During Skye Edwards’s first photo shoot with Morcheeba, one of her bandmates helped hide her baby bump with a strategically placed guitar. It was 1995, and the music industry had firm views on what made for a hot new band. The checklist did not extend to launching a trip-hop group featuring a pregnant lead vocalist – or so Morcheeba suspected.
“I was three or four months pregnant. There’s a picture out there with me in an aqua-blue dress, with these sort of pink and white flowers on. I’ve [bandmate] Ross’s beautiful guitar in front of my belly, hiding my bump. And then, when we signed the deal, I wore a baggy shirt. We’re all thinking, ‘Well, they won’t want to sign a band with a pregnant singer.’ I would basically make myself scarce when the A&R guy would come down to our studio.”
All these decades later, life has come full circle for Edwards and for the downtempo dance project to which she has devoted much of her adult life. Morcheeba’s new album, Escape the Chaos, is not only one of their best, showcasing Edwards’s beautifully soulful vocals and Ross Godfrey’s lush, chill-out production, but also features percussion by her oldest son, Jaega Mckenna-Gordon, the child she was expecting during the photo shoot 30 years ago. It is, to quote one of their biggest hits back to them, “all part of the process”.
“He’s going to be jumping ship. At the moment he’s on tour with Greentea Peng,” she says, referring to the buzzy neosoul artist. “He’s just got the gig with Gorillaz. He’s going to be doing that towards the end of the year. I’m awfully proud of my number-one son.”
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Edwards is chatty and thoughtful, but it is immediately apparent that she has a core of steel. That streak of perseverance has stood to her during her ups and downs with Morcheeba.
When she and the producer brothers Ross and Paul arrived in the late 1990s with a groove-heavy sound, the music press immediately lampooned them as a tired pastiche of the trendy trip-hop scene and artists such as Massive Attack and Portishead. To quote a review by the BBC, they were “too slick and tasteful to function as anything more substantial than background music”.
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Such criticisms were over the top. But the detractors were correct in one respect: Morcheeba weren’t cool in the least – and were self-aware enough not to pretend to be.
Edwards, who is of British Jamaican heritage, grew up in East London; she studied at London College of Fashion before deciding to focus instead on music.
Ross and Paul were straight from the sticks, however. Having grown up in the outer reaches of suburban Kent, they would never be as hip as the trip-hop set. That didn’t bother them. To yearn for coolness is the least cool quality imaginable. Still, it made them easy targets.
“Massive Attack, Moloko and Olive, they were the cool ones. But that’s just because you go by what the NME and the Melody Maker are saying. When they give you zero out of five and call you “the devil‘s own lounge band” it’s, like, ‘Oh, we’re not as cool as everybody else.’ But we just keep doing our thing. And we keep doing it.”
The music press might not have appreciated them, but other artists did. On one occasion they came offstage from a concert in Los Angeles to discover George Michael – a megafan – in their dressingroom. He would later record their tune Tape Loop (though it remains unreleased, tragically).
Madonna also attended one of their shows. “She didn’t want to be on the guest list – there was a queue” – so she asked for her tickets to be sent to her in advance.
“We met Lenny Kravitz in New York as well. He was a big fan, too, and I’ve heard Ozzy Osbourne‘s a big fan. We have got a few famous fans out there. Not that that means much. I guess it’s nice to be recognised by other musicians, isn’t it?”
As with any long-term relationship, Morcheeba had their ups and downs. They were caught unawares by the huge success of their second album, Big Calm, from 1998, which includes The Sea, perhaps Morcheeba’s most popular track.
Two years later it was fans’ turn to be alarmed, when the band released an uncharacteristically upbeat single, Rome Wasn’t Built in a Day – the positive vibes of which also wrong-footed Edwards when Paul Godfrey presented her with the tune.
“I remember speaking to our A&R guy at the time and being, like, ‘I just don’t get it. This is not Morcheeba.’ I wasn’t happy about it. I grew to love it. It upset a lot of chill-out stoners. But when you’re at the gig, and you get the big cheer when that song comes on at the end, you know it makes a lot of sense. It was Paul‘s idea. He’s just kind of, like, ‘I’m sick of people sitting on the floor at our gigs. I want people to stand up‘.”
Audiences may have been amenable to standing up. Edwards was ready for a lie down. In 2003 Morcheeba headlined the V Festival in the UK, played the Hollywood Bowl in Los Angeles the following day and created history as the first band to perform at Trafalgar Square in London.
But the globe-trotting was exhausting, and there came the inevitable burnout. After what they have described as a Spinal Tap-style parting of the ways, it was decided that Edward would leave Morcheeba and the Godfreys carry on with a guest vocalist.
Edwards dived into her solo career, releasing a string of well-regarded LPs. Then, in 2009, she bumped into Ross in London. They got talking, and she was back in the band the following year. Paul Godfrey left in 2014, saying he was “fed up reinventing the wheel”. The trio had slimmed down to a two-piece, augmented by Edwards’s son on drums, Ross’s wife, Amanda Zamolo, on backing vocals, and Edwards’s husband, Steve Gordon, on bass.
This new version of Morcheeba has been going strong ever since. On Escape the Chaos they’re taking stock, counting their blessings, acknowledging the past and celebrating the future. Much of the album is classic Morcheeba: its gauzy opening track, Call for Love, for instance, could have beamed in straight from the late 1990s, when big beat and trip-hop were the inescapable sound of youth culture.
“We can’t escape it, my voice, Ross’s guitar production. It’s there always – it’s always going to feel that way,” she says. “I don’t know that we’re ever going to be able to – or even want to – veer too far from that.”
Some of the material has a darker side. The gutsy How Far We’ve Come celebrates the ups and downs of life in music, Edwards’s woozy vocal accompanied by depth-charge grooves and hazy guitar. The torrid Live and Die matches it for emotional heft, with Edwards counting her blessings, thankful to be still in a position to do so. She explains that its heavy ambience was inspired by an exchange several years ago with a doctor.
“I was quite ill at the time, getting over glandular fever. And then everything was going a bit weird with my stomach. I was getting these pains. Even drinking water was painful. They found a tiny little shadow on my liver. The doctor was going on about, ‘So if it’s cancer ...’
“I remember saying to Ross, ‘I’ve written some words, but I want to change ‘Live and Die‘, because I think that’s a bit too morbid.
But “Live and Let Die ... it’s a bit like a Bond-film reference. So we kept it. And of course my health has improved. The little shadow tumour thing was benign. It’s all good. I’m not going to die – not yet, anyway.”
With the album finished and soon to be shared with the world, Edwards is in an upbeat frame of mind. Thirty years in, she is proud of what Morcheeba have achieved and looking forward to sharing their new songs with fans.
“You never know how people are going to receive it. Someone asked, ‘Are you nervous before the release?’ Absolutely not. I think we’ve written and produced something really cool – really special. There’s some real gems on there that I think will connect with everyone.” She laughs. “I’m bigging myself up now. It’s beautiful.”
Embrace the Chaos is released by 100% Records on Friday, May 23rd
