After albums inspired
by loss and reconnections, RM Hubbert explains why Breaks & Bone is about moving on.
If there’s one label RM Hubbert doesn’t want applied to his delicate,
sad, soothing, searing, subtle, turbulent music, it’s ‘wanky’. It’s an epithet
he extends towards the majority of flamenco guitarists, all virtuoso flair and
no feeling. “I learned just enough flamenco techniques to know I didn’t want to
play it anymore” he says of the period in which he forged his trademark sound –
a sound that’s always astonishingly proficient but never, ever wanky. “I was really interested in the structures – it’s very
strict but it sounds totally freeform. And I love the primal urgency of really
early flamenco. But I realised quite quickly that, melodically, it was really
dull to me.”
He pauses to take part in some playful self-questioning. “I’ve got
this fear of being a fucking middle-aged white guy with an acoustic guitar,
singing about his feelings” he groans. “My worst nightmare is going to a party
and someone going ‘Hubby plays guitar – here’s a guitar Hubby, play us a song!’
Occasionally I’ve been tricked into doing acoustic nights, but they’re so
fucking uninspiring. They’re so…” He lets out a deflated sigh. “It’s the
graveyard where music goes to die. It’s horrible. Some fucking guy singing
about his fucking feelings… I don’t come from that world. I don’t like acoustic
music.” He affects a look of horror. “I don’t know how I ended up doing this!”
he cries. “It’s no right! Oh God…”
If this is ‘no right’, we don’t want to know what is. After
20-plus years in the Glasgow music scene – playing in bands, mixing albums,
running indie labels and so-forth – Hubby’s resurgence as, well, an acoustic
guitarist writing about his feelings has borne fruit generously, starting with First & Last’s emotionally charged
instrumental introduction and continuing with last year’s guest-filled Thirteen Lost & Found. In June, the
latter beat bookies favourites Django Django to the title of Scottish Album of
the Year – an accolade that Hubby still seems pleasantly surprised by now (“I
was very drunk by the time they announced it” he recalls. “I wasn’t expecting
to win so I was just enjoying the free whiskey. It’s totally surreal”). Both nomination
and win helped boost the album’s profile, but while some were busy discovering Thirteen Lost & Found for the first
time, Hubby was already applying the finishing touches to its successor: third
album Breaks & Bone, which
arrives later this month. It’s the final part of a loose trilogy of
thematically linked albums, recapped for our benefit.
“I started doing the RM Hubbert thing when my father got
really ill with cancer” Hubby explains. “I’d heard at some point that flamenco
guitar was really difficult, so I decided to learn it as a way of taking my
mind off things. He didn’t last much longer, and then my mother died very
suddenly. And then I got a diagnosis for chronic depression which it turned out
I’d had since I was about 15… So, it was a really bad few years, and I obsessively
started learning flamenco guitar as a means of escape. And then after a while I
realised there’s actually a huge emotional release in playing music.”
Hubby
used his newly acquired skills to document the period immediately after his
mother died, committing himself to writing a new piece monthly. Together, these
were released as First & Last. “I
never really intended to play any of those songs or do anything else with it,
but at some point someone talked me into it. So I started playing live again
and found it was easier to talk about this stuff in the context of music. Talking
about it onstage made me feel a wee bit better.”
For Thirteen Lost & Found, the concept shifted from “bad things happening and my initial
attempts to deal with them” to the process of “getting back out into the world”
– starting by reviving dormant friendships. “My wife and I had split up at this
point [and] I was feeling quite isolated” Hubby continues, “so I had this idea
to reconnect with old friends by going into the studio and writing music with
them. Most of these people I hadn’t seen for five or ten years. So I got in
touch with everyone and explained the rules: we’d go into the studio for six
hours and neither of us was allowed to write anything in advance, and what we
had at the end of those six hours was what we’d record.” Produced by Alex Kapranos (himself an old
friend of Hubby’s going back to their teens) each song was recorded live with
everyone in the same room – an approach designed to “capture that moment where
we clicked again, that moment where a song naturally starts to make sense.”
Breaks & Bone,
meanwhile, is about “letting go, and not depending on this stuff so much for my
mental wellbeing”, and stems from a 7” recorded last year but never released.
“Whenever you speak to grief councillors they say that, if you feel you’re
unfinished with someone, you should write them a letter and say all the things
you never got a chance to say, and I’d never managed to do it. But I had this
idea that I would make a 7” instead, with one side for my mum and one side for
my dad. But then I didn’t want to release the record – a) because it was the
most depressing record I’d ever made, and b) I still wasn’t ready. So I thought
I’d try to expand upon it and turn it into an album, based on the idea of
letting go of certain things – not forgetting, just moving on a wee bit.” Breaks & Bone is by design, then, a way
of tying up the last five years. “Basically I don’t really want to talk about
that stuff for the rest of my life when I’m doing shows” he says. “I don’t mind
talking about it, but it doesn’t give me the relief it used to. I’m better at
dealing with depression now, and I’m better at dealing with loss and I thought
it would be interesting to write a record about that.”
Break & Bone is notable
for being the first RM Hubbert album to feature lyrics and vocals from Hubby
himself. “Right from the start I’d meant to do singing but I just couldn’t find
the words when I was writing First & Last” he states. “I’m not a good enough lyricist to cover that kind of
thing when it’s so close. When I wrote the lyrics for Breaks & Bone, often they don’t mean what they sound like they
mean. For example, Bolt was written as a very traditional pop song, a kind of
broken relationship song, and hopefully on first listen it sounds like that.
But it’s actually meant as a kind of dissection of the relationship I have with
depression. It’s about how weirdly comforting it can be sometimes, when you
know there’s a depressing period coming. It’s kind of like an abusive
relationship, where you know it’s really bad for you, but it’s also something
you’re used to. So I try to do things like that in the lyrics. I like the idea
of playing with the traditional relationship tropes you get in songs, so the
songs for my mother and father are actually equally applicable to – and this
sounds really fucked up when I say it out loud – but they’re applicable to any
kind of relationship. I like ambiguity in music; I like how your relationship
can change with a piece of art over time. Some of the songs on First & Last that were really
painful at the time are now just a really nice reminder of the person. I can
play them and I don’t think about death anymore.”
As well as his own music, Hubby regularly guests on the projects
of others. “It’s nice just being a musician sometimes” he says of working to
someone else’s brief. “I generally just improvise on those things – not out of
laziness or arrogance, I’ve just always found, even with my old band El Hombre
Trajeado when we got to the stage of doing overdubs, that I’m much better at
just improvising it. It’s a strange one – I like recording with other people,
but I don’t like playing live with other people so much. I hate other people’s
input, I think that’s the problem” he laughs. “I don’t play well with others
anymore…” A recent soundtrack commission underlined this friction. “It was a
pretty unsatisfying experience to be honest. I don’t take direction well. I
wrote what I though was a subtle, nuanced suite of music, and they came back
and said ‘can you make it funky? Can you make it scary? Can you make it happy?’
and I just thought it ended up being really trite. But again, you’re playing
with someone else’s ball, you know?”
Right now, however, Hubby’s marching to his own beat and
receiving the most success of his career – more by accident than design. “I did my first show in 1991, and released
my first record in 1992, so I’ve been doing this a long time” he observes. “And
I just don’t feel the need to have people love me anymore. This is the great
irony of the last few years for me: the RM Hubbert stuff is the least
commercially minded thing I’ve ever done. You don’t sit down and go: ‘It’s a
guy in his mid-thirties playing instrumental flamenco music – it’s gonna be a
hit!’ It’s the first thing I’d done musically where I had no concern whatsoever
about what anyone else thought, and consequently it’s become the most popular.
I remember talking to Alex about this – Franz Ferdinand was the band they
formed because all their bands had failed and they just wanted to have fun. It
was just a really honest thing, and I think people can tell. I think when
people produce art honestly”, he concludes, “it’s much easier to connect with.”
Feature written for the September issue of The Skinny.
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