Morcheeba
Trip Hop / Electronica
"Me and Ross are brothers. We met Skye at a party. We never repeat ourselves. And we smoke a lot," Morcheeba's beats supremo and deadpan humorist Paul Godfrey once told a press conference of bemused Russian journalists when asked to explain the band.
"Great songwriting. Fantastic guitar playing," added Ross Godfrey, who plays the guitars and helps to write the songs. Sitting next to them, Skye smiled enigmatically. Looked at her feet. And sensibly said nothing, preferring to let her mellow, jazz-tinged vocals do her talking.
But how do you sum up Morcheeba, a band who have always defied categorisation and whose main objective over four albums has been never to repeat themselves? You could invent an entire new genre for them, as Mixmag did. "Dub-soul-trip-rock-meditation-trance-pop", they called it. But even that is probably only the half the story.
Clubbers love Morcheeba for the trip-hop dreamscapes of tracks such as Trigger Hippie to soothe frazzled nerves after a night of frenzy.
Socialites bought into them when the cool downtempo grooves of 1998's million-selling Big Calm for a brief season became an essential accessory at all the best dinner parties.
Others came on board for the more upbeat disco-pop of Rome Wasn't Built In A Day and yet others for the limpid beauty of the Lambchop-assisted What New York Couples Fight About.
Movie directors are drawn to their atmospheric moodscapes, with Trigger Hippie appearing in Enemy Of The State, Tape Loop in This Year's Love, On The Rhodes in Traffic and World Looking In in Family Man.
But perhaps above all, Morcheeba appeal most to those who simply love good music in whatever guise it comes and who admire a band that dares to be different.
|