Ahead of this month’s tour, we talk to These New
Puritans’ Jack Barnett about their visionary, Elton-praised third album
Field of Reeds
“This music’s symbolic,” sang Jack Barnett on These New Puritans’ debut
Beat Pyramid. But while there were obscurities and tensions to sink into and unpick from the start, it wasn’t until 2010’s
Hidden that the symbolism and complexities truly began to take hold. As
taiko drums confronted children’s choirs, lyrics spun riddles of
Egyptian gods, swords and labyrinths, making an open mockery of early,
confused efforts to align the band with the transitory pleasures of
nu-rave.
On tracks like We Want War, Barnett embarked on psychogeographic
tours that evoked Sebald, Keiller and other chroniclers of the British
landscape as much as any musical points of reference, resulting in an
album of striking ambition – the sort of grand project that can see
lesser acts flounder in a mire of self-importance, but which, for These
New Puritans, evidenced a conceptual, compositional intelligence
unafraid to challenge its listeners without severing all tethers to the
mainstream.
“We don’t fit easily into certain brackets,” says Barnett, speaking
over the phone in-between legs of an extensive tour that’s seen them
collaborate with avant garde vocalist Salyu in Tokyo and support
Björk in Los Angeles, and which this month takes them around the UK. “I
like the fact that we do that, because we always have one foot in
popular music, or with a popular music audience, whatever that might
entail. I like that it’s not exclusive.”
This balance between experimentation and accessibility continues with recently released third album
Field of Reeds [review
here],
which ditches the militant percussion and mantric vocals of its
predecessor in favour of a quieter, more pastoral tone. While much has
been made of the album’s more esoteric aspects – the arrangement of
tracks into extended suites; the estuarine topography traversed by its
lyrics – it’s not as opaque as the sum of its parts, which incidentally
range from a prototype Magnetic Resonator Piano to a hawk taking flight
(together, a neat representation of an album with its roots in nature
and its sights future-facing).
"There are very few bands in the world who have the level of autonomy that we have" – Jack Barnett
To Barnett’s evident chagrin, the hawk recording has been a
conspicuous focal point in recent interviews (“music doesn’t lend itself
well to being talked about – there isn’t a good vocabulary for it
really, so for that reason everyone has to talk about everything other
than the music,” he sighs), but he volunteers background information for
the other piece of kit, which uses electromagnets to warp the piano’s
string vibrations into something straight out of the BBC’s Radiophonic
Workshop. “Most of the time it’s obvious to me when I write a piece of
music what instrument should carry a part or roughly what the sound
should be,” he explains. “Because of the way we work, with lots of
instruments, we can’t muck around in the studio – we kind of have to
plan every hour precisely. But there was one sound on the album where I
didn’t really know how we’d get it. We called it an ‘un-organ’ – a kind
of organ sound, but something else. It was the last piece in the jigsaw.
I thought I was going to have to sound design it, to fit this
particular role, and then purely by chance we got a phone call from
someone who had seen a demonstration of this instrument that had
recently been invented. So yeah,” he deadpans, “that was a bit of luck.”
It’s the first time the piano’s otherworldly timbre has featured on an
album, but you don’t doubt for a minute that novelty played little part
in its inclusion.
When even the piano sound comes with a layer of mystery, it’s clear
why These New Puritans attract active, investigative listeners. With
recurring motifs and repeated imagery, their music offers a rabbit hole
down which to get lost, seemingly filled with immeasurable meanings that
beg to be deciphered. “Our music does seem to invite a lot of peculiar
interpretations,” Barnett agrees. “It reminds me: I recently got a
letter from a molecular biologist who was saying that
Hidden was
all to do with Christian symbology. That was quite an interesting
read.” Not only does the example indicate the intellectual calibre of
the average piece of These New Puritans’ fan mail, it also makes clear
the breadth of interpretive possibilities. “A lot of interpretations
seem to say and write that it’s really ominous and dark music,” Barnett
adds, “but for me, quite a lot of the songs are quite hopeful. There’re
bits of darkness in them and bits of lightness.”
The other key narrative to have affixed itself to
Field of Reeds
is Barnett’s Kubrickian desire to get things absolutely perfect,
Working Time Directive be damned. For Fragment Two, it reportedly took
76 takes for twin brother George to nail the drum sound the band had in
mind. “The process of making this album necessitated inhabiting this
very insular world,” Barnett reflects. “I think a lot of people got sick
of us because we were determined to get it right at all costs. It’s
quite a difficult mindset to get out of actually – I remember a couple
of weeks after we’d finished the album I went to buy a pair of shoes. I
don’t care about shoes, it’s not something I think about, but I ended up
taking them back and getting more, then taking
them back and getting more until they were exactly right. I think we had to be a bit rehabilitated.”
Barnett credits the process of rearranging songs for live performance
with “bringing the pieces back to life” again after the precision
engineering of the studio. “It’s a process I’ve enjoyed quite a lot for
this album,” he says. “When you’ve been working on the music for a long
time, getting it to its final state…” he pauses. “It sounds a bit like a
bullshitty artist thing to say, but I’ve lived very close to this music
and given so much for this album that it was difficult. I don’t like
listening to things after I’ve finished them, because I think too much
about what I would change. But when you’re reinventing the music live,
you make it different every night and add different things. I think this
band generally is probably the best we’ve had. We’ve a seven piece-band
– small enough that we can have agility and big enough that we can
bring a lot of different sounds. Plus we’ve got Elisa [Rodrigues,
Portuguese jazz singer who appears on several
Field of Reeds
songs] singing with us, which is pretty fun because she can do her 50
per cent and I can do my 50 per cent. I don’t have to try and do
everything – we can specialise a little bit.” And it’s not just vocal
duties that are divided 50/50, with Barnett promising an equal split
between
Hidden and
Field of Reeds material at the
upcoming shows. “It gives us a big range of contrasts,” he somewhat
understates. “It allows us to do a lot of stuff.”
This freedom to ‘do a lot of stuff’ is not one Barnett takes for
granted, noting that “there are very few bands in the world who have the
level of autonomy that we have.” Indeed, These New Puritans seem to
occupy a blessed middle ground where they have the time and budget to,
for instance, set-up 28 Thai gongs or spend a day recording the sound of
smashing glass (both features on
Field of Reeds), despite the
decidedly un-commercial end results. Barnett has also recently become
more involved in the band’s visuals, scripting a ten-minute animation
for V (Island Song), due later this year. “Up to a point any idea is
just as expensive and time-consuming as any other idea, they just have
to draw it. So it’s amazing what you can do, in terms of the range of
ideas you can use,” he enthuses.
We end by asking about a tweet (“not ‘industry’ enough”) made the
night of the recent Mercury Music Prize shortlist announcement, for
which
Field of Reeds was submitted for consideration but not
chosen. “People had said to me ‘oh no, that’s so disappointing,’”
Barnett explains, “but I never expected to get it. I just don’t think
it’s the kind of album that would go on,” before noting that he’s “not
deadly serious all the time” and drawing attention to the tweet that
followed in order to prove it (“Maybe it’s the fact that we’re touring
with the Operation Yewtree Roadshow as support act”).
When asked more generally if there are any accolades that mean
something to him, Barnett's pensive interview manner suddenly becomes
animated. “Yeah, yeah!” he replies. “In today’s
Guardian, Elton John said he loves the arrangements on
Field of Reeds.
I genuinely think he’s an incredible songwriter, so that’s fantastic.”
But, he adds, the most satisfying feedback comes from less starry
quarters. “It’s more important to me when people come up to me and say
things like ‘this album changed the way I think about music,’” he
concludes. “That’s a wonderful thing to hear.”
