In recent years, Britain seems to have produced a crop of super-inventive, highly skilled beatboxers, who, while remaining true to the art form’s Hip Hop roots, are able to take the format onto new untried levels. Shlomo, THePETEBOX, Nathan ‘Flutebox’ Lee, Bellatrix … they’re all trying to take to reinvent a niche genre, often associated by the mainstream as the thing that guy from the Police Academy movies does.
One of the most well-known and prominent practitioners of this new breed of homegrown talent is Beardyman. Crowned UK Beatbox Champion in 2006 and 2007, the ex-Brighton resident is now performing his combination of mouth-beats, looping and improvisation, up and down the nation. His latest project, a collaboration with the Heritage Orchestra, heads to Bexhill’s De La Warr Pavilion on Saturday November 14, and we caught up with him for a chat about it.
E: How are the preparations going for the gig with the Heritage Orchestra?
B: Ha-hem … we have a general idea of what it’s going to be. It’s going to be quite ambitious, but we’re yet to have the final techniques of exactly how we’re going to do this sorted. But what we’re going to do is pretty mental. We’ve refined the orchestra down to those musician who we think can cope with what we’re trying to do and we’ve got a couple of practice dates in, so we can workshop some of these techniques that we’re going to devise together.
What we’re planning on doing at the moment, and this may change, but what we’re planning on doing at them moment is for the first time having an orchestra improvise together, but not in a kind of beard strokey way, where everyone’s playing free jazz and seeing what happens. More in a directed way, so you can’t tell it is improvisation, which is my favourite kind.
E: Chris Wheeler (Artistic Director with the Heritage Orchestra) seemed really excited about not knowing what would happen. Is that the same with you? Is there anticipation about the improvisational aspect of it?
B: Yeah, exactly. I love improvisation. The one thing that is annoying about the entertainment industry for me, well there’re a few things that are annoying about it, but the one that really gets me creatively is that if you write a piece, make a song - it’s brilliant because you develop a piece of theatre of film or whatever – but you can spend ages refining it and at some point you may suddenly realise there was a whole other way you could have done it. And I tend, at that point, to loose interest in the project. So for me, improvisation is completely necessary for me to keep going because I work very quickly and I get tired of ideas very quickly.
The idea of improvisation just fills me with excitement, because it means that things can always be kept fresh. And I think my shows – my solo shows, the shows I do at Battlejam, which is the night I run with JFB in Brighton – we have this impatience, that’s one thing me and JFB share in common, so if something isn’t going amazingly we’ll have no problem doing a massive spin-back and stopping everything, ridiculing what we’ve just done and starting again. And I just love that about improvisation, so it’s just going to be really, really exciting. It’ll be a little more difficult to trash an idea half way through if you’re dealing with an entire orchestra, but you can still direct proceedings so that what you’re thinking at the time can be reflected in how you do it. And I suppose any of the great composers will have perfected the art of making their music something which you can experience as a narrative, but it’s done with a lot of planning and conscious thought that’s gone into it and that’s just the incredible thing about the great composers. These days, with all the technology we’ve got it’s possible to make music live as you think of it. So it doesn’t demand quite as much ridiculous levels of Beethoven-like genius, which has a real powerful effect on you and takes you on a journey.
E: Have you seen any of the stuff they’ve done with The Bays?
B: It looks incredible. That’s a very expensive way of doing it but yes, it’s very, very impressive and forward thinking. But what I’m thinking of doing is something a bit cheaper. That was with a couple of guys writing music into score and then having that come up on screens, which is one way of doing it, and also very impressive. We’re going to try and do it in a slightly different way. We haven’t yet sorted out whether I’ll be conducting the orchestra or whether it’ll be someone else conducting, because they have their own conductor. But either way, we’ll figure out a way so that we can make something incredible and something no one will have planned.
E: I guess it’s going to be slightly more spontaneous than Kenny Muhammad’s gig with the New York Philharmonic Orchestra.
B: Yeah, but not to do that down because that was amazing. In a way it’s a lot more impressive if you’ve spent a lot of time planning it and rehearsing it. What we’re essentially doing is blagging it. But we will be spending a lot of time working on the techniques, so there may be phrases which will be prepared, or there might be sections or transitions or methods of marking out intervals – there’re so many different ways we could do this. There’re other ways, like you could have a leader of the orchestra … or I don’t know … you could point at a member of the orchestra, like a member of the string section, and get them to come up with a riff and then get the orchestra to play that riff slowly as they pick it up, and so long as it’s simple enough and the musicians are good enough, they’ll be able to pick it up within a couple of rounds, that’s how skilled these musicians are. So it wouldn’t necessarily be me coming up with these riffs, but the idea of me controlling the structure of the piece is really exciting to me, and to able to work with musicians of that calibre, is just really, really exciting. That’s the thing, there’re loads of different methods of authorship for each of the sections we’ll be doing. The challenge will be keeping it as tight as possible and making sure the talents of everyone there are used to the fullest degree of their capabilities, without it being unmanageable. So it’s going to take a lot of prep and it will be hard. There won’t necessarily be practices of the actual piece itself, but there will be a lot of preparation done.
E: Is it important for you to work with forward thinking collaborators? I saw the thing you did with Nathan ‘Flutebox’ Lee.
B: He’s wicked. He’s very, very talented; incredibly talented. Who else does what he does? Perhaps one other guy in the world and I think Nathan’s better.
I did a thing with Hilary Hahn, who’s an incredible internationally renowned violinist. And that was unreal; she’s an incredible musician. But she’s not an improviser, or she doesn’t think she is. It’s weird, there’s like this taboo against improvisation almost, or just a fear that a lot of musicians have if they’re really, really well trained and they’ve got incredible skill in playing prewritten material, they often won’t want to show themselves up, so they’ll just shy away from improvisation. So it’s almost like a different route that you have to take. A lot incredible musicians will happily improvise on their own, but it’s not necessarily their focus. So here’s a kind of different thing and it’s kind of much maligned, because if you think about improvisation you’ll either think of jamming on E – which doesn’t mean smearing yourself in jam when you’ve had a pill at a club – it means playing one chord or playing a chord progression everyone has agreed to and then noodling over the top – that’s what a lot of people think of when they think of improvisation. Or they think of free jazz, which I do have time for, but not that much time. It’s a bit like trying to enjoy a headache, managing to and then being glad it’s over and feeling a better person for it. Maybe that’s a bit unfair actually. But I mean it is very specialist, free jazz, and it’s not for everyone. It’s kind of a bit like modern art, where you have to really put yourself into that space and be willing to appreciate it. Bit I think the technologies are here, and the will is here, to be able to improvise. I mean look at Bobby McFerrin back in the 80s. He was improvising with just him and a microphone and he was able to do that because it’s just him on a microphone. And one of the reasons I’ve got so involved with looping … am I going to get this taxi, no way … I’m never going to get a taxi on a road with red fucking lines on it … fuck … sorry, that was an aside … but one of the reasons I got involved with looping so much … please stop for me … is because I’m able to control all the elements, which means I can improvise without worrying whether someone else is going to miss the job, or have a different musical idea, or change key, or something like that. It means I’ve got complete freedom … ah he’s stopped at the lights, hold on a sec. Alright mate, can I go to Farringdon … yes, but I mean the great thing about The Bays is that they have dance music as a focus and dance music is very predictable, no matter what you put in it, it tends not to change key. There’s a lot of abstract noise in it which means it’s atonal, it’s still very rhythmical. It goes in groups of four and groups of eight and you can’t help but anticipate what the next move is going to be and that’s part of it.
So The Bays, I can’t quite believe The Bays are the only people who do what they do. Obviously they’re all ridiculously talented musicians and maybe you need to be that talented to make it work. But I mean they to me set a sort of template about how music could be. You look at Ableton Live and that’s a piece of software designed to help people improvise around pre-prepared loops and pre-prepared sections, basically to try and break people out of song structures. What we’re trying to do is the opposite of Chris de Burgh. But not so far from Chris de Burgh that it sounds like free jazz.
E: You might go full circle and end up at Chris de Burgh.
B: (laughs) It’s like fascism and communism; it all ends up at Chris de Burgh.
E: What first got you into
B: I first got into beatbox by just discovering sounds when I was young. But I had to keep it out of people’s way because they just thought it was weird. I suppose the people I was hanging around with when I was a kid weren’t into hip hop, I wasn’t into hip hop to be honest. I’m still not into a huge amount of really early 80s hip hop. But I got into drum and bass when I was 15 and that’s something I really liked and something I really wanted to use this talent for mimicry I have for. So I started beatboxing drum and bass. But now I’m into all different kinds of stuff: I’m into loads of hip hop and loads of drum and bass and dubstep. All beatboxers are into different things. You get loads of kids doing grime and two step stuff, but I’m more into drum and bass and techno and tend to do a lot more of that in my set.
But it was seeing Rahzel which really influenced me to start taking an interest in beatbox properly, as in doing it out loud and showing people I could do it. He made it cool. Before that it was this kind of thing that wasn’t that impressive. So I suppose really it was seeing Rahzel, seeing him hold a crowd for an hour with his mouth, and a DJ doing stuff occasionally. The fact that that was possible, I thought was just incredible and the whole singing and beatboxing at the same time, well, my mind just started whirring about all the possibilities of things I could do and before I knew it I was doing them and getting plaudits for it and it’s just gone from there really.
E: How important was the Brighton music scene for you when you were just starting out?
B: Not very helpful to be honest. I’m still not really wearing the hip hop uniform. You know, you must wear a certain form of cap with the peak at a certain sort of angle, and a certain sort of size t-shirt, with a certain make of trainers, with a certain style of trousers, and I didn’t necessarily fit that mould. You know, I like hip hop but I like every kind of music.
So, yeah. Without wanting to say anything bad about the Brighton hip hop community, I wouldn’t say that I was welcomed in as a part of it, but then I didn’t really try. In terms of people I really respect in the Brighton community hip hop wise, I’ve got connections with them and they’re really cool and I respect what they do. It wasn’t necessarily the Brighton hip hop community that was getting me gigs, it was more that I was doing things on a comedy tip and it was also because I didn’t think I could pass myself off necessarily as being hip hop, because a lot of that, a lot of hip hop, is about your attitude and the way you act.
And as much as I respect that, I couldn’t fit into that mould and I’m not so up on hip hop that I can listen to it all day. As a scene, it didn’t particularly interest me, but I’ve always had a really, really eclectic music taste and I was going to all sorts of different raves. A lot people say I go to drum and bass raves, or I only go to house stuff, or I only go to hip hop – I was just going to them all and I think that influenced what I was doing. The weird random nights people put on in Brighton, that you don’t necessarily find anywhere else, where it’s kind of half cabaret, half someone’s attempt at a band night. People would put these really ambitious nights on at these quite big venues … well, not quite big, but not super small. So I was doing loads of those kinds of gigs. But I was also getting gigs at drum and bass nights, at hip hop nights, at house things, at rave things, at all different kinds of things. I was doing a bit of hosting with a mate at this club at Wimbledon. All really small stuff, but all of that, slowly, slowly but surely, allowed me to become reasonably well known around Brighton.
But Brighton’s got a very transient community and I was very aware that I had to break out of it, but yeah, the sort of lax nature of Brighton in terms of people’s music tastes, everyone’s into really eclectic stuff – that’s really what made me. That and the people I was working with, people I still work with, like Klumzy Tung, an MC I started working with at the very beginning. We had this thing called the Gobfathers, that was really cool.
That’s really made me do what I’m doing now, more the eclecticism of the Brighton music scene rather than the Brighton hip hop scene.
E: How did it feel doing the Big Beach Boutique?
B: That was heavy. That was wicked, it was amazing, it was an honour; it felt like a homecoming. I hadn’t lived in Brighton for a couple of years but I still really felt a part of it and I still do. It was amazing, considering I started playing tiny nights and slowly but surely I ended up playing every venue in Brighton. Now I’m playing all these venues up and down England and in London, and it felt really good to go back to Brighton. I’d already played the Brighton Centre, supporting Groove Armada, but this was just ridiculous. I’ve got such strong memories … well, I’ve got a selection of strong memories, but mostly just weird faded ones, of the first Fat Boy Slim Big Beach Boutique thing I went to, which was in 2002 I think, and that was just fucking amazing. So it felt really cool to be able to be part of it. And it was really nice to meet Norman Cook; he’s just such a normal bloke. He’s one of the nicest guys you’ll ever meet and he just happens to be ridiculously famous and super rich, but you just wouldn’t know if you met him. He’s just super cool.
E: Was it quite flattering that he approached you and JFB on the basis of your Battlejam nights?
B: I don’t know, he should have been flattered we accepted. No, no, it was amazing; yeah, hugely flattering. We just felt we had to step up to the mark really. He offered us a platform so we planned loads of really cool stuff and did it. But it was a really cool thing to have someone who’s a bit of a hero, a bit of a Brighton legend and an all round world wide superstar, say that he wants you. But that’s the thing though, he’s got such a good sense of humour I can understand why he wanted us to do it. It’s not like we were doing a full set, we were just doing little 15 minute things, so rather than being flattered, we were just really appreciative. It was an incredible buzz to play a gig that size; it’s always fun to play gigs that size. But yeah, I just totally got it. He’s such a funny bloke and that comes through in his music and comes through in everything he does. He just let us do what we wanted, which was really exciting. He was like, ‘I’m not even going to check what you’re going to do, just do some shit and make it as silly as you like’. So we scratched with German He-Man, and we video scratched with loads of footage of Brighton, like walking through the Laines and stuff. He’s got loads of love for Brighton, which is really good. I miss Brighton. I might move back. This has just made me nostalgic.
E: It’s a trap. It’ll suck you in before you know it.
B: (laughs) What’s that phrase? The graveyard of ambition(33). I don’t believe it though.
E: Just finally, What’s in the future for you?
B: Loads of stuff. In the immediate future there’re loads and loads of video and audio material which will be coming out through various different channels. But there’s loads of stuff being talked about and in development. There’s loads of footage from shows I’ve been doing which needs to be edited down. I’ve been doing this crazy show which borrows heavily from Battlejam, but it’s done for a theatre audience. We treated them with a lot of respect actually, if we’d have done it as a Battlejam thing then I think it might have just jarred them and it would have been a very different kind of show. But we made it this kind of more like a surreal showcase, whereas Battlejam’s more of a party. So we gave it a bit of structure and it was just this really mad show. We did it at the Edinburgh Fringe, and because I have experience doing theatre stuff I sort of took control of it, but it was mental, it was really an experience doing it and we’re going to do it again next year. We did it in the Udderbelly, which is this really prestigious venue at the Edinburgh Festival which is great. Normally if you’re doing the Edinburgh Fringe, you’ve got to fund yourself for ages and it bankrupts you, but we just got a kind of foot in which was really good. But there’s loads of footage from that and I’ve got about six shows to edit, so there’ll be loads of stuff coming up from that.
I did this project with Reggie Watts, who’s this genius improvisational, surrealist, musical comedian who’s just amazing. He does beatbox and looping and stuff, but he’s just a nutter with a giant afro and no sense of holding back – he just says whatever’s on his mind and often it makes no sense, but sometimes it’s the most intelligent thing you’ve ever heard. So I did this project with him where we both went off on one for ages and that was amazing and there’s some really good stuff that’s come out of it and that’s going to be made into a little film. Who knows how yet? Whether it’ll be for sale or whether it’ll be for free, I don’t know.
There’re loads of other projects and other things. There’s talk of doing stuff with the BBC, which we’re just trying to find time to fit it into my diary at the moment. But like, that’s going to be crazy. Battlejam’s still going strong.
I’m taking time off between January and March to make an album. I really just want to get in the studio, lock the door and come out the other side with just the craziest, craziest stuff ever, but with loads of attention to detail. But just getting silly in the studio and making all the ideas that I’ve had on my mind for ages but haven’t been able to do because I’ve been touring so much. So yeah, that’s what’s in the future for me. It’s going to be a wicked year and I’m really looking forward to it.