Messed!Up
Having a long band career, especially one marked by consistent activity and sonic development, is quite unusual in the music scene. Line-up changes, creative rifts, commercial pressures, life changes, or simply losing momentum over time make the club for bands being active for more than three decades very small. Bands like The Rolling Stones, U2, The Cure, ZZ Top, and a few more acts are of a very rare breed that have spent four to six decades in the scene when most bands call it quits after the first decade. And for bands that never made it to the arena level and enjoyed commercial success, the laws of economics usually force them to find normal day jobs, and their dream slowly fades away.
However, there’s an ever rarer category of bands that, despite not having a major commercial breakthrough, continue to struggle and never stop releasing records – the bands that achieve cult status. One of those bands is post-punk act And Also The Trees, one of the more undeservedly underappreciated post-punk bands in the scene.
Formed in Inkberrow, Worcestershire, in 1979, brothers Justin Jones and Simon Huw Jones got together with brothers Graham and Nick Havas, and And Also The Trees was born. Their mix of atmospheric post-punk and dark folk coated in poetic lyrics gave them a unique style and set them apart from their contemporaries, and they gained a dedicated cult following, particularly in Europe.
While the Havas brothers left the band, Simon and Justin kept it together, brought in new band members, and continued pouring out new music on record for the next four decades to come. Last year saw the arrival of their sixteenth studio album, Mother-Of-Pearl Moon, and when they popped by Witten in Germany, we sat down with Justin and Simon for a chat about their latest album and to pick songs for their setlists.
Songs being too complicated for live shows
At the beginning of your career, especially in the 80s, you created a unique sound with your guitar, and it sometimes sounded like a set of strings or even an orchestra. You hear a lot of it on Virus Meadow and the Millpond Years. Everyone could tell that it’s an And Also The Trees song, even if Simon isn’t singing. How did this massive sound come about?
Justin: “I think in our early years, when we were touring around Europe, we went to Italy at some point and had a day off in Florence, and I was walking down by the river. As I came back, there was an old market square with a musician that was playing with his mandolin, and he played this repetitive line over and over again, and this in an echoing environment. But I didn’t go home thinking I was going to do that. I think you become exposed to influences and things like that”.
“Also, I’ve been very keen on soundtrack music, and that generally has an orchestra in it. The guitar creates a kind of wash, but you’ve got to be careful not to use it too much. It has to be in the background. That’s the point, I wanted it to be orchestral. I didn´t want it to be sounding like a guitar”.
“You can do lots with a guitar. You can make it sound like crazy things”.
I would love to hear “The Millpond Years”, the song, live again. I think you didn’t play it after 1988 anymore.
Simon: “That was difficult. We did play it at that time, but thereafter not anymore. We felt it was a bit heavy going as a piece, didn’t we? It weighed down and it didn’t seem to work for us”.
Justin: “Sonically, there are some problems with it. The bass line is very high, and on the record, you got a low sub-bass that’s also playing along. Without that, it sounds too airy and hasn’t got any weight, and that was the problem live. It’s quite simple as a piece”.
Simon: “I guess it’s good that we can’t have everything live, so you have to have the record. Sometimes pieces get better when you play them live, and sometimes you can’t catch them”.
Justin: “Probably we have to look at it one day. There’s a guitar melody in it that I took from Bernard Hermann’s Marnie, the Alfred Hitchcock film. Maybe it’s a bit too technical to say, but there’s a little motive in there that plays it. And that’s in “The Millpond Years” as well”.
That must also affect how you organize a setlist for a concert. What do you take into consideration when deciding on the songs?
Simon: “It’s a question of dynamics as well. I think it’s quite important to make a set have a particular shape which builds up to moments of power and then dips down, but this needs to happen at the right time, and for that you need to choose the right songs to suit those moments in the set. You can’t have too many peaks; otherwise, you overdo it, you can’t have too many quiet ones in a row, and you can’t have too many that build in a row because it’s like playing a card too many times. Over the years, I’ve been trying to get it right. I think the more we play, the closer we get to getting this shape right”.
“It’s nice if we can play something from all of our history as well. Ok, it’s difficult to play something from our first album now. We’ve tried, but my voice wouldn’t do what it did forty years ago. It just sounds different. Ok, we are playing “Shantell” and “There Were No Bounds” and “Wallpaper Dying”, which are ancient and my voice can do that. So it’s nice if we can have one or two songs from all of our history and make them blend in with each other without being too obvious about this changing”.
“Also, we know that people like to hear certain songs (laughs), and when we don’t play them, we often get someone saying ‘Oh, I’ve come all the way from Argentina and you didn´t play “Slow Pulse Boy”’. So we do tend to play tracks from Virus Meadow again and again. But we play them because we are ok to play them, I don’t get bored with playing that, and I hope we don’t get bored with playing that. It’s always slightly different. I go to this place (venue or city) and if I can find something new in that place where I go in “Slow Pulse Boy”, and I often do, it’s like living something and it’s living something that I’m not tired of, personally. That’s from my point of view”.
Justin: “Also, with that particular song, it helps that it’s never the same twice. It’s similar, but never exactly the same, because of the length of the intro and certain things. There’s a little bit of improvisation that happens, that’s the magic, isn’t it? If it’s the same every time you lose the magic. With that on, it’s different every time”.
On a personal level, are there any favourite songs that you loved to include in a setlist but didn’t because you consider them unplayable live?
Simon: “Plenty”.
Justin: “How many songs have we got? 200? 300? We have a repertoire of 35 songs”.
Simon: “At the moment, and that’s just because we rehearsed 35 songs for this tour. I would have loved to include “Macbeth’s Head” from Farewell to the Shade live, but that was too difficult”.
Justin: “Or maybe “The Street Organ”. It’s quite difficult to play”.
Simon: “There are some that we try and try, and eventually we get it. Like with the new album, we are just about getting how to play “Valdrada” quite well, but we nearly gave up with it because it’s tricky to get right. When you’re in a studio, you can play around with the balances of the instruments to get it perfect, but actually doing that on stage is another story”.
Justin: “Some of the pieces of music that I write the pattern for are almost improvised. There’s a charm in some of the mistakes or time signature changes. I don’t want to get too technical, but in “Valdrada” there’s 7/4 and then 3/4 at the beginning. It really messes with your head if you’re not really on it. So I’ve had to get rid of a few bars because it’s just complicated”.
“I think what Colin finds really interesting in our music is that it’s quite unpredictable, and some of that is down to the way it forms. Sometimes it’s just a recording that is an improvisation, as I was saying, and you’ve got to recreate that improvisation, or there are unusual twists and turns that make it interesting. And he loves that kind of thing because he is from a jazz background, so he loves the weirdness”.
When you look back on your career, what songs would you like to be remembered for?
Justin: “It’s a quite hard one, isn’t it? Generally, when I listen back to our records, I don’t like it. I find it too much like looking into a mirror and seeing all the faults”.
Do you think there are any?
Justin: “Yes, I hear them all the time. But there are certain songs like “Paradiso” that are very close to being perfect on the record”.
Simon: “To me, there is one song that is very much rooted in the way we come from and that’s “Virus Meadow”, the song. When I sing it I’m right back there in Morton Underhill where the band formed and where we lived. That’s probably to me the quintessential root of And Also The Trees”.
A Brothers of the Trees project turning into an And Also the Trees record
Last year, And Also The Trees released their sixteenth studio album, Mother-Of-Pearl Moon, receiving strong acclaim from critics, focusing on its atmospheric maturity, pastoral instrumentation, and haunting beauty.
Our journalist digs into the lyrics on the album and what some of the songs represent.
About your latest album you released last year, is there any central idea or a main theme regarding the lyrics for Mother-Of-Pearl Moon?
Justin: “Yes, originally the project was going to be a Brothers of the Trees (side project with Justin and Simon) album, so we deliberately limited the amount of instruments that were on there. So, from a musical background for what I was doing, it was quite a different approach because the Brothers of the Trees’ shows are just Simon, myself, and sometimes Colin, so we had to be very economical with the sounds to start with. There weren’t too many things developed. Later on, some percussion was coming in. That was the original idea”.
When I listen to songs like “The Whaler” or “Town Square,” it reminds me of towns in the east of England. Did you have any specific places that you thought of while writing the songs?
Simon: “Not really, no. It was just a vague concept of a city or a town. Of course, “The Whaler” was supposed to be a town at the coast, obviously, but I didn’t have any particular town in mind. I suppose they would be British anyway”.
You write a lot about ancient times, not just on this album but also on lots of others. How did you get this affinity for long gone times, sometimes even times in Victorian England?
Simon: “That’s probably going way back to the times when we still lived in Wochestershire. It was sort of a timeless place that we were living in. Particularly lyrically, I was taking inspiration from the scenery there. And then I made a deliberate decision to rarely mention or make references to the modern world, and when I did, it was sort of surprising. So you have a song like “Vincent Craine” in which I talk about wrecked cars. That had an interesting effect because you were not expecting it. It reminded you that it’s the modern times, but what we’re seeing around us quite often are the ancient times. It’s a little bit the type of timelessness that I lyrically like, coming backwards and forwards in time, both in landscapes and in people”.
“I can start a song, sometimes, and the person in the story would be an old person, and then he will get younger as the song goes on, and then older again. Or even change gender sometimes. I like this idea of moving, so to speak, of places because when we look around us anywhere in any country, you can see the past as well as the present”.
What are your influences text-wise?
Simon: “Text-wise, everything really. Anything that I can possibly take influence from, mainly the music, if I can find something in the music that I need to write down. I can take influences from films and books. Sometimes I just take a book of paintings or art, open it up, and see what happens with the images. Sometimes it works and sometimes it doesn’t. When it does, it’s quite satisfying as it brings something to your head which is not expected”.
Simon, you also shot all the pictures for the latest album, as you did for many of the others. Did you ever think of releasing a book with all band-related photos and texts, or lyrics?
Simon: “There is a guy in the Netherlands that is working on it. But we did not make a lot of progress recently because when we are working on a new album, I keep my focus on just that and nothing else. He is such a nice guy who doesn’t dare to put any pressure on me. But I guess he should, to finish this project one day (laughs)”.
“Some of my photos and other artwork are available at our merchandise stand. So if people are interested, now they can find some there”.
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Photographer: Guido Rangnitt
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And Also The Trees pages
