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bleat surrender
Take one soul-hating studiophile and one song-loving technophobe
and you've got LAMB - potentially the most argumentative pair in pop...
"IT was a test to see if she had a stick up her butt," explains Andy Barlow, grinning at his musical partner across the table over fast-emptying plates of sushi. "I wanted to see if she'd go, 'Oh,that's outrageous,' and put the phone down on me."
Louise Rhodes apparently did feel like telling Andy and his sense of humour where to go when he asked her, prior to their first meeting, if she was good-looking.
"I very nearly put the phone down, but obviously I'm glad I didn't," Louise admits.
Thank God for forbearance, then. And for divine interference or whatever else showed its face that day in 1994, because without it we'd be Lamb-less, lacking the sparky beauty of their debut album and bereft of a brace of singles that prove there's a million and one ways to thump the tub of drum'n'bass.
Lamb make magic, eschewing the rigidity of the breakbeat by layering it with jazz, classical and hip hop inflections to produce emotionally-charged and sensuous music for which a label has yet to be printed. And however unworkable it looks in theory - one technophiliac wunderkind committed to beats, with a hatred of soul and a total lack of interest in vocals, plus one vocalist whose principal interest is in The Song, whose inspirations are Joni Mitchell, Leonard Cohen and Carole King and for whom technology is a tedious necessity - in practice it's a dream, a perfect working model of conflict and concord.
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"I'D been listening to hip hop, but I didn't like the idea of setting songs to it," says Louise, trying to explain her dissatisfaction with the conventional singer / songwriter structure and the need to find a more vibrant vehicle for her expression. "There didn't seem to be the freedom for a song to flow over hip hop beats; rap is what fits to hip hop and British rap music has never really worked - for me, at least. Then I started hearing breakbeat on pirate stations, I thought, 'Hmmm, this is interesting.' I can pinpoint it to this one track, really, which is Peter Bouncer's 'Love Is All We Need', and it's a kind of improvised soul vocal over manic breakbeats. It was just... brilliant, because there was this freedom of vocal over a completely conflicting drum beat And it worked."
Andy, meanwhile, was working in a Manchester studio - "getting paid to write music for DJs who would have their name on it and sit at the back skinning up and drinking beer while I wrote it."
He was happy enough, but got the sack for being "too weird - they wanted straight house music", the very same day he and Louise had arranged to meet after that initial phone call. Enter fate, stage left. Again.
"They wouldn't give me any studio time," remembers Andy, "but they owed me a week, so we had to go to Leeds every day for a week to use this other studio. We slept in it one night and all the windows were shut - we were like hamsters! And we didn't know how to work all the gear, but we did write 'God Bless'."
That found its way onto the three-track demo which got Lamb their deal and marked them out as leaders in a flock of fashion-struck followers.
"For both of us, our stuff pre-Lamb was very different," Andy admits, "but as soon as we got together, we both felt like we'd stepped up a division, basically because of the way we bounce off each other. Without actually learning new stuff, we both knew more, because we each had to re-evaluate the writing process to cater for the other person."
"We definitely draw things out of each other," agrees Louise, who's 10 years older than Andy, "because of our various conflicts. And because we're different in a lot of ways, we push each other to places we wouldn't otherwise necessarily go, which is what makes Lamb stronger. Good things come out of struggle."
You argue a lot, then?
"A hell of a lot! With nearly every song we write... We nearly split up!" Andy laughs.
Louise: "We're both very strong-willed and we don't compromise, so we have to argue until we're both happy."
Andy: "Plus there's the fact that I turn into a small child after two hours in front of a sampler. I've no social skills whatsoever."
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DRUM'n'bass - not the definition of Lamb's sound, but its foundation - is poised to be the millstone around the neck of '97 that trip hop was to '96. Do Andy and Louise think it has any place meaningful left to move?
"Whenever anything develops a formula, that's when it loses its way," Louise shrugs. "That's what happened with house music - people like Derrick May were true innovators-and then once it became co-opted, it became production-line music for idiots."
"And remixes spawned a generation of boffins thinking they're musicians," Andy adds. "But as long as the people who mean it and keep experimenting keep doing it, there's a future."
How about that cloth-eared trip hop accusation, most famously voiced about you by Tricky (who said he wanted to glass Andy) in a recent Guardian interview?
Andy just laughs. Louise sighs.
"There are so many tripped-out bands that have some girl singer trying to sound really stoned, singing about nothing in particular and just wailing over beats - so the idea of us being compared to that infuriates me so much. It's quite outrageous, but it's just laziness."
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LAMB's latest magic moment is "Gorecki", a breath-snatchingly beautiful single based on the Third Symphony by the Polish composer of the same name. It's one gorgeous, steady gush, a modernist take on MBV and TGU that builds with orgasmic certainty into a very personal recognition of the wonder of one-in-a-million love and the obliterative bliss it can generate.
You could say it's the most hopelessly romantic thing you've ever heard. Or you could say it's the most bone-scrapingly real.
Louise explains: "It's about when I first heard Gorecki's Third Symphony with someone who is very important to me. It was one of life's perfect moments.
"I was completely moved to tears, and still am, when I hear the Third Symphony; I can safely say it's one of the most moving pieces of music ever written, and that's not just because of the context in which l first heard it."
Do you have a romantic idea of love, Louise?
"I do, but I'm constantly coming up against the opposite. I've been through enough intense moments in relationships followed by those relationships breaking up to know that nothing lasts forever, but each time I'm back there, going, 'Yes This is It! This is wonderfull!'"
But "Gorecki" seems very much to hold onto the idea that some loves are unkillable.
"Well," sighs Louise, "I'd rather feel things to the full even if I'm going to be upset the very next minute, because it's either that or living a half-life at half-intensity'. Too many people are scared to leap in headfirst and enjoy that feeling to the maximum. That's what 'Gorecki' is about. And that's the feeling I'm determined never to lose."
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WHAT SHE LIKES
Singer/songwriters Louise would love to share a pen with...
JONI MITCHELL: Canadian singer/songwriter with the voice of an Arctic archangel. Her fingers unfailingly measure the pulse of male / female relations and recognize their futility in the face of larger universal concerns: "Now here's a man and a woman sitting on a rock / They're either going to thaw out or freeze" ("Hejira"). "Court And Spark" and "Hejira" are perhaps her finest hours.
LEONARD COHEN: The master of miserablism is copied by many (Nick Cave, Stuart Tindersticks, anyone else lacking vocal range), equalled by few. His voice - grizzled and grey, like it's been dredged up from the bottom of a cold lake - practically owns the copyright on sombre sensitivity, and "Songs of Leonard Cohen" defined a genre.
CAROLE KING: One of the famous Brill Building song-writers of the Sixties who, along with her husband Gerry Goffin, wrote "Up On The Roof" and "It Might As Well Rain Until September".
After they split. King delivered her own massive-selling album, the introspective "Tapestry", which established bedsit female angst for the first time.
WHAT HE LIKES
Artists Andy would love a studio lock-in with...
DAVE BRUBECK: Popularised jazz in the fifties with a cool bebop style that was scorned by sniffy purists. His Quartet was most famous for "Take Five", around which post-rockers Tortoise seem to have modeled most of their oeuvre, while "Blue Rondo A La Turk" unwittingly supplied a bunch of hopeless early Eighties popsters with their name.
HERBIE MANN: Born in 1930 and the best-known flautist in jazz, his style was rooted in bebop, but he was open-minded about rock and his playing embraced African and Middle-Eastern music. If this is your cup of tea, "Herbie Mann At The Village Gate" might be the LP to check out.
STEVIE WONDER: The main man. Forget "Ebony And Ivory", Wonder was a ferociously funky Motown mutha with magic fingers and a voice like scuffed silk, without whom everyone from Afghan Whigs to Prince would still be looking for the plot. "Master Blaster", "Superstition" and "Living For The City" are unsurpassable.
interview: Sharon O'Connell
photos: Stephen Sweet
nicked from 'New Musical Express', dated 8 March 1997
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