As one of the world’s most accomplished downtempo outfits, England’s Morcheeba has never been afraid to take musical chances. The trio – DJ/producer Paul Godfrey, singer Skye Edwards and multi-instrumentalists Ross Godfrey – always seems to digest a wide array of styles (hip hop, funk, psychedelia, soul, whatever) and respond with some of electronica’s most tuneful material. So it should come as no surprise that its latest, Charango (Reprise/Sire), pushes the diversity envelope even further.
Morcheeba’s fourth album is loaded with gorgeous pop songs (the single “Otherwise”), appealing oddball moments (“What New York Couples Fight About” with Kurt Wagner of the wildly eclectic Lambchop), DJ cuts and scratches (“Get Along” with MC Pace Won of the Outsidaz) and seriously guilty pleasures (the hilariously mean “Women Lose Weight” with rap legend Slick Rick). Beautifully recorded, Charango skips deftly across genres with a battery of fully realized songs that make you groove, while occasionally tickling your funnybone. DJ Times caught up with Paul Godfrey to find out how Morcheeba approached Charango, its first album in two years.
DJ Times: What is the DJ setup you use?
Paul Godfrey: I use Technics 1210 MkII turntables and a Vestax PMC-06 mixer. I recently got a Korg KAOSS Pad to make spacey echo effects.
DJ Times: Is this what you use when playing live with Morcheeba?
Godfrey: I make noises with the decks and scratch. I use the records DJ Swamp made that, even if they jump, you land on the same noise. They’re basically scratch-proof. When the stage is bouncing up and down and the needles are jumping everywhere, you can still scratch with them. I also have some of my own that I had made with sounds from the record and some movie soundtrack stuff. Because there’s so many layers of texture on the records that we make, I try and fill that in so it doesn’t sound too much like a straight rock band.
DJ Times: What gear do you have in your studio?
Godfrey: We’ve got loads of funky, fancy gear in the studio. My standard beats machine is an [Akai] MPC 2000XL that I do all the drums on. But then we have loads of great retro gear, valve compressors and a valve desk, Hammond organs, Rhodes, Wurlitzer, Clavinet, Gretsch drum kit. We use Apple Macintosh with Pro Tools and Logic. We do a lot of editing and treat that like a big sampler. But most of it is analog. We now have some really expensive gear, which is cool because when we started we had a Mackie desk and some [Alesis] ADATs. The reason the new record sounds so good is we had the equipment to do it. When we were recording Pace Won, we had every single expensive mic you could think of all around him and it looked like a press conference, but the Sony was the best one, and that’s what they used to record Slick Rick. It made Skye sound amazing. It just has so much top end on it. You have to roll some of it off, otherwise it can be too bright compared to the track.
DJ Times: Are you the main producer?
Godfrey: It’s pretty much Ross and I and Pete [Norris] is engineer/co-producer.
DJ Times: For a project that, as you’ve said, started as a beats record, Charango sounds the most live of all your albums.
Godfrey: It was a conscious decision I made. We were going to do it with quite a lot of cut-ups and samples. It was a moodplate of how I wanted things to sound with all the hip hop I was listening to and how I was feeling at the time, playing with adaptations of that with Ross’ songs and chords and stuff, and then Skye came in and started adding melody, so I started writing lyrics. Before you knew it, we had about 20 tracks.
DJ Times: Have you always written all the lyrics?
Godfrey: I wrote all of them apart from Kurt Wagner’s, and Pace Won and Slick Rick’s raps. I’ve written all of them. I always have. I write with [Skye] in mind. I write words I know will sound good in her mouth. She writes her own stuff, but she’s not very forthcoming and confident with it. We’re kind of bastards for editing stuff, and I think she’s a bit precious about having her stuff chopped about by us. It’s something that needs to develop a bit more.
DJ Times: You didn’t go on the last tour. Why is that?
Godfrey: I decided I was going to be the Brian Wilson of the DJ world, stayed at home, spent about 20 grand on records, did loads of sampling and made loads of beats. I made about 60 tracks. When the guys came back, I played them to them and got them to mark them all out of 10, and we democratically decided which moods we wanted for the record. The whole record came from a DJ angle and then was turned into songs. I do quite a lot of scratching on the record and spin noises in. I DJ a lot in Europe and in England, so I’m always playing acetates of what we’re doing. One thing feeds the other.
DJ Times: Was this the first time you worked on your own so much?
Godfrey: I did in the beginning because we had a lot more time on our hands and we were unemployed. Once we got caught up in the whirlwind of promotion, tour, promotion, tour, then I just didn’t get the time to do it.
DJ Times: You didn’t feel that not being on tour with the band had a detrimental effect on working together?
Godfrey: I’d done enough of that and I hated it. I like doing fresh things every day, as opposed to playing the same set over and over again. I’m back on the road now because Brian Wilson is back on the road.