuned into does the world need my music do people want it there has to be some reciprocal rolling process for you to want to carry on doing it you know yeah after some years of performing i mean to be honest i had such an amazing first gig experience actually at the larmatree festival when i was 17 i think my brother managed to get me an audition to play at this festival it was so nice because i played a small room and there was only a few people there to begin with but by the end of the show it was full and everyone's sat on the floor absolutely locked in and really super appreciative and it felt really really magical to start from an experience like that so validating and assuring and think right i'm going to keep going this feels good and it feels right so there has to be some luck i think in the beginning that i can imagine if i didn't have a brother as supportive as thievin was it could it could have stunted my growth creatively as well like there's plenty of sibling rivalries and families and people that will shut you down or tell you to cheer up all the time when you're playing your music and i didn't have to contend with that which i'm grateful for as well it's great to hear about steve legacy and mostly what you guys had and how you impacted your career your music i think it's incredible you mentioned about live music and you don't play as much potentially as you would like to where do you see the future of live music and actually contact with music per se everything's changing and we need to accept the change is always going to be present if you could change anything and if you could sort of bring anything back how would you imagine music to be consumed more in a life space differently i don't know how it's going to be obviously but i'm hoping that connection will become more of a thing more important everyone's so comfortable at home now and so online and whether it's you know watching series or texting with friends and not going out so much and everyone's i'm hoping that as the technology manipulates us to stay at home and spend money.

45:15I think I'm hoping that a human connection will become more important or more necessary for us. And there will be, I'd like to see live music, not just happening in venues and nighttime bars, but becoming in more alternative spaces and spaces where children can be as well. I think there are some festivals which are more family orientated. And I think it's really nice to be able to play for young people as well and to have inspiration on them at an early age, I'd like to see live music more accessible in more alternative spaces and to become more, the human connection aspect of it to become more important as well.

45:55Well, Angelo, I don't think you can summarize all of this conversation better than this, than to say it's all about human connection. Thank you so much for coming to talk to me today. It was nice to see you again, and it was nice to talk again and finding out more about the things that are not that easy to see through streaming platforms or just social media. So thank you for your honesty and thank you for telling me more about how you work because I'm a big fan and I'm looking forward to all those new albums because you've got no plan B. All the albums that are coming in the next few years, put them up.

46:23I will. Thank you so much for having me. It's been a pleasure.

46:35Thank you for listening to this episode of Daring Creativity Podcast. asked i'd love to know your thoughts questions and suggestions so please get in touch via the email in the show notes or social channels this episode was produced and presented by me radim malinage the audio production was done by neil mackay from seven million bikes podcast thank you and i hope to see you on the next episode

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