You have been away from the public eye for quite some time. What’s been happening in the Morcheeba camp since ‘The Antidote’ album in 2005?
We didn’t intend for it to take so long. We wanted to make sure it was really good. We had worked with so many collaborators, after a while we had to start cutting down. We’d probably written and recorded about fifty tracks, about three albums worth. We wanted to make a record that was very cohesive, and it just took us a long time to decide what stuff we wanted to use. Also, I’d just moved to Los Angeles and so I was over there setting up my home. My brother Paul has got two kids now, and so now when we do get to make albums, we decide our own schedules. We utilise the time to do personal things as well. So we been living life really, and trying to write music.

What does this new album tell us about the Morcheeba of today?
We were a lot less control-freaky on this album. My brother and I usually write all the music and lyrics, and then tell people what to sing and everything. On this album we were very much into bringing a cast of people together. It was a bit like making a Mike Leigh film or something, when you just get a load of characters and give them enough freedom to act out their own bits. We were directing things in a very loose sense. We were happy for people to bring along melodies and lyrics, very much a collaborative thing. We learnt a lot from just directing the flow and not being rigid about how we were going to record everything. It was an interesting album to make and I think it sounds a lot more freeform because of it. The idea was we were directing a film, and we wanted all the characters to tell the same story from different perspectives.

How would you describe the Morcheeba of today compared to that of 1996, and the release of your first record?
Well, apart from letting other people write a lot with us, we kind of do stuff differently. Like, when I was in Los Angeles and would send ideas to Paul, he sort of adds lyrical ideas and programme some drum beats or some weird voodoo loops. He would then send them back to me and I would try and write some music over them. I don’t think it was necessarily the best way of doing things, but it did give us time individually to come up with ideas. When we write together we will sit in here in this room for twenty minutes, write two songs, and then go to the pub. So it’s been a new way of doing things. 

You can hear a lot of historic music references scattered over this new album... Was there any present day contemporaries that you may have looked to for inspiration?
Yeah, there is a band called Brightblack Morning Light. They are fantastic and are from all over California and New Mexico. They are a bunch of hippies with two drummers, a Fender Rhodes player that looks like Janis Joplin, and a guitar player that plays slide. They kind of sound like the Meters but at third the speed! I think their record was the best album of last year. I went to see them in LA and their ultra-hippy singer jumped off the stage and started having a fight with the sound engineer! I also went to see them at Henry Miller’s Library in Big Sur, which is outdoors. I was speaking to them and they claimed their album was recorded in front of an audience of owls! I think it’s the way forward!



“On this album we were very much into bringing a cast of people together. It was a bit like a Mike Leigh film or something...”

Your new album is more than a fresh page for the band with very mixed vocal contributions, how did this come about?
We listened to Judie Tzuke when we were kids. We loved that song ‘Stay With Me till Dawn’, and we were very much self-consciously influenced by that in Morcheeba.  We heard the song again recently on the radio, and we thought it sounded just like Morcheeba. So, we phoned Judie up and asked if she wanted to do a track with us. We did that track, and it worked out really well. From that session it kind of gave us the confidence to contact more people. We have collaborated with artists that are not specifically ‘names’. People can collaborate with name artists just because they want famous names on their records. We want it to just fit musically. My brother discovered singer Thomas Dybdahl who is really big in Norway. He has a really amazing range and walked in and could play all the instruments in the studio. He is a genius, he really is brilliant. Bradley Burgess sang the song ‘Run Honey Run’ on the album, which is a cover of John Martyn song. He went to my school and we’ve known him from Folkestone. We had never really done a cover before and it worked out quite well. It all happened very naturally. Manda Zemelo is a singer from Paris who sent us a message on MySpace saying she would love to sing on our record. We asked her to come over to see what she could do and it worked out brilliant. I think it’s about opening your mind to random things, and then just going with it.

Is this new formula of collaboration, rather than having fixed members, something you will stick with in the future?
Yeah, I think we found it very limiting having one vocalist. It felt like we had to change the music much more because you would get the same vocal on every track. It just becomes a little bit monotonous. I think Skye had a really amazing voice and we made four really good records with her, but we wanted to try other things. I think we may use some of the same singers again and also pick some others. There is a singer called Mark Ray Lewis who is in a band from New Mexico called Trilobite. He has a brilliant voice. I went to see him in Albuquerque which is a really strange place. I think he’s really up for singing on something in the future. 

Your brother Paul has been quoted in saying that he was “at his unhappiest when Morcheeba were at their most successful”. Could you explain this?
When people hear you’re doing really well and you’re at the height of your success, you’re not actually here enjoying it and going to The Ivy and nightclubs in London, you’re in the back of a van driving round Hamburg in Germany at four in the morning playing shitty clubs. We would have to fly ridiculous amounts, two flights a day, to turn up somewhere for five minutes and then off somewhere else. It was a really hectic horrible schedule, eventually we were just exhausted. I think a lot of record companies work on the plan that you’re only going to make three albums and they will pretty much kill you by the end of it. This was kind of happening to us, so we wanted to just slow it down and enjoy what we were doing again. Try to keep enough life force in ourselves to make another record. It was a shame and I wish we had taken some time off and enjoyed the success that we had. There’s always a delayed reaction anyway. If you get to be on Top Of the Pops, you’re not going to go to the pub that night telling everyone you’re on Top Of the Pops. You’d have to be in a van and driving to Birmingham or somewhere, and then get back in the van to play a gig in Brighton or something, so it’s not that fun. There is not a lot of glamour sitting in the back of a van! (laughs)

You are about to embark on an extensive tour. Would you say you are happier productively in the studio or spending time on the road?
I like both really. My brother prefers the studio. I kind of prefer playing gigs because I play the guitar so I can crank up the AC30’s and go for it. We are just about to tour America, which is my favourite place to tour. We’re doing four weeks there.  When we come back we tour Europe and England in June, before the summer festivals and then America and beyond again after that.

Do you have a strong following in the states?
Yeah, but it’s such a big place. It’s like saying ‘are you big in Europe’? You might be massive in Germany and then sell no records in Italy. We do quite well in America because we have a lot of our music in films and things, so people identify us through that as well. 

Having sold over six million records worldwide, what was it that made you rethink  what most would say  was the winning formula of Morcheeba?
I think we wanted to question what we had done that people thought was so good. What it was that people liked. After a while you can’t see the wood for the trees and you kind of get confused. So it’s good to get some time off. My favourite thing to do is to take loads of magic mushrooms and listen to a couple of tracks from one of our old albums. I like to see the record from a completely different angle, as if had nothing to do with that record, to hear it from a different point of view. I quickly realised that a lot of what made those records good was the emotion. It’s all about the mood. I love playing the guitar and Hammond and stuff so I can get my blinkers on and get into it that way. I think most people view Morcheeba as emotive music...

Morcheeba’s new album ‘Dive Deep’ is out now