Leeds-based aggro-jazz quartet Vipertime are a force to be reckoned with.
Loud, rhythmic and hypnotic, Vipertime have been making a name for themselves with shoutouts from Iggy Pop and Jamie Cullum over the last few years – and it’s more than deserved for the band, who are one of the most unmistakably talented bands currently touring.
I caught up with Vipertime’s saxophonist Ben Powling after their last UK tour to chat about collaborations, how they got started, and plans for getting back into the recording studio.
EARMILK: You’ve said this tour was a mix of venues you’ve played before and some new places – how did those experiences compare?
We actually took a risk for this most recent tour and had far more unknown venues than we normally would. We got some funding through a really great Arts Council-funded company called Jazz North, who run a scheme called The Northern Line that we applied for, and we got £3k of tour support.
EARMILK: Tours are so expensive!
Yeah, and we’re such a militant DIY band that we’ve never really had any kind of support like that before. Normally if we want to come home from tour with any money at all we have to totally slum it, like cramming into one car with all our gear, sleeping on friends’ floors after the gig and so on.
The Arts Council funding enabled us to get a van so we could take all our own equipment, which is great for venues that don’t have their own stuff. It also meant that we could book some hotel rooms here and there – we’re not 21 and able to sleep on the floor of a pub or on the stage anymore, it was getting a bit rough.
The main thing the funding allowed us to do was to go to places we’ve not been before – in fact my main pitch for getting it wanted to tour further afield. So this time we did a lot more shows on the South coast, and it people didn’t if all the tickets didn’t sell we had the funding to fall back on. But the shows actually did so well that the tickets weren’t a worry in the end.
So we started off in Deal (Kent), then we went to Brighton and Hastings, and then back to Halifax to stay home for a couple of days. Then we went South West to Exeter, Falmouth and Dartington. Out of all of those we’d only done Deal and Falmouth, where we’d played at the Cornish Bank before – this time we supported an afro beat group led by Dele Sosimi.
EARMILK: How did the South and South West shows compare to the Northern and hometown ones?
The South and South West gigs really thrived from having small promoters putting gigs on and going out of their way. When we’re playing up North we’re in Leeds, we’re in Manchester, we're in Newcastle, Liverpool – there’s a wealth of music going on that in the South and South West is being championed by smaller promoters who are making amazing things happen for their communities.
The place we went to in Dartington is called Things Happen Here, and it was amazing. In Kent we went to The Lighthouse in Deal, and our friends there are doing amazing things in the South East. There’s also a great music pub in Hastings called The Jenny Lind Inn where we’ve done a few gigs, but basically the story across all our tours is that they really happen due to the work of exciting, passionate people putting on music and taking risks.
EARMILK: A community effort across lot of different communities.
It’s completely symbiotic.
EARMILK: You guys are such an exciting band to watch perform – how did you get started?
A friend of mine was putting on a house party for a charity fundraiser and asked if my old band would come and play. It was an afrobeat that myself and Matías [Reed, bassist] were in, but that band was a 12-piece so there was no way we’d be have had the room to perform, especially as our current four-piece didn’t exist at that time. We almost destroyed a friend’s house with that 12-piece, so I told my friend I’d sort something, but then I went on tour to Europe as part of another friend’s band and kind of forgot about it. They called me up asking what band I was bringing, so I panicked a bit and asked Matías to come and play bass, and we called up two drummers to join us because we thought that would make people dance.
We improvised a set of music and it was great, really fun and then we did a few more parties and DIY events like that. The first one was just so impromptu and kind of magic, so we realised after the first one that we should just write some tunes, so Matías and I got together and wrote that first album pretty quickly and now it’s become a vehicle for all our solo compositions.
Luke [Reddin-Williams, drummer] has a few tines we started playing on the last tour that we haven’t recorded yet, actually.
EARMILK: Yeah I noticed a few tracks that weren’t off either of the albums
We were really test-driving some new material on the tour.
EARMILK: I think it really speaks to what strong performers you guys are that you couldn’t tell what was new and what wasn’t
[Laughs] You might have been able to tell on the first day of tour, but by day 5 I think we’d ironed out the creases.
EARMILK: Your set-up is really interesting actually – having the two drummers playing both in sync and also trading off was great
Contrasting the two drummers like that is actually a really deliberate compositional tool we use. Sometimes we want all their limbs going so we can make it sound like we have eight percussionists, but it’s out of the great tradition of bands that have two drummers – like James Brown’s band, Coltrane or The OCs.
EARMILK: Who are your main influences? You’ve mentioned Gang of Four specifically before, and you do definitely have a similar kind of coiled-up energy they had
That’s partially some Leeds solidarity [laughs]. Really, none of us are actually from Leeds, but we’ve all chosen to love there – I’ve been there 15 years, same as Matías and Luke, and Josh [Smout, drummer] has been in Leeds for a while as well.
I just want to be part of that Leeds lineage – I’ve spent a lot of time getting pissed in the pub where Gang of Four formed, and it’s definitely part of Matías’ bass sound. He’s really into all kinds of West African music and a lot of hip-hop, Peter Hook [Joy Division, New Order] and similar. He studied classical guitar at Leeds Conservatoire and studied a lot of Latin American material there, so that’s also a huge influence for him.
I’ve always described Vipertime as a jazz band made up of former metal heads, so I’m always curious whether that influence comes through. But also there’s a bunch of British bands who have been fusing those influences for a long time. There’s a Leeds saxophonist called Xero Slingsby who did a couple of albums in the 80s, but died really young. He was a phenomenal saxophone player and a huge proponent of fusing jazz and punk in a way that I personally am really influenced by.
Also, that early 2000s jazz revival was really influential on Luke and I when we were teenagers – bands like Acoustic Ladyland and Polar Bear – especially Acoustic Ladyland, who really changed the way I thought about music as a teenager. I’d been listening to a lot of and The Stooges but I didn’t realise those worlds could combine until I heard those bands.
EARMILK: They were separate but then you thought, oh what if…?
Exactly, that’s it, and when you’re sixteen years old that can really spark your imagination in two says.
EARMILK: You mentioned you have plans to start recording the new stuff soon?
Yeah, fairly soon. I’m not sure whether we’ll self-release or go with Hyde Park Book Club again, which I run with a guy called Jack Simpson. But we’re considering shopping round for some other labels this time. Who knows then the actual release will be, though.
We’ve got some loose plans to do some collaboration recording with some friends, and also try to record some of Luke’s new compositions – may be as separate releases rather than one for the Vipertime album. We kind of need mental space for it, and also we need time to make sure the newer material is tried and tested before we get it into the studio. There was some stuff on the last album that we re-recorded largely before we gigged it, which was cool and it worked but I think this time we really needed to take it on the road and get it a bit worn in before recording it.
EARMILK: Does that make a big difference for you guys to gig things first?
There’s good sides to doing it and not doing it, honestly. Sometimes it can be good to record something when it’s really fresh, whip it into shape and then record it immediately when we’re all really excited about a new idea. But then the downside of that is sometimes you then tour that track for a month it takes on a totally new life, you change the structure or you interpret it differently, and then recording it early becomes frustrating.
EARMILK: What is the process of making an album for you guys? Especially when it comes to collaborations – what’s the difference between collabs within the band and working with other people?
They’re different on a case-by-case basis, really. To be honest, we’ve all spent so much time playing in other people's bands that we’re all quite used to it, which I think means we all know how to present our music to people we collaborate with in a sympathetic way.
There’s a track we’ve done called “The Wiser” which Luke wrote, and our friend Mick came and played cello on that. I feel like Luke had some fairly impressionistic ideas for the track, like can you create this texture here, this sound there – and then Mick interpreted that in a really great way.
Whereas when Jasmine [Myra, saxophonist and composer] came and played, I’d written the notation out for her part because we were playing the melody together and needed to be totally together on it. But I also left a section open for Jasmine to improvise.
But when we worked with Franz [Von, Afrofusion artist and emcee] it was a composition Matías had done and it had been on the cutting room floor for ages. Matías and I had been touring with with a band called K.O.G & The Zongo Brigade, which Franz was in, and we’d been calling Matías’ track “Big New Riff” but couldn’t get it to sit right. So I suggested we get someone to do some kind of poetry or spoken word in the middle of it, and it made sense to ger Franz since we’d been working with him for a while and we really love what he does, he’s so talented. We got him in, he brought the lyrics in, and he did it in like two takes while I was working on some sax parts for something else.
EARMILK: Incredible
He was only in the room for like 45 minutes. We’ve actually performed with him a few times, on a track called “Flight” that has this really textural, atmospheric sound. We don’t get to perform it live much because it’s kind of just a soundscape, but we have used it as a backing for different rappers and poets before, like our friend Tallulah [Howarth, poet and musician] come and improvise over it. We’ve also had our friend Troy [Osmond], who’s in a band called Myron Butler, perform on it when they were supporting us for a few days the first week of tour. I actually went to school with him and we’ve been big cultural confidantes for each other since then – he’s an amazing poet, so if you want to hear Henry Rollins scream-reciting John Steinbeck, he’s your guy.
EARMILK: Did you find that if you’re all writing separately, you find it easier to bring your own ideas in?
I feel like every composition starts life being really individual to the composer when you write on your own. But by the time that’s been refracted through the lens of three musicians, and then being performed by a specific line-up, you end up with something really cohesive as a group. If you’ve got a track being played by two drummers, a bassist and a saxophone, it takes on a certain sonic quality. So nothing ends up being exactly how the composer envisioned, but we’re all very open to other musicians’ contributing ideas. We really try to take our egos out of the room.
EARMILK: You mentioned about shopping around for a new record label – is the new record something you’d rather finance yourself?
The deal we’ve had so far with Hyde Park Book Club has been so loose and philanthropic that I don’t think it would be that different. It’s just me and Jack Simpson, who also trunks some rehearsal studios and the studio where we record. We got together some years ago to curate and release a compilation of Leeds jazz, so we made it as a platform to release that record, and Jack suggested we also release some Vipertime stuff and he basically just fronted us the money for the vinyl cutting.
He got us a really good deal for studio time for both of the albums, and we’ve just been paying him back out of sales as we went. Both the launch shows for the albums were at his venue, so all the money went right back to him and we’ve paid him back with albums sales the past few tours. It’s really the complete opposite of what most bands go through and really the only downside is that because the label is just myself and Jack, so we haven’t got a big distribution hub or a press time, so the only reason we’d start searching for a new label is because we’ve kind of hit the glass ceiling of what Jack and I can achieve in terms of reach. We just need a bigger phone book [laughs].
EARMILK: What’s something you always want to talk about in interviews but never get the chance to?
I always just want to talk about music, but not necessarily OUR music. I just want to talk about records I like, which is what I find Vipertime really is for us – it’s just the four of us channelling our favourite bits of our record collections and playing music we want to hear. So as fun as it is to talk about our own music, I want to talk about other people and our influences. Which, to be fair, people do ask, but honestly, I just always want to talk about Sun-Ra and The Stooges or Steve Grossman, because that’s what I talk about down the pub or in the van. Like what are the pros and cons of the first three Stooges albums [laughs].
EARMILK: There will be a huge audience for that, though
It will really get the Radio 6Music dads on side!
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