Leafblade - The kiss of prog-folk

Two and a half records in six years is a decidedly slim haul, the kind of output usually only afforded to bands already established, at least within their own scene. That's not the case for Leafblade, the prog-folk project led by the mysterious figure of songwriter, poet and actor Sean Jude, born out of his meeting with Daniel Cavanagh, guitarist of the far more celebrated Anathema – the two were later joined by Kevin Murphy, bassist of Moondoggies. It's the man behind the name – who, given how forcefully he insists on asserting his status, might more fittingly be called the deus ex machina – who agreed to tell us the story behind the scenes, from the band's founding to the definitive step forward of the latest “The Kiss Of Spirit And Flesh”, in language steeped in philosophical evocation as much as polemical verve, not shying away from a few awkward revelations and a couple of surprisingly frontal attacks aimed at the man who should, in theory, be his primary partner in the project.

When, where and on what occasion did you first meet?

Towards the mid-Eighties, Kevin and I built up a reputation in Liverpool playing in a prog band, Valle Crucis, and making music that was truly fiery and full of stories to tell. It was the dawn of my career, of my ideas. Daniel, meanwhile, was busy with his own scene, but before long he became a fan and adored what I was creating. That band, in fact, is still recording to this day, under various incarnations, just as I continue to write and carry on my career as an actor.

How did the idea of founding this project come about?

I stayed in occasional contact with Daniel, who in 2003 suggested I bring my acoustic work to Europe. Back then he was truly in love with that material, and besides, Valle Crucis already had an excellent reputation thanks to their heavier, more conceptual pieces. Then both Daniel and I realised it was necessary to bring my material to the attention of a wider audience: so we founded Leafblade as a "cousin" project to Valle Crucis and began touring outside Europe too.

How much of your own experience have you poured into this project?

How much? 100% of my blood, my sweat, my tears, the wounds on my fingers, my spirit, my dreams, my emotional sphere, my visions and my imagination. My life is a sum of what I have been, am, and will be: memories of what I was and of what I might be. My poems, writing in general, my memories and Leafblade are all I have. This is my experience: creativity, imagination, memory, growth, everything combining to form a single essence, the reality of what we are. I've been given the chance to carry all of this across the stars, the best thing that could have happened.

Did you find it difficult to reconcile your musical background with Daniel's?

Daniel and I have a fairly similar musical background: we both grew up in Liverpool, we share an interest in meditation, in the power of nature, and a love of acoustic music. It was all pretty straightforward: I was writing some new songs and he liked them, so he sought out and found channels to spread them across Europe, where we toured for many years and where my older writing was already better known.

This new work is decidedly closer to prog-rock than the first record under the Leafblade name. Was that a stylistic choice?

We agreed we wanted to create something more dynamic and driven this time. Daniel shared my plan to make greater use of electric guitar and drums, the latter played divinely by Cardoso. The tracklist was also genuinely easy to put together: we included a handful of songs we'd been playing acoustically for a few years, brought them into the studio and re-recorded them adding synthetic orchestration, plus new versions of other existing tracks. Digging into my archive felt like the right and enjoyable thing to do, so we could include songs on the album that longtime fans would recognise. Certainly, the new album has a rock edge, whose core lies in poetics and mysticism. That's because I love rock music, and when I'm not on stage with the classical guitar, backstage I practice on my Jackson Pro-Fusion playing wild arpeggios. It's all in my blood because I'm a guitarist with interests in different worlds. As for prog, I don't think it's quite the right label, except for "Portrait" and part of "Oak Machine". There are no odd time signatures or forcedly unconventional solutions, also because the heart of the music lies, if anything, in the voice, the strings, the vision and the gravity.

How did the thematic concept behind the record come about?

It's a project that unites the fire in the flesh, the strongest warmth ever in the blood, and the divine fire in the spirit. Something that has moved within me since birth, and not only that, that moves in all of us, and is also the ultimate essence of what we are: vibration. A mix of sensory perception and the joy of pure physicality of the organism. These are concepts I've explored in my poems for more than twenty years. The album focuses heavily on the expansion of awareness and perception, which allow us to feel a real bond with the universe that moves within us and beyond us, and to escape that small mind at the root of everyday existence. A subject that brings me back to Dante, Virgil, Leonardo, and Nietzsche's thinking on human potential. The birth of "The Kiss Of Spirit And Flesh" is mine as much as it is yours, it's the conduit of what we are: blood, electromagnetism, bio-synthetic skin, universal energy. We are the ghosts in the machines, each with a nuclear force and a heart beating with potential energy equal to that of a caesium clock.

I also noticed this bond between the earthly and the spiritual in the lyrics…

Some think life is the meeting place between the physical and spiritual dimensions. But both are matter in different states of refined vibration. Take a wall or a photon, for example: anyone would think of a wall as something solid, yet from a quantum point of view it's made up of particles in constant vibration, exactly like photons. Deep within nature, far from the apparent solidity of things, there is quantum motion, a vibration born of chemical madness. Some might call it the soul: I like to combine chemistry with metaphysics and find a meeting point between them, in a Buddhist sense. Science and religion aren't mutually exclusive, but share a series of common references found in many places, creativity and inspiration among them. One of the essences of this new record is the interaction, through poetry and inspiration, between mind and earth: human sensitivity fused with the spirit within nature. And it's not just a jumble of post-romantic sentimentalism: it's the human condition that drives us to seek, to strive, to hurl ourselves beyond the stars in search of expansion. We don't know who we are, we experience everything in this life, and it doesn't only happen to people with a greater poetic inclination, but to everyone who feels love, sadness, hope, anxiety, depression, euphoria: which is to say, everyone. Since childhood I've tried to channel some of this energy and remain as aware as possible of the infinite spirit that exists within and all around us, as well as in the few carnal moments we allow ourselves. Like everything in nature, from rocks crumbling beneath our feet to plants turning green thanks to the light, that's how we are too, in our being human.

"Portrait", the album's closing track, does seem to be truly close to the prog world, though. Has that world, of which the latest Anathema also belongs, influenced your music?

I agree that "Portrait" is one of the few tracks with a progressive feel, but I've never been influenced by Anathema, and I've never thought about moving towards their world. If anything, it's the opposite: it's my music that has considerably expanded their creative horizons. If he were here beside me, Daniel could confirm that what I'm saying is true, and if he didn't, he'd be lying. When he called me a few months ago telling me he was working on his own version of that same "Portrait", I found it quite sad that he was using one of my songs as the basis for his own work. It might sound strange, but I never try to draw inspiration from other people's work, except early on when I was somewhat influenced by Rush and Clannad. Anyway, that song was born in 1991 as a poem, to which I started adding music around 1996, on my own. I'm sick of hearing that my work has been influenced by Anathema or by Daniel, because it hasn't, not even by a single note! Danny added quite a few nice ideas to the tracks in the studio, particularly regarding the synthetic orchestration, ideas we nonetheless discussed and worked on together before he physically put them into practice. And in any case, "Portrait" is centred on medieval allegory and a Celtic epigram: a world of occult idylls, of fairy evocations, where the doors connecting worlds are found, and invocations of feminine doctrine answering the call of the Muses from Greco-Celtic-Arthurian culture. Concepts that have never been and will never be explored by Daniel or by Anathema. If you want to know who has really influenced my world, I should instead give you a few names of poets and writers: Walter de la Mare, WB Yeats, John Masefield, Robert Frost, Edward Thomas, Thomas Hardy, Shelley, Robert Holdstock, Umberto Eco, Philip Pullman and Mervyn Peake, Colin Wilson, RJ Stewart, Murray Hope, Marian Green, Aleister Crowley and Dion Fortune, just to name a few. And then, musically this time, Igor Stravinsky, Vaughan-Williams, Bach, Hoddinott, Panufnik, Beethoven, Mahler, Pärt, Respighi and Shostakovich.

How do you split the workload? Listening to you talk, it sounds like you're the real driving force behind the project, with Daniel effectively present only as a performer!

The new album has a sticker from the label that reads something like "the new masterpiece by Daniel Cavanagh", and mentions me in a decidedly minor way. Well, that's just a marketing strategy. I wrote the lyrics, conceived the content and worked out the heart of every song on the album myself. Daniel added the guitar parts and the orchestration. On top of that, I also chose all the poetic epigraphs that accompany the lyrics. Cardoso took care of the rhythms, though not without first discussing and arranging everything with me.

Kevin has contributed fundamentally to the development of my ideas from the very beginning, and he's shown that he truly understands the background underpinning my music. I think he's the only bassist on the planet I could ever work with. He writes all the bass parts himself, and he's got a great voice too: I just have to give him some basic pointers, and for the rest I let him do as he pleases. With his multicoloured intelligence, Kevin is a dominant force in Leafblade, and always welcome. If we want to think of him as an actor performing in my shows, then he certainly always plays leading roles, on a par with Pete Gilchrist, who over these sixteen years has always shown great musical maturity and a strong sensitivity towards my ideas. As far as I'm concerned, the two of them are full-fledged members of Leafblade, while Dan has and will have a lesser role, at least for as long as he keeps being, quite rightly, so busy with a thousand other projects. We've played in twenty-five countries over the last nine years, but lately he's only played with us in London, at a label party for the album release. Before that, three and a half years had gone by since the last time we'd worked together in the studio and live. I don't know what will happen, but I think his role within the project will keep diminishing over time. I have no interest, desire or need to work with someone who shows up in the studio for a few weeks and then vanishes: what I need is a band made up of people willing to commit to it full-time.

How did you end up on Kscope, and how important was landing on that label?

Dan's direct contact with Kscope probably made things easier for us, but it's also true that Steven Wilson had already come to appreciate Leafblade's music, to the point of keeping the first album in his car for about a year — all before we'd even signed the contract! We probably would have gotten there anyway without Dan as a go-between, but that's how the music industry works, you know: clichés and connections. But that's not all, thankfully: you also have to make music that's worthwhile, that the label in question sees as having real potential for popularity and sales. Our relationship with KScope is excellent, they've always been extremely quick and efficient in promoting the record, as well as being genuinely friendly and likeable. And I think it's very important for an artist to have a good relationship with their label, above all.

Will you be bringing "The Kiss..." to the stage?

I hope so. The band, made up of me, Kevin, Pete and a new drummer, has been ready since the start of the year, and we're still on the hunt: we need places to play live at high volume, and we've got to manage to find them! It would have been impossible to play with Dan and Cardoso too, given their constant commitments, but to be honest I'm glad to have brought new musicians on board. Leafblade was increasingly being seen as a kind of Sean & Anathema, and I wanted to quickly distance my project from that cliché. Aside from that, neither of them was in a position to commit fully: with Danny we agreed from the start that he wouldn't play live with us, and we're both fine with that. Over the last few years we've played quite a few British festivals and events on the Pagan scene, and now we've got a handful of dates lined up before the end of the year, some of them with the new drummer too. There are also some offers from Europe that I'll be considering, since it would undoubtedly be a great pleasure.

What are your thoughts on where the project goes from here?

I think I already answered that earlier! We'll keep going as a trio, and occasionally as a quartet, for live shows. I also hope to manage to record a new album in spring 2014, and before that, to release a new acoustic solo record. It's all in the label's hands, but I'm weighing things up just as much as they're weighing up the potential of my music. For now, it's all a matter of alternating between shows and promotion, all while never losing focus on keeping the Leafblade fire burning bright!

Outside of the project, what do you have planned?

I'll keep cultivating my life as an actor and writer as much as my physical fitness, and I also feel the need to meditate to stay focused and find peace of mind by looking inward at my life. I see Pete and Kev regularly, even if it's just for a beer among friends. Lastly, I want to keep giving all my love to my partner, my closest friends and the spirits of nature: they all deserve to be met with a smile.

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