Music > Interviews
The Little Unsaid
The Bicycle Shop
24/05/17
West Yorkshire-born multi-instrumentalist, songwriter and producer John Elliott leads The Little Unsaid, making music that beguiles with its delicacy and vulnerability as well as its strength and beauty. A rich palette of sounds delving into feelings and nature always show John’s heart clearly on his sleeve. He’s playing solo at The Bicycle Shop this month, some classics from his previous albums and a taste of his latest album Imagined Hymns & Chaingang Mantras. I spoke to him about his experience of PTSD, what playing live means to him and working with Radiohead engineer Graeme Stewart.
How did you get into music initially and how did you go about forming the band?
I played in bands as a teenager, playing confused-adolescent-alt-rock in sticky-floored clubs and trying to get served beer. The usual stuff! But I really fell in love with it when I started recording my own songs at home. I got an old PC that my Dad had pulled off the trash heap at his work and a £5 microphone from Argos. I’d shut myself away for hours into the night recording these very lo-fi albums, trying to recreate the production techniques on whatever records I was listening to at the time…pinching a bit of Pink Floyd here, Jeff Buckley and Massive Attack there, a bit of Kate Bush’s drum sound here, and so on. Years later when I started releasing music under the name The Little Unsaid, I thought I should put a band together to recreate the music live, because at that point I was layering up drums, electronics, piano, guitars and strings. It took time but the band line up we have now – Tim Heymerdinger on drums, Alison D’Souza on viola and effects, and Mariya Brachkova on Moog bass and backing vocals - is so strong, it’s a massive joy to get up on stage with them every night and travel around together creating mischief.
You are recent winners of the Steve Reid InNOVAtion Award for boundary-pushing new music creators, and as a result have had the opportunity to work with mentors. Who did you work with and what have you learnt from it?
I’ve had some good chats with people like Gilles Peterson, Kieran Hebden (Four Tet), Sam Shepherd (Floating Points) and some good folks at Brownswood Records and the PRS Foundation. There’s so much you don’t know about until you’re thrown into that world and I’ve seen lots of people get caught up in bad deals or just get disillusioned and backed into a corner by the industry. The music business is a slippery beast, so getting the opportunity to chat with these wise folks about how to build a sustainable career has been really helpful.
You’ve spent the last year travelling the UK and Europe, and will be playing at plenty of festivals this summer. What do you enjoy most about playing live, and what’s been the highlight so far?
For us it’s all about sharing that fleeting but meaningful sense of community with an audience. It’s hard to describe but the gigs have become quite emotionally driven, in that a lot of the material from the new album is quite personal and relates my own experience of trauma, but in sharing that with people openly and honestly there’s somehow such a sense of connection and celebration in the room. Last night we played our London show on this tour, which was one of those really special nights, the atmosphere was really electric and the audience was amazing.
You’ve just released your new album, Imagined Hymns & Chaingang Mantras. It was recorded with Radiohead engineer and acclaimed film score producer Graeme Stewart. How did you find working with him?
I’ve worked with Graeme on three albums now, he’s become a good friend and it’s always a pleasure to work with him. He has an amazing ability when mixing our music to somehow make sense of the chaos he’s at first presented with! That was important particularly on this record, because we wanted a very precise and direct sound to deliver these songs.
This album was written during your recovery from post-traumatic stress disorder after a year of trauma. How did it help you?
Songwriting for me is the main activity that helps me find meaning in anything. Even if the song ends up on the scrapheap, the process of writing is like rifling through a landfill of confused, tangled thoughts, looking for the little gem of an idea that makes the whole struggle worthwhile. Songwriting is self-discovery, it’s a chance to slow the restless pace of life and take some time to find out how you feel about a particular thing, or what you believe in, or what upsets or excites or angers you and why. That is hugely important after experiencing any kind of trauma, because I found in the face of that kind of mental upheaval the sense of self almost completely vanishes. This happens to most of us at some point in life, and we have this extraordinary ability to rebuild ourselves, to let grief and pain enliven us and return to life with more energy and excitement than before, and it really helped me having songwriting to map that process.
Would you say it’s a positive album overall?
Yes I would, to me it’s a celebration of all that darkness and complexity when we come up against trauma, and the resilience of the human spirit. Plus we’ve laid a little path of tiny, flickering candles amidst all the darkness in the songs, if you can follow those you’ll come out the other side in one piece.
You have a genre-spanning approach to songwriting – what have you been listening to recently?
The new Colin Stetson album All This I Do For Glory is incredible. Who knew one man and a saxophone could create such epic, swirling, exploding landscapes. I’m going to see Oumou Sangare on a night off next week, she has a new record out soon, so I’ve been listening to her lots, too.
Your songs seem to focus on nature and feelings – are they natural bedfellows for you?
It depends on the song – I suppose sometimes they’re bedfellows, but other times they’re more like lovers who keep falling out and having vicious arguments and breaking all the crockery and then making up again. Being in nature gives me a lot of headspace and inspiration. But at its most ferocious it’s a necessary reminder that there is something much bigger going on than the twisted little thoughts rolling around in my brain.
Your album sleeve designs are intriguing – all very different. Why did you decide on a picture of yourself for the new one?
The previous two releases have depicted my face in some way, A Filthy Hunger being a print taken of my inked face and Fisher King being a charcoal sketch my friend made, so it seemed a natural progression to have a very raw, honest photograph for this one. Especially given the nature of the songs, it seemed the most direct image to use.
Your songs are pensive and considered, beautifully and delicately put together. The piano seems to take the lead – do you write everything on the piano and then add to it subsequently?
Not always, I wrote the album mostly on piano but I’ve mainly written on guitar in the past. At the moment I’m enjoying using just the laptop to sketch ideas with electronic loops and beats. But it normally all starts from something minimal and some words, and then the rest is arranged later for a demo recording.
There’s a real richness to your music, for example in Get On The Other Side Of That Door! When you start writing lyrics or a tune, how early on do you start to imagine or hear how it will eventually end up?
Sometimes the words demand a certain kind of rhythm straight away, and in the case of that song it felt like it had to be a fast, driving tune with a less common meter - 5/4 - that makes it feel you’re kind of skipping ahead with every step, thundering towards some inevitable conclusion. Other times, like with Let Desire Back In, you have to try a lot of different things before the song settles. That song was originally a very slow ballad, but then we picked up the pace and changed the time signature to 7/4 and it suddenly took on a life of its own. It’s very exciting when that happens because it feels like the song is writing itself and you have to really work to keep up with it.
There’s a real feeling of movement in this album, which is also reflected in some of the song titles – tumbling, melt, dig, wreck. How did the process of ordering the songs for this album go – was it an easy job to make it flow as well as it does and get the pace right?
Getting the order right is one of the hardest things about making an album, I find. There has to be a flow and a journey to the listening experience, but because you’re so much in the centre of it as the writer and you’ve heard the songs a thousand times each by that point, it’s very difficult to perceive how someone else might hear it. We tested the order out on several people and changed it around loads of times before we mastered it. On some past albums we haven’t quite got it right but in this case I think the order maps the journey perfectly, and hopefully rewards those folks like me who like to listen to albums from start to finish.
I love the name The Little Unsaid - it’s very poetic. How did that come about?
I think wine was involved. I just remember me and some friends all coming up with suggestions when I didn’t want to release things as plain old boring John Elliott, and that was a favourite. Putshot Bosh and Carvery Lad were two of the other suggestions I can remember, so the competition wasn’t very stiff!
What sort of experience can we expect from your show at The Bicycle Shop here in Norwich?
It’s a solo show in a very intimate venue I absolutely love, so it will be me laying out the songs in all their pure, naked glory. Just a guitar, a piano, my voice and some subtle electronics here and there. I love playing with the band but there’s something very liberating about doing the occasional solo show where I can strip the songs right back to their core and improvise my way through them a bit more. Norwich is one of the only solo shows on this tour so I’m especially looking forward to it!
The Little Unsaid is at The Bicycle Shop on 8th June. Tickets available from ueatickets.ticketabc.com