This month’s Barclaycard Mercury Prize Session with The Hospital Club welcomes two of the Country’s most idiosyncratic artists. Although Metronomy, or Joseph Mount as he’s otherwise known, and Roots Manuva aka Rodney Smith share little in the way of background – Mount grew up in Totnes, an artistic enclave in North Devon, Smith a born and bred South Londoner – the particularly British mode that their musical styles follow make them ideal comrades. As Roots himself once put it in an interview “The English have always got it wrong: The Beatles tried to make R&B and came up with something completely different. The Specials tried to play Reggae, but ended up with this weird kind of Ska. And as for Hip Hop? Well, we tried that and ended up with Drum & Bass. It’s all about celebrating the mistakes”.
This notion has been a quiet mainstay throughout Roots Manuva’s peerless back catalogue. On its release in 1999 ‘Brand New Second Hand’ bashment bass and stark, jarring drums seemed completely apart from anything happening in Hip Hop or Ragga on either side of the Atlantic, but there’s no doubting the subtle influence the album had on the Capital’s nascent Grime scene. Things took a turn for the heavier with ‘Run Come Save Me’, a bass-laden odyssey that spawned ‘Witness (1 Hope)’, one of British Street Music’s finest moments, and was counted amongst the Mercury Prize Albums of the Year. Following on a few year later, ‘Awfully Deep’ set Roots unmistakable cadence to an even more musical backing (a must check is ‘The Haunting’, a piece performed with the Easy Access Orchestra) and confirmed what many had suspected since day one: that in Mister Manoo, the UK boasted a talent that easily transcended the often limiting parameters of the indigenous Hip Hop scene.
But even though audiences far further afield from the traditional UK Hip Hop crowd were immersing themselves in his music, Rodney was keen to point out that many people were missing the point. In an interview he once explained the methods behind his music. “[My music] is about merging the most unlikely bedfellows, but no-one seems to hear it. I tried to eliminate the more raga influences but people still ask me about them. I’m like, ‘don’t you hear the 80s synth pop inflections?” and it’s these inflections that prevailed with his fourth album proper ‘Slime & Reason’. As has been well documented, Toddla T was responsible for much of the album’s freshness, but who better to extrapolate 80’s Synth Pop than Metronomy? Having already turned in a remix for Awfully Deep’s title track, Mount worked with Roots on one of the albums cornerstone moments, ‘Let The Spirit’
On ‘Nights Out’, the second Metronomy long player, Gabriel Stebbing and Oscar Cash joined Mount and added a tighter rhythm and more song orientated structure to the now identifiable Metronomy sound, delivering twisted gems like ‘Thing For Me’ and ‘Heartbreaker’ Mount described it as “the soundtrack to a bad weekend”, but that didn’t stop critics heaping praise for its original and awkward take on classic electronic Pop music. NME awarded it a glittering 9/10 whilst The Independent on Sunday simply stated it to be “A Modern Classic”. Not to say that the response from the public was similarly unanimous, but challenging people conceptions lies at the very heart of Mount’s modus operandi. “We had a hilarious time supporting Kate Nash” he told a journalist “every night the audience were split in half: half were cheering, half were booing!”
In the months since ‘Nights Out’ Metronomy has once again grown, with Stebbing leaving to concentrate on his own band Your Twenties and new members Anna Prior (formerly of Lightspeed Champion) and Gbenga Adelekan have stepped up to drums and bass respectively. “We used to do everything on a computer, which wasn’t very reliable”, explained Mount “and now we have real musicians, who are at least half as reliable”. The latest release, the ‘Not Made For Love EP’, doesn’t feature the new band but is once again the product of Mount left to his own devices. Its synth ballad title song is as touching as a Casio keyboard will allow and closes the cover on the Nights Out era whilst gently hinting towards what can be expected of the new album.
The Session takes place on Thursday 12th November and you can win tickets right here on the website, via our Myspace page and by tuning in to John Kennedy’s Xposure show on XFM. For more music from Roots Manuva, keep an eye out for the forthcoming from Rodney’s label Banana Klan and a Dub version of Slime & Reason that he’s been working on with DJ WrongTom. Metronomy will have a new album out in the goodness of time, but Joe is also working with cocknbullkid, a.k.a East London’s rightful air to the Wonky Pop crown Anita Blay.
