Portico

Portico, formerly Portico Quartet, are transformed. No longer a busking group, no longer a Jazz group, they’re now a threesome, freshly signed to Ninja Tune, and making the best music of their lives so far. Imagine, if you will, a cross between these Jameses; James Blake, Jamie Woon and Jamie XX, plus all the best parts of modern jazz and urban sounds. Their latest album Living Fields is a collection of soundscapes scattered with intricate drumbeats, delicate vocals from a selection of guest singers and swooping tunes that mesmerise and capture the listener. This is a winner, and may well take Portico to a whole new raft of listeners. I spoke to Jack, a founding member of the band, about their new sound and how they came to create it.

Is music in your blood?

My mum plays piano and my great aunt had a residency on Brighton Pier as a pianist years ago, before it burnt down! None of them were really professional but enjoyed themselves.

You originally met Nick Mulvey when you were both studying at SOAS in London. What were you studying and how did you meet the others from Portico Quartet?

I was studying Ethnomusicology, the history of non-Western music culture from around the world. Milo, who plays bass, I’ve known since I was eight, and Nick knew Duncan, the drummer, from Cambridge where they’d grown up together.

You’re just off on tour of a selection of European cities. Didn’t you get your name from an experience you had the first time you played in Europe?

Yeah, we were playing at a festival in Castelvecchio, a little village outside Bologna. It started to rain so we were moved to a portico, which is like a porch, like the one outside the White House. The locals started calling us the Portico Quartet and it just stuck!

Debut album Knee Deep in the North Sea named after an incident in Norfolk?

That came from Nick. He got a phone call from his mate Pete really early one summer’s morning at like 6 or 7, and he was like “Nick mate, I’m knee deep in the North Sea!”

You were nominated for the Mercury in 2008 and was Time Out’s best jazz album of 2007. Was it overwhelming at the time?

At the time it didn’t feel that overwhelming because we’d just come straight out of university and it felt quite normal. But in retrospect, it was a lot of attention for a band like us at the time. But yeah, we didn’t realise it at the time.

You sound like you’re fans of Radiohead’s latest work. Who else do you enjoy listening to?

My most influential albums would be Arthur Russell’s World of Echo, Steve Reich’s Music for 18 Musicians…that’s probably the album we all bonded over when we all got together initially. I like this guy called Oneohtrix Point Never, who makes collage work in New York, and I like Tim Hecker who did this great album Ravedeath a couple years ago, with lots of processed organ sound. I like Meditations by John Coltrane, which is more like Free Jazz.

One of your members, Keir left last year. How come he left and how come you decided not to replace him in the band?

He had his own stuff going on, and things he wanted to explore. On our previous album we brought him in towards the end, so me, Milo and Duncan did the bulk of it; Keir was always on the fringes of it a little bit and he felt that he wanted to get stuck into something himself. He’s one of my best friends so we see each other still quite a lot. The reason we didn’t replace him was because this new album, Living Fields, was a bit of a new start. We’d dropped the ‘Quartet’ from our name and drew it back in to just the three of us.

You signed to Ninja Tune last year; how come you made this decision? I think it definitely says something about the direction you might be taking in the future.

The addition of vocals, and not having the saxophone is probably the main things that have changed in terms of the sound. But the way we made this album was very different for us too. We made a lot of it on the computer rather than working out the songs, playing it live and then record them. We rented a studio in an industrial estate close to where we live. As we were creating the sounds we record them onto the computer, and then produced and mixed it all ourselves. Once it was all on the computer it was quite easy to do. Working with singers as well was new too, the themes, the lyrics, the melodies, all of that. It was very very different.

You’ve got guest singers on this album – Jono McCleery, also on Ninja Tune, Joe Newman from Alt J, Jamie Woon. How much influence did they have on the tracks they sang on? For example, Memory of Newness with Jamie Woon has a real R’n’B vibe to it.

It really varied between each singer and each track. That’s Jamie’s genre really, his style is pretty R n B. We developed some of the themes we wanted people to write about. We got together a package of bits and bobs to send to the vocalists, like a documentary we liked, a few quotes, some photos a book we all enjoyed reading, the things we got together represented the things we wanted the album to be about. We asked the vocalists to base their lyrics around these things. We asked them to write their lyrics, send them back to us, and then maybe we’d change some of the words, or move things around, repitch them a bit, then send it back and get them to do another version. The track 101 which we did with Joe, we just sent him the track and he sent back his vocals and they were spot on. So it was different with each person.

Will they be out on tour with you?

Jono is! He’s going to be singing all the tracks and then hopefully at some point in the year we’ll play live with Jamie and Joe although they’re very busy.

You’ve always had very passionate fans; are you a little nervous about what their reaction may be to your new sound?

Jazz is funny because it can be quite protective and hermetic, and I think a lot of people do see Jazz as ‘their’ music and don’t listen to much outside of it. Not entirely, but sometimes. I think the Jazz world is quite funny; there’s this open-ness to new music but also it’s pretty conservative. I think a lot of our fans, therefore are quite open to the change. There’s been a good response to a lot of the stuff but there’s been a reaction to the new music as well…some people think we sound like just another indie band or something! Which I think comes from not knowing much about other forms of music outside of Jazz. I don’t think we sound like an indie band, anyway! Some people won’t be into it and that’s fine, we’d expect that. Hopefully we’ll get more fans than we’ll lose. I think it will take the cycle of this album, from release ‘til about a year’s time for that switchover to change and for people to know we’re doing something different and not to expect us to do what we did with the old band.

Portico play The Waterfront Studio on 23rd April. Tickets from www.ueaticketbookings.co.uk.