Music Interview: Matt Berry

One of the rarities you’ve included on the box set is a song called ‘Catch Me In Time’, which features US soul legend, Geno Washington. How did that collaboration come about?

I can’t really remember… We had the same manager for a while and I’d written the song, which was used in a TV show called Snuff Box. He’s got a fantastic voice and I just wanted to see what he would make of it.

The song sounds like a Northern Soul floor-filler, doesn’t it?

Yes – I’m a big fan of Northern Soul, so I suppose that was the motivation, but also to get Geno on it.

Your first album on Acid Jazz was Witchazel – a record influenced by your love of ‘60s and ‘70s folk and psych. What are your memories of writing and recording it?

There was an interesting juxtaposition – it’s an album containing songs about the countryside and elements of it, like animals and the weather, and, yet it was all written in a little flat on Shad Thames, in South East London. It couldn’t be further away from the things I was writing about.

So, it wasn’t like when Paul Weller goes into the countryside for a few weeks to write and record an album?

I couldn’t do that because I didn’t have a pot to piss in! It was all made on GarageBand – I had no money to do anything or master it, so I did it all myself. What you hear is all my own engineering and production – stuff recorded with two cheap microphones.

At the time, because you were known for acting and comedy, were you worried that people might not take your music seriously?

That’s never occurred to me. It’s only a journalist thing – ‘Berry wants to be taken seriously…’ I never said that, and I’ve never thought that. The way I see it is that I’m in a niche, on an independent label, and if you like my stuff that’s fantastic, but if you don’t, I’m not going to know. I haven’t ever had this ‘take me seriously’ thing – I’ve just been lucky enough to be able to do both things and be on a label. There’s no manifesto with it.

In 2013, you released Kill The Wolf – your folk-horror album. Where did you make that record?

I was on the Thames, in Rotherhithe – again, it was nowhere near the countryside. I made it in a tiny room and did it all on my own.

Was it inspired by British folk-horror films, like The Wicker Man and Blood On Satan’s Claw? Are you a big fan of that genre?

I can’t help it. I don’t know whether it’s a British thing, but it’s always been something that I’ve done. It doesn’t even feel like a genre to me – it feels like my childhood and upbringing, and it’s part of who I am, I suppose.

For your 2016 album, The Small Hours, you took a different approach – you went into a studio (Rimshot, in Kent) with your band, The Maypoles. Was it a challenge to make a record with lots of other people?

It was and now I’ve done it, I don’t need to do it again. I did it because I was expecting it to bring something new out – not just in the songwriting, but also in the playing and the sound – but I didn’t have the kind of control I’ve got when I’m doing it all myself, so it wasn’t as satisfying for me.

Everybody did an amazing job – it’s all about having the sounds that you hear in your head and making sure that your finished piece is exactly like that. The Small Hours is the only album where I can’t say that’s the case.

Television Themes, your seventh album, from 2018, includes your reworked versions of TV themes from the ‘60s to the ‘80s. What was the thinking behind that?

They were themes that were playing in my house while I was growing up. I originally wanted to release a compilation album featuring that music – to get licences to use the themes – but I couldn’t. We couldn’t find the theme from World In Action, and it was impossible to get Sorry! and Blankety Blank, unless you crudely ripped them off the internet, and we didn’t want to do that, so I recorded them all myself.

2020’s Phantom Birds was a more stripped-down record – pastoral country-folk, with some harmonica and pedal steel on it. Was the album influenced by Bob Dylan?

Just the production and the sparseness of it and keeping it to no more than three or four instruments. That was a challenge for me, because I’m naturally prone to just putting 20 guitars on some tracks – it was a lesson in less is more, and I had to stick to that. I enjoyed doing it. I got B.J. Cole to play pedal steel on it, which lifts the whole thing, as does Craig Blundell on the drums.

For The Blue Elephant album, which came out laat year, you did put lots of guitars on it – it has layered sounds, psych electric guitar and synths. There’s Moog, Mellotron, fuzz-bass, funk, prog, blues, garage-rock and cosmic psych pop…

It was made during lockdown, when I was supposed to be in Canada, playing a vampire. Instead, I had all these months free, so I really had time to learn how everything in my studio works. I got to know all the gear and got more into the recording process, and I loved it. It wasn’t a chore and I applied it to the songs. If there was a ‘60s vibe that I liked, I’d try and work out how to achieve it. There were lots of references and trying things out. I had freedom – I didn’t want to do conventional pop songs, like I’d done on Phantom Birds.

What’s your home studio set-up like?

I use Logic, but that’s the only digital aspect of it – everything else is analogue, like the desk, the effects, and the synths. I use a lot of Panasonic hi-fi reverb – it came out in the mid-‘70s and it was something you would add on to your stereo system – but I don’t know how useful it would’ve been at the time, because once you reverb the drums, everything gets lost. It’s useful now for vocals and guitar.

There are some great keyboard sounds on your records. Do you collect vintage gear?

I did do. I got a lot of it in the early ‘90s, when I worked at Tesco, because a lot of it was very cheap back then. You could get analogue synths for 100 quid, because they weren’t vintage – they were just old – and people wanted digital gear. It’s not like it is now.

I got lucky. I got a Yamaha CS-60 for 250 quid. They go for £18,000 now!

We’re the same age, and when I was at school, everyone wanted a Yamaha DX7…

Exactly – when I was young, if it wasn’t black and it didn’t have a tiny screen, then it was a piece of s***! I didn’t have that attitude – I wasn’t interested in the digital stuff. I wanted the stuff with all the knobs and the switches – and I still do.