Morcheeba - The calm waves of trip-hop

1. Trip-hop, blues and bossa nova

At the start of the Nineties, brothers Paul and Ross Godfrey amused themselves playing drums, psychedelic guitars, keyboards, and recording their creations on computer, with no rhyme or reason, by their own admission. "Paul was into hip-hop, and I was into acid rock and blues. We met in the middle with Bob Dylan for the lyrical content, and we fused hip-hop beats with blues guitar," Ross recalls. In those years the digital era had quickly shifted attention from television screens to those of computers and mobile phones, and the lives of musicians, DJs and producers, among others, faced yet another revolution. New labels sprang up to categorize the flood of bands coming out into the open, and Morcheeba ended up under the one spearheaded by Massive Attack, which answered to a mix of ingredients: hip-hop, dub, techno, house, reggae, r&b, soul, funk, etc. They're remembered as one of the founders of the genre: welcome to the era of trip-hop.

Their debut Who Can You Trust? (1996) bears only a distant resemblance to, say, a Tricky record. It doesn't rely on electronic instruments: guitar and drums are played conventionally, and sampling is used sparingly. The dub rhythms create the perfect cushion on which to lay Skye's voice, for which adjectives abound: sweet, languid, never overstepping the mark, steeped in soul and blues to pace the beats and shape the harmonies. She grew up listening to Patsy Cline, country & western music, and eating fish & chips in London's East End with her adoptive parents - no rice & peas, the classic Jamaican dish, like her origins, which she instead rediscovers in front of the microphone. The vocalist chuckles: "If I took part in a contest like American Idol, I wouldn't even pass the audition, since contestants are required to sing at full throttle - as loud and as high as possible. Maybe I'm just lazy, but I like to sing effortlessly, the way my favourite singers did: Shirley Bassey, Frank Sinatra and John Martyn."

Critics defined Who Can You Trust? as "softer and more soulful than Portishead, less pop than Sneaker Pimps, and without the visionary spark of Tricky and Massive Attack." From the opening "Moog Island" onward, Skye's voice leads us through a series of compositions that, while introducing a new sound, borrow liberally from the past. The record is populated with slide guitars and funky wah-wah, a Hammond organ, and the occasional string arrangement, as in "Col" or "Howling", where they duet with Ross's electric distortions.
There are instrumental tracks: "Post Houmus", "Enjoy The Wait" - which could have come straight off a Ry Cooder soundtrack - the title track, nearly nine minutes of noise and distortion, and the closer, "End Theme", where a guitar stands in for the voice, briefly returning to the opening theme for just a few seconds. The long, psychedelic "Never An Easy Way" hypnotizes with its chorus, and "Small Town" opens with a bassline hinting at a reggae groove, over which a relaxed, smoky melody is sketched.

At the end of 1998 the album was reissued with a second disc of eight tracks, Beats & B-Sides Collection, which also includes a remix of "Shoulder Holster", a track that would reappear on the following album, Big Calm (1998).
Looking back on that period, Ross recalls that the trip-hop tag helped them "get a record deal, a recording studio, a world tour and the press on our side (…) and now we're in a position to do whatever we want." Paul sees it differently: "That label is just bullshit, there's nothing psychedelic about our music. It's just instrumental hip-hop made by middle-class people who can afford all the gear but don't know any rappers." Skye Edwards's voice, indeed, is about as far as you can imagine from the angularity of a rapper. "We never had a clear goal until we met Skye," Paul recalls. Together with Ross, they had drawn attention with an instrumental track built on a hip-hop beat and slide blues guitar; a label paid for their studio time, but they ended up recording a country song with banjo and pedal steel - branded as madmen, they were shown the door. After Skye sang for them at a party, they rented a studio and recorded "Trigger Hippie", their first single and the passport that got them asked, this time, how much money they wanted for an entire album. Portishead, with "Dummy" (1994), had sold half a million copies in the States, and record labels' doubts about whether there was an audience for that kind of music dissolved in an instant - they weren't madmen anymore. China Records (Warner Bros. from 1997) invested in a dedicated studio; some friends painted the walls and decorated them with posters of old Jimi Hendrix and Stephen Stills records. That's how Who Can You Trust? came about - the question that gnawed at them about the music business, the same old story, everyone acting like great friends but always with a financial interest lurking behind it.

Despite the success of "Trigger Hippie", named single of the month by Melody Maker, the album was given the cold shoulder by critics. "We had to deal with accusations of copying Portishead, and in a way we did, to get the attention of the media and the record labels. We didn't feel offended by that - we just wanted the genuineness of our intentions to come through to the audience," Ross explains, and the plan indeed worked. The album sold half a million copies and, despite the critics, David Byrne called them in to produce six songs for "Feelings" (1997).
On the tour for Who Can You Trust?, Morcheeba played without technological interference, unlike all those bands that stood motionless on stage without conveying any energy. "Audiences are generally interested in the visual side of things," Ross says, and with a frontwoman like Skye, things were naturally more likely to come together smoothly.

"Now that we've sold a lot of records, we can go back to playing what would have felt natural to us: country music with hip-hop beats," is the straightforward calling card Ross laid out to announce the release of Big Calm (1998). "We knew full well we'd be too busy to have time for the dreaded 'difficult second album', so we figured we'd write it before the first one even came out," recalls the guitarist and keyboardist. So, at a rate of roughly a song every five minutes, during a boozy night on 25 December 1995, the Godfrey brothers laid down the foundations and lyrics for Big Calm. Who Can You Trust? hadn't even come out yet, but their new record deal already demanded new material, and so it was.
"The Sea" is a soul-tinged ballad: a dragging drumbeat, the first element around which the Godfrey brothers build the chord progression, accompanies Skye's ethereal voice. The funky guitar and some scratching gurgle up from the waves of the calm sea (big calm, indeed) referenced in the lyrics, while the strings illuminate the vocal. Skye, as with all the other tracks, fits her rhymes to the music, crafting a dreamy, soft melody, almost a folk mantra: “Ho lasciato lì la mia anima/ Giù al mare/ Ho perso il controllo qui/ Vivendo libera”. It would become one of their most beloved songs, often performed in acoustic versions too.
"Blindfold" picks up where "The Sea" left off, blending loops, scratching and violins; it opens as if it could be an outtake from "Dummy" - but only for the first ten seconds, because beyond that it's genuinely hard to liken Morcheeba's sound to the dark, dirty, murky tones of Portishead. The album alternates mid-tempo moments with livelier ones, in both cases leaving behind the dub imprint that marked their debut, while still holding on to hip-hop influences, as in the lengthy title track and in "Bullet Proof".
"Shoulder Holster" is a pastiche of sitar and electric piano, carried by a scratched loop; together with "The Sea", it's one of the killer singles preceding the album. "Part Of The Process" is the most successful meeting of country and hip-hop: the slide intro, with a dark electronic kazoo marking time, flows into the catchy chorus, underscored by Cajun violins and pedal steel: "We all love to look down/ All we want is a little success." Ross is enthusiastic: "We wanted to write a song Dolly Parton could sing." "Over And Over" is an acoustic sketch of just over two minutes: guitar, violins and a philosophizing lyric sung by Skye: “Vorrei incontrare un umano che faccia sembrare tutto chiaro/ Per capire tutti questi cicli e perché sono qui/ Sto cadendo/ Ancora e ancora e ancora e ancora e ancora”. In "Fear And Love", the drums only come in at the end, while before that, the track is carried by a string orchestra arrangement with some horns peeking through; a trumpet traces a delicate solo, and the industrial trip-hop rhythms seem like a distant memory.
"Let Me See" is a contemporary boogaloo revamped to a hip-hop beat, with a flute drifting into tropicalia territory; "Friction" is driven by a reggae rhythm, a soulful trumpet answering Skye in the chorus, before Spikey-T throws in his rap contribution and the track takes flight. It's pop, at the end of the day. "It seems like most people have one particular track they like," Ross says, "whether it's the reggae one ('Friction'), the country ones ('Part Of The Process', 'Over And Over') or the hip-hop ones ('Bullet Proof', 'Big Calm'). They're easy reference points for fans of different styles, and then, if they listen to the rest, they'll probably end up liking the others too."
"My main memories of that period are just of intense panic. We were always out of our minds, and the fact that we were making such calm music was bizarre," Paul says, and put that way, we too wonder what mysterious potion the three of them took to produce the eleven tracks of Big Calm.

According to Ross, the musical differences among the three members are so great that it's impossible for them to tread on each other's toes, which is why Morcheeba's music never sounds forced and flows so pleasantly. For Skye too, the musical balance is a result of the three distinct personalities: "Paul is a control freak and Ross just wants to lie on the sofa smoking all day, so I slot in right in the middle." And right there in the middle, besides fitting Ross's lyrics to Paul's tracks and crafting refined melodies, the singer also found time to have two children. The first, Jaeger, to whom Who Can You Trust? is dedicated, travelled with his mother on their early American and European tours (and from 2015 he would go on to become the band's drummer). Later, Big Calm and its tour were scheduled to allow her a month of maternity leave after the birth of her second child.
Skye's status as a mother amplified Morcheeba's success: even women's magazines, which would normally have had little interest in a British trip-hop trio, promoted the band, playing up Skye's angle as a new-age rock mother. The album quickly became a bestseller of the late Nineties, selling two million copies worldwide and propelling the band, like it or not, into the mainstream.

"I was in the studio playing a riff for Paul," Ross says, "and he was yelling at me, asking for something fucking happy and fast! The problem was we were doing world tours with ninety-minute sets of very slow material, we needed to come up with something a bit faster, otherwise we'd fall asleep on stage!" With Fragments Of Freedom (2000), Morcheeba shed the more melancholy tones of their first two albums to launch new fusions, setting aside country in favour of funk, r&b, disco music, and ever less hip-hop. Some turned up their noses, finding the record too easy-listening, and its forty-four minutes do fly by, but there's nothing wrong with that if we're still hearing their most famous track on the radio today, "Rome Wasn't Built In A Day", an update of Sly & the Family Stone's hits, whose famous video's dance moves were seen just about everywhere at the turn of that millennium, 21 years ago now. The Godfrey brothers moved their arms and legs channelling the spirits of Jake and Elwood, in the scene from "Blues Brothers" featuring Aretha Franklin belting out "Think". From a coffee shop, Skye calmly sang: "These days it's so easy to get stressed out/ 'Cause people are strange and you never get a second chance", and we had only just entered the year 2000…
In "Love is Rare" the voice drifts in distractedly over a dragging funky guitar, before coming in to wag a finger at us during the chorus, just like Mrs Franklin in that aforementioned cult movie, “Fareste meglio a stare attenti/ Trattatemi con rispetto/ Perché l’amore è raro”. "Let It Go", like the opener "World Looking In", stays close to the rhythms of their earlier records, but Morcheeba were turning a page - the concern over being accused of copying Portishead had been replaced by a desire to explore new directions and embrace new collaborations. "In The Hands Of Gods" features Biz Markie, the East Coast rapper nicknamed The Clown Prince of Hip-Hop, who went down in history for losing the 1993 lawsuit that would change the world of hip-hop forever. From that point on, the copyrights for all samples taken from other tracks (one of the hallmarks of hip-hop records) would have to be bought and credited on the records.
The opening of "Good Girl Down" is borrowed from Fatboy Slim's "Praise You", released just a year earlier, and the riff of "Swallow End" throws everything onto the dance floor of a '70s disco, somewhere between Donna Summer and Gloria Gaynor, complete with a spacey solo paying homage to Stevie Wonder. With "Be Yourself" we keep dancing, shaking whatever we can; the rhythms darken, it opens by quoting Van Morrison's "Gloria", but the acoustic guitar breaks down into synthesized bass, once again nodding to Wonder - this time his '80s period - bouncing Skye's voice over an instantly catchy chorus: "Just be yourself/ In any way you want, baby." The title track closes the album: "When the party's over/ you don't know where to go," she whispers over a track that moves along the chord progression of Led Zeppelin's "Stairway To Heaven".

The charango is a small South American guitar with a body made from an armadillo shell: the name, chosen as the title of their fourth album (2002), evokes a purity that many felt had been lost on the previous record, which had been sold out to the charts the world over. The album draws on the Brazilian Tropicália movement (in the Sixties a group of musicians and artists, including Caetano Veloso and Gilberto Gil, had blended bossa nova, rock'n'roll, folk, African music, experimental music and fado) in a new fusion of Latin rhythms with soul, rhythm & blues and trip-hop. "We wanted this to be our weird, psychedelic, out-there album," Paul says. And Ross continues: "Charango was our attempt to placate the people we'd pissed off with the third album."
"All you have to do is slow down": Charango opens with "Slow Down", searching for peace and bringing us back toward Big Calm territory; a Hammond organ, inspired by Quincy Jones's "Summer In The City", weaves phrasing over a gentle rhythm, and we feel right at home, as if stepping through the door of our favourite haunt. "Otherwise" glides along an Arabic-tinged melody, introducing us to the warm, round sounds that populate the record. It's the single that carries the whole album, and the video draws in plenty of listeners, good and bad alike, somewhere between Wes Anderson and Walt Disney - but who cares: Morcheeba keep their own style, and without the millions of copies sold, some critic would have dismissed it as indie-pop. Along with "Way Beyond", it's the track that most recalls the band's past.
In "Aqualung", classical instruments mix with pop and scratching over a catchy melody, creating original sounds in a musical world where it's almost impossible to stitch together anything new: "The flute in the verse was particularly hard to get right," Ross recalls. "Sao Paulo" marks their first foray into Latin rhythms and bossa nova. The intro could be the sound of a plane landing, carrying us to Brazil: on a promotional trip the band never reached their intended destination, Rio de Janeiro, and ended up in São Paulo instead. "Even though the city was a concrete jungle, the people were wonderful, and that's how the lyrics came about," they recalled.
Kurt Wagner of Lambchop collaborates on two songs, providing the lyrics for the sensual "Undress Me Now" and for "What New York Couples Fight About", on which he duets with Skye; her voice, barely there and meditative, was recorded on a veranda in Nashville, with cars passing and dogs barking in the background. Ross plays harpsichord for the first time: "I wanted to do it because my hero Jimi Hendrix plays one on 'Burning In The Midnight Lamp', but it was harder than it looks!"
"Women Lose Weight" is a sparkling piece of hip-hop in which Slick Rick raps and Skye joins in on an infectiously r&b chorus that harks back to another era: a joy for new fans and yet another misstep as far as the old guard's purists were concerned. The song pokes fun at how superficially certain subjects get handled: a guy wants to leave his wife because she's too fat, and ends up killing her and going to prison.
Pace Won, a member of the hip-hop collective Outsidaz, duets with Skye on "Get Along", which Ross describes as "Neil Young produced by Dr Dre." "Nobody's doing stuff like that," he points out, "there's an orchestra in there if you can see through the haze of the psychedelia. The ending is like Dennis Coffey's guitar orchestrations (the legendary Motown session guitarist)."
On the title track, Pace Won again takes the lead vocal, and in general, compared to their other records, Skye's role as lead singer often takes a back seat, making room for heavier tracks in which her voice would otherwise get lost. "Public Displays Of Affection" is the most exotic track on the album, complete with harp, violins, a Morricone-style bassoon, and a backing vocal from Paul that recalls Serge Gainsbourg, marking his first time on vocals on a Morcheeba track. Ross: "There's a very uplifting chorus, based half on Dolly Parton's 'Jolene' and half on Ennio Morricone's 'A Fistful Of Dollars'."

Charango found success pretty much everywhere, though, admittedly, part of the old audience had moved on by then, replaced by younger fans who were perhaps less demanding. "I went to see Lambchop and someone shouted at Kurt (Wagner), 'Why the hell are you working with Morcheeba?' and he answered into the microphone, 'Because they're lovely people.' I also remember going to Rough Trade (a record shop in London) and there was a white-label copy of 'What New York Couples Fight About' with a note that said: 'We know this CD is by Morcheeba, but it's actually pretty good and you might like it!' It was practically apologizing for being one of our records!" Ross recalls.

In 2003 the compilation Parts Of The Process (The Very Best Of Morcheeba) was released, featuring one new track, "What's Your Name", sung by Skye alongside US rapper Big Daddy Kane. Then came a major tour of the States, which would yield the DVD titled Morcheeba: From Brixton To Beijing.

2. No longer a single singer

In the summer of 2004, Skye got a phone call from the band's manager: he informed her that they no longer needed her. On tour, Morcheeba had circled the globe five times, Ross recalls; the balance among the three of them had dissolved in the contrails left by their flights: "Working with a single singer limited our possibilities (…) it tied the sound to a single dynamic level." Skye wasn't exactly thrilled, but she wasn't devastated either: "To be honest, my first reaction was one of huge relief. I no longer felt comfortable in the band, and in the end that was the best thing that could have happened to me. Maybe I just wasn't brave enough to take the initiative myself." Looking back, her account of the split had more to do with the two brothers' egos than with any musical ambitions. In Italy, for instance, where they'd had great success, they played a lot of promotional tours, and it was always her who ended up on television while the other two didn't want to take part. The public began to think of her as a solo artist, even though she always made a point of crediting the Godfrey brothers' role. In the end, her departure would be chalked up to the usual vague "personal differences", and it wouldn't stop her from returning to the band in 2010.

The Antidote (2005) was meant to mark the band's turn towards artistic growth, a path previously blocked by Skye's presence. The new singer is Daisy Martey, already a vocalist with Noonday Underground, and the record label changes too: they move from Warner to Echo Records (a smaller label, later absorbed by BMG, which specialised in bringing well-known but not yet famous artists back to the surface). Listening to The Antidote right after any of the previous four albums, it's hard to believe it's the same band: no harm in that, change is almost always good. Pitchfork wrote that the new singer replaced Skye like "an Angela Lansbury stepping in for a Marilyn Monroe" — without, we might add, revealing any mystery worthy of Jessica Fletcher.
The psychedelia remains, but it's no longer filtered through hip-hop beats or the downbeat of earlier work: Martey had struck the two brothers with her psycho-soul voice in the vein of Grace Slick, which evidently led them to produce the ten new songs as if they'd come straight out of the 70s. A major influence is the legendary arranger/producer David Axelrod, whose pioneering 60s and 70s work with artists such as Lou Rawls and Cannonball Adderley boasted the same bright drums, big horns, strings and flutes. On the record, all of it is recorded live, and it sounds more dynamic than Morcheeba's familiar overdubbed sound.
The lead single, "Wonders Never Cease", moves between Fairport Convention (as do "Ten Men" and "Lighten Up"), Jefferson Airship and Love. "Everybody Love A Loser" echoes the sound of a record that would come out the following year, Back To Black (2006) by Amy Winehouse — the vintage revival of an era was already underway.

Dive Deep (2008) changes things again: we return to the present with a set of expansive songs, performed by different voices, often found through online scouting. For the single "Enjoy The Ride", they even try to bring Skye back in, but she, immersed in her solo work, turns down the offer. So the call goes instead to a pop/rock veteran, English singer Judie Tzuke (her moment of glory came in the late 70s and mid-80s, with "Stay With Me Till Dawn" her best-known song). The single is a decent success, a more mature Dido flavoured with world music touches. The same treatment goes for "Blue Chair", enriched with a few hip-hop samples to remind us the band remains, after all, one of the founders of trip-hop. Few tracks hark back to those not-so-distant years: "One Love Karma", featuring the voice of Korean-American rapper Cool Calm Pete, is one of the clearest leftovers.
The album is recorded almost entirely live and is inspired by traditional music, blues above all, albeit with that same urge to project it into the future so typical of the Nineties. "Run Honey Run" is a case in point, the first cover to appear on a Morcheeba album: a fingerpicking piece by John Martyn (it appeared on "London Conversation", 1977), with a relentless kazoo marking time. It's performed by English guitarist Bradley Burgess (formerly of Holly Golightly), who would return with the band playing bass on almost all of Blood Like Lemonade (2011).
"Riverbed", "Sleep On It Tonight" and "Washed Away" are propelled by the tonsils of Thomas Dybdahl, a talented Norwegian singer-songwriter with a deep soul voice. The first is a midtempo number somewhere between Richard Hawley and David Gray (remember "Babylon"?); the second opens with the slide guitar so dear to Paul, tinged with blues, much the same goes for the third and final track of the album, which bids us farewell on black-music tones.
"Gained The World" is perhaps the track closest to the old Morcheeba, thanks to the seductive voice of French singer Amanda Zara, who would go on to become Ross's partner: it could easily have fit on Charango. The acoustic "Au-dela" is sung in French and is the freshest novelty on the record, with a chorus sticky enough to be whistled after a single listen.

3. mor cheeba

In 2009, Skye and Ross meet in London at the offices of their shared manager, and after a cheerful evening, the singer starts reconsidering the idea of returning to the band — not just for a couple of songs, but for a whole album. Each of them lived in a different part of the world, but that was no longer a problem: internet technology, still in its infancy when the band formed in the mid-90s, was by now advanced enough to let them swap demos, vocal takes and song backing tracks as if they were all in the same room. Ross working from Los Angeles, where he'd specialised in film scoring, Paul from the south of France and Skye from Surrey, calmly finish off the tracks for Blood Like Lemonade (2011), already almost entirely ready before the band's original voice returned to the lineup.
"It was a natural process, we've never communicated as well as we do now that we live so far apart from each other," comments Skye, who, fresh off several years of solo success, asserts her point of view in a way that had never happened before: "When I came back to Morcheeba, I felt that Ross and Paul trusted me, they gave me free rein over the vocal arrangements. It's almost unbelievable that things work between us." For Paul, Blood Like Lemonade is a record with a classic sound, the natural follow-up to the bestselling Big Calm that they'd never dared write before, for fear of being branded monotonous.
Hypnotic drumming introduces "Crimson", which describes the moments following a car accident, opening "on the roadside near the wreckage", and it really does feel as though Morcheeba have been burned up like that wrecked car. "The woman in the song is truly psychotic, she tries to kill her lover by forcing him off the road," comments Skye, amused at voicing a killer speaking in the first person, a novelty in Paul's writing. On that, he says: "I've always wanted to write character-driven stories, but I was never any good at it; for this record I managed to focus on that kind of storytelling thanks to all the films I've watched in recent years and to collaborations with people like Jim White, Kurt Wagner (Lambchop) and Slick Rick (all of whom contributed lyrics to the band's past albums, ed.), who are master storytellers."
"Even Though" is the first single and, like the title track, is pure Morcheeba sound. In the video the singer warbles the words underwater in a polluted sea. The lyrics are inspired by interviews with astronauts who, looking down at Earth from space, couldn't understand why its inhabitants kept fighting each other and destroying it. The laboured breathing heard at the start and end of the track comes from one of their helmets, from someone who doesn't have much time left to live.
The title track tells the story of a former priest turned vampire and bounty hunter, roaming in search of revenge on villains and outlaws whose blood he drinks as if it were lemonade. Some critics have suggested the record is haunted by bleak messages: "If Nick Cave sang 'Blood Like Lemonade', the dark themes would be really obvious, but because it's my sweet voice, it won't stand out so much, I can get away with all this carnage because I sound so polite," jokes Skye.
We stay in dark territory with the opening line of "Recipe For Disaster", which asks: "Why is there a dead man in my dining room?" The woman kills her boyfriend because he turns up drunk to the dinner she'd prepared, Ross's slide riff mysteriously opening the tale. Paul likes to think of this record as born from his love of Raymond Chandler's novels and his technique of translating stories written for magazines into novels, weaving and polishing them so as to get, say, three stories into one. An alternative way of expressing his creativity: "Instead of always trying to be innovative, why not take what you're really good at and put it together into something better than what you've already done? That's the aspiration behind 'Blood Like Lemonade'."
Musically, the tracks follow the same logic, with no great new departures: the Godfreys have learned how to concoct an effective, highly personal blend of trip-hop, mixing the heavy drum-and-bass beats present in almost every track with subtle folk and electronic experiments. That's how "Self Made Man" and "Easier Said Than Man" play out, with lyrics written by Paul to explain to Skye that he'd come to understand how she felt about them, and to shed any remaining trace of post-breakup resentment. The acoustic "I Am The Spring" falls within folktronica territory, recalling "Over And Over" from Big Calm.
"Cut To The Chase" is an updated version of the esoteric, instrumental brand of hip-hop they've always crafted, while on "Mandala" Ross plays blues harmonica. "There's nothing wrong with having your own musical personality, but we didn't really consider that until our seventh album," Paul recalls.

If Blood Like Lemonade is Big Calm's little sibling, the next step, Head Up High (2013), comes straight out of the pop experimentation of Fragments Of Freedom (1998). "It's much more uptempo, it's over 150bpm! And normally we don't even go above 70bpm!" Paul points out.
"Gimme Your Love" opens the show: in the video Skye, sporting a quiff more rock than dance, moves among flower beds and outfits she designed herself, with a mischievous smile and a chorus catchy enough to quickly sweep away the darkness of the previous record. "Face Of Danger", featuring rapper Chali 2na of the hip-hop collective Jurassic 5, updates Grace Jones's hit "Demolition Man". "Call It Love", with James Petralli of White Denim, is the collaboration you'd never expect on a Morcheeba record. The indie-rock bandleader, used to blending experimentation, electronics and psychedelia into his compositions, stamps the track with his assertive voice and supplies lyrics for this soul-tinged number; he returns on the brief "I'll Fall Apart", duetting with Skye, and closes the album with "Finally Found You", a ballad with mood shifts worthy of Stevie Wonder. "Under the Ice" returns to more familiar territory for the band's sound, with an acoustic riff marking out the verses — the most Morcheeba-oriented track on the whole album.
"Make Believer" is a catchy dub number with a relentless reggae-style drumbeat and a wicked dancehall groove, as is "To Be", featuring British hip-hop duo Rizzle Kicks. The female voices on "Hypnotized" seduce partly thanks to the contribution of French-Chilean singer Ana Tijoux (formerly of Chilean hip-hop group Makiza, then a solo artist who resurfaced from obscurity thanks to "Breaking Bad", in which she features with the song "1977"). "Do You Good" sits somewhere between Goldfrapp and Kylie Minogue, and there's nothing to be ashamed of there: after all, even Iggy Pop used to play their records on his tour bus to calm down after shows — Morcheeba are more rock'n'roll than you'd ever have imagined.

In 2015, it's time for another lineup change: Paul leaves the band — "He wants to do something completely different from me. Paul likes electronics and off-beat stuff, while I'm more into organic, downtempo, psychedelic things, with guitar," comments Ross. For legal reasons, the Morcheeba name disappears and the new record is titled after their two names, Skye & Ross (2016). Skye's husband, Steve Gordon, plays bass, and their nineteen-year-old son, Jaega (born around the time of Who Can You Trust?), plays drums, while Ross's wife, Amanda, has fun on backing vocals.
Paul's departure, the band's DJ, causes the hip-hop influence to almost entirely disappear: scratching and rapping vanish, while in return there's far more guitar and live instrumentation. A homogeneous style wraps around every track, keeping electronics as a supporting element and creating warm midtempo songs leaning towards rock, while touching along the way on a variety of other genres. Skye's role within the group expands: besides building melodies over the backing tracks Ross sends her, she writes all the lyrics, as she had already been doing in her solo work.
The single "Light Of Gold" adds nothing to the band's familiar atmospheres; it's the calling card for a record that would run into no small distribution trouble. Not releasing under the Morcheeba name takes its toll: their names get lost in the flood of new releases, and both sales and listens would stay below their usual standard.
The guitars on "How To Fly", mixed with the screech of the organ, lend it a bluesy vibe; on "Feet First" they're filtered through a psychedelic wah-wah, while "Medicine", using similar elements, leans more towards soul, thanks to the organ and backing vocals accompanying the lead voice. "Clear My Mind" is acoustic, nothing more, as is "Head Home", carried by fingerpicking over a bed of keyboards; on "Repay The Savior", beneath Skye's voice, Ross's whispered electric chords alternate, while "The Point Of No Return" closes the run of songs with a bluesy slide-guitar riff in a desert-like atmosphere.
The record glides by quickly, maintaining a homogeneous sonic palette throughout, without ever sounding stale or flat. During the promotional tour, the old Morcheeba-branded songs would get far more stage time than the new ones, as if to reaffirm that the cards on the table were the same as before.

With Blaze Away (2018) the legal issues with Paul are resolved and the Morcheeba name goes back to navigating radio and charts, picking up the thread of Head Up High (2013). The influences from their early records haven't been lost: Fifties blues, Sixties psychedelic rock, Seventies dub reggae, Eighties electro, and finally Nineties hip hop. The melting pot of styles we've come to expect from them reworks everything they've tackled over nearly twenty years, refreshing it with new collaborations. On the title trackRoots Manuva (a pioneer of British hip-hop, of Jamaican origin, already featured on Massive Attack e Gorillazintroduces Skye's voice, backed by a machine-gun groove funky beat, while the guitar strums along following the lead of Keith Richards"Roots said in rap what we had tried to express in a more melancholy way. He goes straight to the point, which inspired us to be rawer and more direct," explains Ross. Right behind comes the bassline of "Love Dub", where Zion Train (a British dub group active since 1988) leave their mark, which resolves into a pop chorus with reggae rhythms.

"It's Summertime" boasts lyrics once again penned by Lambchop frontman Kurt Wagner, but we prefer it stripped-down and bluesy in the version by Little Mountain (on the second remix CD of the deluxe edition), a project of Ross's with his partner, French-Chilean singer Amanda Zamolo (who had already stood alongside the band on 2008's "Dive Deep" during Skye's absence) who resurfaces on the final track, the hallucinated "Mezcal Dream". There must be a reason for the title: the two female voices repeat, over an obsessive Massive Attack-style backing, "I look and touch, I look and will touch", while the electric guitar hammers out a riff with world-music flavours. French star Benjamin Biolay duets with Skye on the sensual "Paris Sur Mer", somewhere between late-period Leonard Cohen and Serge Gainsbourg, with a galloping rhythm, tackling a description of a Parisian night.
"This time, nothing was off-limits. Morcheeba have always embraced different cultures. We're as proud of being global as we are of being British," says Skye. And the truth is that the best tracks are the ones made together with other artists. We like "Sweet L.A.", a rarefied r&b number marked out only by Ross's Hammond organ and Skye's voice (turned into dreamy folk in the second CD's remix), the scant minute of "Free Of Debris" and the opening, futuristic "Never Undo", but we could have done without "Find Another Way" and "Set Your Sails".

The deluxe edition of the record will include remixes of almost all 11 tracks, some even in a couple of different versions. The work carried out by the various DJs feeds into stimulating sounds and atmospheres, in which Skye's voice is set like a jewel without ever getting lost.
The Blaze Away tour sees the band playing around the world in an increasingly familiar lineup: Skye's son, Jaega, on drums, her partner Steve Gordon on bass, and Ross's partner, French-Chilean singer Amanda Zamolo, on backing vocals.

So, in 2021 comes the return to action with Blackest Blue, yet another musical chapter born of a year of forced lockdowns: an elegant ten-track album with sounds closer to the band's trademark style — downbeat, chill, electro-pop, soul.
As with the rest of their nine-album discography, the track that opens this tenth record, "Cut My Heart Out", is a low-tempo number, where the bass plays hide-and-seek with the drums, creating off-beats over which Skye's voice stitches rhymes while Ross's doubled guitar bends notes in the best Funkadelic style. The single "Killed Our Love" spins around a killer riff, losing itself in the chorus, and the lyrics don't make it any easier to digest. The single "Sounds Of Blue" is, for now, the most impactful track, as fresh as a dive into the ocean. "Say It's Over" is a two-voice piano ballad: Edwards is joined by Brad Barr, a Canadian folkie already known from The Barr Brothers and The Slip, also co-writer of the track: the two trade verses and rhymes over the bare-bones texture of piano and slide guitar laid down by Ross. The 70s B-movie-style musical interludes are scattered throughout Morcheeba's discography: the instrumental this time, in an r&b key, is "Sulphur Soul" and, imagining holding one of the blue vinyl copies pressed for the occasion, it would close side A.
Flip the record over and Ross's guitar ushers in a velvety dub-soul, Skye comes in: "Oh Oh Yeah" is one of the singles and, for nearly 7 minutes, takes us back to the low-beat sounds that fade away, just like at the dawn of their career. "The Moon" is a cover of Croatian singer-songwriter Irena Žilić, with an added verse, but while the original has an indie vibe, Morcheeba's version veers towards the mainstream with a riff that smells of the 90s. The rarefied, folky "Falling Skies", marked out by acoustic sounds, pays tribute to the memory of George Floyd and to the activism of the Black Lives Matter movement. On "The Edge Of The World", the dark voice of Duke Garwood, formerly of Archie Bronson Outfit and Mark Lanegan, recites the verses, while Skye's clear voice takes on the chorus, in a track with psychedelic, futuristic sounds. The driving "Namaste", meanwhile, revives the trip-hop era, lost somewhere between the late 90s and the start of the new millennium.
"Blackest Blue is about finding a way through the darkest moments and emerging on the other side, changed but intact," Skye and Ross note on their website. After these claustrophobic months, it's a good starting point to step out into the open, ready for new adventures.

Returning four years later with Escape The Chaos (2025), the spark seems to flicker back to life again, at least in part: a groovy, seductive legacy ("Call For Love"), alternating with more dreamy, nocturnal moments ("Cooler Hands"). The whole record lives on this contrast: a perhaps timid aspiration to change skin, and loyalty to an already well-established identity.
The production aims to weave Ross and Skye's lounge soul together with a layered sensitivity, evoking psychedelic flashes and tropical shades, while still staying anchored to their signature sound. Skye Edwards delivers an enveloping vocal performance, a velvety yet assertive tone, interwoven with a pulsing, measured rhythm section, almost in slow motion. And alongside Ross's drum machines, keyboards and guitars comes a palette of arrangements featuring horns, strings and backing vocals ("Hold It Down"), in a sound that is at times fuller-bodied than works like "Fragments Of Freedom". This isn't baroque excess, but a dense, warm execution, able to smooth over, if only slightly, the murkier passages.
There's no real misstep here: simply, aside from successful tracks like the opener, "Elephant Clouds", or the bossa nova of "Dead To Me", much of it slips by without fully leaving a mark.
The advantage, though, lies in its atmospheric consistency: Morcheeba know how to dress up even flimsier ideas with elegance, keeping them from becoming mere filler. The nod to their early days remains their strong suit, but it isn't always enough to leave a lasting impression. More than a metamorphosis, "Escape The Chaos" is an exercise in style: a conscious return to a by-now-codified aesthetic, which nonetheless marks a measured step forward from their most recent work.

Last but not least, the name Morcheeba means something like "The way of cannabis": it's made up of "mor", an English term denoting a musical genre close to smooth jazz as well as, literally, the middle of the road, and "cheeba", slang for cannabis.

4. Side projects and collaborations

Skye is the only member of the band to have had a solo career of her own; as early as 1997 she took part in the Unicef charity collection with "Perfect Day", alongside, among others, Lou Reed himself and David Bowie. In 2004 she took part in Band Aid alongside Dido, Paul McCartney and several other big names. Her output as a solo artist begins a few years after her departure from Morcheeba. Mind How You Go (2006) is produced by Patrick Leonard (American musician and producer, from Madonna's "True Blue" and "Like A Prayer" to Leonard Cohen's last three albums). Thanks to the lead single "Love Show", the record performs well on European charts and gives the singer a real confidence boost: she takes on writing all the lyrics herself, often together with her partner, bassist Steve Gordon, and on the closing track, "Jamaican Days", a brief Caribbean-tinged a cappella gospel number, she's joined by Daniel Lanois.

In 2008 she sings two songs ("Call Me" by Blondie, also released as a single, and "A View To A Kill" by Duran Duran) for the "Hollywood, Mon Amour" project, an all-female album of reinterpretations of American songs, and in 2009 she releases Keeping Secrets, produced by Grace Jones and put out on an independent label founded by the Morcheeba vocalist herself: Skyewards Recordings. The record, while keeping the tone of her debut, dares a little further into electronic territory, meeting with decent success, especially in live performance.

Back To Now (2012) arrives after her return to Morcheeba for Blood Like Lemonade (2011). It's produced by Stephen Fitzmaurice (U2, Depeche Mode, etc.), and it shows in the sound, which leans towards fairly commercial mainstream pop.

The return to a dimension more suited to her voice comes with her latest solo album, In A Low Light (2015). Skye has said she didn't write the songs for radio, and that most of them came together at the piano and were recorded on her phone. Not being a pianist, the results are quite improvised, but it was definitely an alternative way of composing.

A side note on Skye's close relationship with Italy: still with Morcheeba, she took part in an album by Alice, "Exit" (1999); in 2012 she appeared as a guest on the X Factor reality show, then at the Sanremo Festival duetting with Nina Zilli, and at the Christmas concert with both a solo appearance and one alongside Annalisa. Recently released is the compilation "Good Night Songs For Rebel Girls" (2020), based on the book "Storie della buonanotte per bambine ribelli" by Italian authors Francesca Cavallo and Elena Favilli, on which Skye sings "The Only Way Is Up", an early-80s soul-dance track. The record is a collaboration between Decca and Rebel Girls, a digital media company and children's publishing house known for a series of hugely successful books that offer young girls around the world stories and illustrations of history's most influential women, featuring, among others, Ani DiFranco and Beth Orton.

Little Mountain (2014), on the other hand, is the side project of the same name by Ross Godfrey together with his partner Amanda Zamolo (already featured with Morcheeba on Dive Deep and later a permanent backing vocalist in the Skye & Ross lineup) and Ste Forshaw, whom Ross met on London's Southbank, where he was performing as a busker. It's a warm, sun-drenched record, with echoes of the Laurel Canyon scene in California, where Ross lives, enriched by a wealth of instruments (vintage guitars, early synthesizers and Hammond organs, bass, lap steel and drums) and references, from the beloved Stephen Stills (one of Ross's favorites) to Fairport Convention and Fleetwood Mac.

Contributions by Alessandro Giustiniano ("Escape The Chaos")

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