Lamb - Interview - 2001

At Last. It feels like a lifetime has passed since the last offering from Lamb. There aren’t enough Christmases in a year.

Lou Rhodes and Andy Barlow met in Manchester in 1994 when, on the day that Andy lost his job, Lou called and asked if he wanted work with her. If this event had happened in 1065, it would have been included in the Bayeux Tapestry. Lou and Andy had stumbled upon a combination as potent as water and potassium permangenate: a masterful blend of texturally dense songs and inquisitive production - sweeping building strings, ominous wallowing bass lines, jilted technoid beats and Lou’s ever present hauntingly sweet vocals.

In 1997 their eponymous debut album redefined the term ‘aural beauty’, and the track ‘Gorecki’ became an instant classic, backed up by explosive live performances. The following albums ‘Fear of Fours’ (1999) and 2001’s ‘What Sound’ continued to reach new heights in audio serenity. And now, at the peak of summer, Lamb are nearly ready to drop their next album 'Between Darkness an Wonder

’. B4beats caught up with Andy and Lou at their studio retreat in the Bath-shire countryside. 

We started at the beginning:

Lou: “I was a fashion and music photographer, but I was still writing songs.” 

Andy: “I was working in Manchester producing and going to sound school. Lou called, looking for someone to work with, and it just so happened that it was the day I lost my job, so I said ‘yup’. We got some studio time in Leeds and did two demos, the response from our mates was good, and then Mercury offered us a deal… I was like, ‘we haven’t even been together two months!’”

Andy: “At the time of the first album, I was listening to a lot of drum & bass and general electronic music, but I grew up listening to a lot of jazz, stuff like Dave Brubeck. I was really into making ‘sounds’, like getting pots and pans, filling them with water and hitting them.” 

Lou: “I come from quite an acoustic background, I was used to my mum’s friends coming over and playing guitar and stuff.”

The result of the fusion was not a compromise but a symbiosis: a head to head of ‘songs’ and ‘production’. 

Andy: “Although there are very different elements to the style, they gel because we do everything together.” 

Lou: “Some trip-hop producers make the track, and then get a girl to sing over the top, the result is often a stultified and disparate sound. A lot of producers just have a sample looped round and round, but I like songs with a beginning, middle and an end, songs that go somewhere. We didn’t do any collaborations on this album, we wanted to go back to basics – this album is a lot simpler. We worked with our band a lot more. [The band’s guitarist] Uddor lives here, so it’s awesome to have someone here who I’m close to who can play and do backing vocals and make samples from scratch with. Working from our own samples means we get the best of both worlds: we get our own, very organic sound with the advantage of plug-ins, effects and so on, ‘Soul with control’.” 

The pair have been working together for eight years, and it appears that despite nearly splitting up whilst paddling in the sea two years ago, the bonds between Lou and Andy have only become stronger. 

Andy: “We have a greater understanding of each other and what each of us do, and can do. We’re more confident in our sound and each our own and each other’s abilities.”

Lou : “Really, we used to interact in a very small way. Now there’s nothing I couldn’t say to him, it’s a lot more like family than it ever was.” 

Andy: “We were always treading on each others creative toes, now it seems like the most natural thing in the world.”

Lamb’s music has also climbed the celebrity alphabet, finding its way into favourites of A-listers like Moby and Nicole Kidman (who performed a Lamb track with Ewan McGregor in Moulin Rouge).

Andy: “It was really weird, because my brother called me from Australia and said ‘I just watched a film with Nicole Kidman in, and they were singing one of your songs’ And I was like, ‘oh really’, I was shocked. Then Nicole Kidman’s manager approached us and asked if she could do a cover version.”

The pair are currently holed up in the studio putting the finishing touches to the new album.

Andy: “This album is a lot simpler than the last – it’s as simple as the first album. It’s more raw – that combination of the electronic and the acoustic. It’s difficult to say how it sounds yet, we’re still too inside it to get objective.”

Lamb have somehow managed to be masters of the headphones and the stage: with music that takes you somewhere amazing when you close your eyes, but that surrounds you in an effervescent blanket that sends shivers up your spine live.  

Andy: “We did a few live dates and played three new tracks. It’s the first time we’ve previewed songs like that – it adds a different dimension to the tracks and we were able to go back into the studio and tweak them. Someone once said to me ‘We don’t understand you guys: you’re a studio band but you’re better live’ – so it’s good to feel songs on stage and take a bit of that back to the studio.” 

It seems odd that just as Lamb provided music for America’s newest favourite TV show, last year’s ‘6ft Under’, the pair were dropped from their US label, Def Jam, who had decided to drop all of their white artists. As such ‘What Sound’ has only just seen American shelf space. But their international popularity is far from waning, and Lou and Andy will be following their Glastonbury headline slot, by gracing the shores of New Zealand, Australia, Portugal and Budapest (with Massive Attack).