Matthew Herbert wants to create something that’s the opposite of Brexit — about collaboration, about creativity, about love rather than hate.

Source: Politico

Herbert had opened the show crooning “The Only Word Left is Goodbye” and his band had just played a gently swinging number that set the words of Article 50 to music. Then came a technical glitch. Nonplussed, he glanced up at the audience knowingly: “The way this is going is the way Brexit is.”

Herbert made his name in the 1990s as a house music producer, making the sort of seductive electronic tunes you’d stumble across in bars from London to Croatia. He remixed everyone from Serge Gainsbourg to Björk. More recently, he’s made a specialty of turning unlikely concepts into critically-acclaimed music.

On one record, he draws exclusively on the sounds of a pig’s life — from birth to butchering — to highlight the realities of meat production. (PETA, the animal rights group, did not approve). Another relies on the soundtrack of everyday goods, including a Starbucks’ Frappuccino being poured down a sink, to make a statement about the evils of consumer culture. Last year, Herbert released an album made using only the acoustics of the human body. It included, to the horror of some, a track called “Is Shitting.”

Such records have made him a critical darling. The New York Times profiled him in its style magazine (for his music, not his sharp suits) and praised his records for “resembling nothing else out there.” The Guardian called his music madcap at first glance, but claimed that once you talk to him you quickly realize “it’s all the other musicians who [are]crazy.” He’s been invited to work on everything from operas to Eurovision.

Herbert’s latest project will test even his ability to turn unlikely subjects into good music.

The Brexit Big Band — a two-year-long project — will see Herbert crisscross Europe on what he’s called “an apology tour,” composing and performing songs that respond to the U.K.’s exit from the European Union. An album will be released the day the U.K. formally leaves — in March 2019. 

The opposite of Brexit

Brexit, in theory, should be a ripe subject for musicians. Its negotiations are filled with plotlines and characters straight out of an opera — just think of Theresa May’s desperate longing for a good deal; Jean-Claude Juncker’s frantic attempts to keep the peace, or the palpable awkwardness at formal dinners between the two. Britain’s exit will also put the future of its youth in a perilous state, something you might expect young talent to use as fodder for their art.

But few musicians have taken on the subject — with the exception perhaps of Mick Jagger, who released the unsubtle singles “England Lost” and “Gotta Get A Grip” in July, inspired by the “changing political situation.” And there was French rocker Bertrand Cantat, whose single “L’Angleterre,” which came out in October, was seen by some as an attempt to get his fans to forget about his 2003 conviction for murdering his girlfriend.

Most British artists seem keenly aware they risk losing half their audience overnight by touching the subject. Or maybe Brexit is just so all-pervasive they don’t want to have to sing about it too.

For Herbert, “it was just a feeling I had to do something,” he says, speaking by phone from his home in Margate, Kent, an area he calls “UKIP central.” He wasn’t surprised by the vote’s outcome but is still clearly saddened by the divisions it exposed. There were few jokes until we got off the topic of Brexit.

He recalls that, overnight, his local barber’s became a place to avoid speaking politics. Margate’s diverse residents — from its taxi drivers to its hipsters — would all sit silently judging each other across the room, he recalls. What most upset him was the story that was being told, “that the root of all our problems was Europe — that simply was not true.”

“[The] Remain [campaign]did a particularly poor job in crafting a coherent story about what it means to be part of the EU,” he says.

Is he making a belated advertising campaign for Remain? “Maybe it is that,” he says, “but the crucial thing for me is that this is a response to Brexit rather than about Brexit. I want to create something that’s the opposite of Brexit — about collaboration, about creativity, about love rather than hate.”

‘Political music’

Herbert initially thought the project would focus on the nitty-gritty of Brexit. “When I started out I wanted to do something very on the nose about the political process,” he says. “One of the first pieces that I wrote was that one setting Article 50 to music. But things change every hour, it’s impossible to keep up in a way. If I was to write about whatever deeply unpleasant thing Boris Johnson said last week, by the time I’d finished he’d have said the next deeply unpleasant thing.”

The emotional arc of Brexit became more important. “In a way, it’s become about relationships, about separation, about divorce. And that’s surprised me as that’s not something I’m normally a fan of in political music.”

At the Barbican show, the emotional songs clearly worked best. The audience — 99 percent Remain, if I had to venture a guess — barely moved throughout, as though recalling how they felt the day after the vote.

One soulful number, performed by London-based singer Rahel Debebe-Dessalegne, repeated the line “Be here, be still” as if in prayer and brought to mind the murder of British MP Jo Cox ahead of the Brexit vote. (The song, it turns out, is about the suicide of one of Herbert’s family friends.)

For another, “You’re Welcome Here,” Debebe-Dessalegne sang about the people the Brexit campaign riled against (“If your parents put you on a boat alone…”) The choir punctuated every line with a chorus of “You’re welcome.”

“There were some Europeans in the choir who were in tears when we first rehearsed that,” Herbert says. “One said, ‘In my whole time living here, no one’s ever told me I’m welcome.’”

The project’s focus could still change, says Herbert. He’s not ruling out that the final album could feature tracks about policy minutiae, from the size of the divorce bill to what happens to mobile phone roaming charges once the U.K. leaves.

The final outcome is almost as uncertain as Brexit itself. How the project develops will, in part, depend on the reaction it receives. Herbert wants the Brexit Big Band to play shows in Britain’s Leave-voting heartlands, but its main focus will be on touring the Continent using local musicians and choirs.

The band recently made an appearance at the Montreux Jazz Festival and is booking shows in Germany, Greece, Poland, Portugal, Spain and Sweden. Ideally, Herbert wants to take the project into the heart of the EU itself and is angling for an invitation from the European Commission to play in its building. (In any case, he’ll be hitting Brussels in January.)

Turning anger into song

It would be easy, of course, to dismiss the project as self-indulgent — a consolation to Remain supporters to reassure them that Brexit hasn’t changed who they are or what Britain is, and an outlet to moan about those they hold responsible (the Barbican performance involved a track in which the ripping up of hundreds of copies of the Daily Mail, the U.K.’s notorious pro-Brexit tabloid, created the song’s drum beat — a sight met with laughter and cheers in the audience).

At least one early review also criticized Herbert for making gentle lounge jazz rather than filling his songs with the anger that clearly motivates him. This point clearly rankles. Lyrically the show couldn’t be more angry, Herbert counters, though he concedes some of that anger may be lost in the performance’s fairground-like feel.

“The music is about seduction … trying to seduce audiences towards a story they wouldn’t normally want to hear in the context of a night out,” Herbert later writes in an email. “My anger toward the injustice of it all is laced through the whole thing from top to bottom.”

But you can’t sustain a revolution with anger — you need optimistic action, and that’s what the band is doing by reaching out across the Continent, he says.

Despite the controversy that’s sure to surround the performances, there’s no denying Herbert has stepped out on a limb in a way others haven’t. The show also makes Brexit fun, moving and occasionally even funny.

At the Barbican, Herbert left a piece on paper on every audience member’s seat and asked them to write a message addressed to Europe, then toss it onto the stage as the band played its final song. It was a riotous few minutes as hundreds of paper planes flew through the air, turning the most adult of concert halls into a children’s party.

Herbert, smiling broadly, picked up a couple of the planes at his feet and read out the messages. “To the people of Europe, I’m sorry,” went the first. “I like your cheese and wine,” went the second.

Alex Marshall is a freelance journalist based in London.

Source: Pitchfork

Matthew Herbert‘s restless experimentalism has led him to create music that’s ranged from house to pop to big band to something bordering on noise. In 2012, he told Pitchfork about the particular songs, albums, and artists that have marked his life, five years at a time.

Age 5

Kraftwerk: “The Model”

I grew up in a little rural English village called Five Oak Green. There was one shop and it just sold milk, so I led a pretty isolated existence. I had quite a strict Methodist upbringing; I probably didn’t go to a nightclub until I was 17. For me, music was a little window into an alternative world. And when your diet is mainstream music, you become very receptive to anything that deviates from that.

I was five in 1977. It seems like another world now. I grew up without a TV, so I was listening to an awful lot of radio, recording things with cassettes and putting the songs in some kind of order. It’s going to sound like I’m a wanker, but I was listening to “The Model” by Kraftwerk at five – I know that sounds like the coolest answer possible, but it was a big hit record over here. It was getting heavy rotation on the radio. In my own defense, I didn’t know the song was by Kraftwerk until four years ago.

Age 10

Tom Waits: “Step Right Up”

In the early 80s, my mom was a teacher, and the dreadful Margaret Thatcher was destroying the teaching profession, so it was a pretty hard time for us. There was a sense of politics that I really appreciated in Tom Waits’ music. It was something I had a direct relationship to. The Beatles and stuff like that was fun and good, but it wasn’t rooted in an experience that was familiar to me. It might’ve been because I was this slightly over-earnest, Methodist nerd at that point.

So this radio DJ called Annie Nightingale played Tom Waits’ “Step Right Up”, which is the most fantastic piss-take of advertising and marketing. It’s pretty extraordinary that advertising has massively increased in terms of its hijacking of public space. The music industry is basically funded by advertising now. There’s a sponsor for every gig, and if it’s a festival, it might be 20 sponsors. There’s logos around the stage, and on tickets, and on the bus that takes you from the hotel to the stage. It’s all funded by corporate money. As an artist, you receive minuscule sums of money from YouTube and Spotify, but you get a little bit of a share in advertising. Bands that are just starting are looking to get their music on advertisements, because you can earn more off one advert than from selling records for five years. I’m artistically and politically utterly against that whole principal. It’s the fundamental fracture between the message and the music.

I’d written a very tricky piece of music that took me a couple of years to record, with a lot of different singers and I got offered a very large sum of money, which, with repeat licenses, would have gotten me about two million pounds over a 10-year period. But it was for shampoo. Fundamentally, taking the deal would have made me look like a liar, because I’d be saying this song was about something important to me, about a particular time in my life… and it also happens to apply to dirty hair as well. [laughs] It doesn’t make any sense.

“Our local policeman was a sweet, nice man, and the idea of shouting, “Fuck the police!” at him seemed so totally absurd.”

Age 15

De La Soul: 3 Feet High and Rising

This was when hip-hop made it over to my little corner of England. Hearing N.W.A.’s “Fuck Tha Police” for the first time was extraordinary, because our local policeman used to live up the road and would knock on the door occasionally and tell us that our tax disc was due to run out on our car, and that maybe we should think about renewing it soon. We’d make him a cup of tea and have a slice of cake. He was a sweet man, and the idea of shouting, “Fuck the police!” at him seemed so totally absurd. Almost at the same time, I heard 3 Feet High and Rising, which was all ranting about bling: put the gold away, take off your jewelry, take off your sneakers. It seems extraordinary to me that things got worse after that in terms of hip-hop and its love of bling and extravagance. It’s worrying that there hasn’t really been any coherent equivalent to De La Soul’s position 20 years later, when that position is needed more than ever.

I was standing on a roof on September 11 and watching the buildings collapse. We had a gig that day at the Knitting Factory. I remember standing on the roof thinking, “Wow, this is going to change hip-hop forever,” the representation of an entire city in such a dramatic and violent way. In some part of me there’s still an element of disappointment, that it was difficult to trace that representation in the music.

Age 20

Robin S: “Show Me Love”

I was at my second year at university, living the house-music dream. It was the time of the free party movement, which was a classless kind of event where you had rich farmers’ sons giving up their land so people could throw parties. There were travelers and university students as well as a couple of hooligans that would normally be out stabbing people. A real hodge-podge. You’d just turn up, and someone would hook up a sound system. It was democratically worked out who was going to DJ when. It was unbelievable. Those days were a bit of a haze, but “Show Me Love” was just everywhere. It didn’t really come out as a single until the free party movement had been banned, and we all had to go back inside, but that’s still one of my favorite bits of club music. I bust it out from time to time when I still DJ.

Age 25

Model 500: “Be Brave”

In 1997, I’d moved out to London. That was the year Tony Blair got elected. It was a pretty amazing time, because it was the end of years of Tory government. We had a sense of optimism. Little did we know what Blair was going to become. Maybe he was always that, and we just didn’t stop it.

I was discovering more Detroit techno at that phase. There’s a great lost Model 500 album that came out at that time, which I totally loved. It was an alcohol-fueled celebration. I’d met Björk by that time and started to work with her. Things were really picking up with my music. I was doing film work, too. It was one of those points where I couldn’t believe that, suddenly, someone was paying me money to fly to Canada and play records. It was a bit weird.

It was also the beginning of the internet starting up. You’d get phone calls saying, “We’ll offer you 50,000 pounds for digital rights to your records for three years.” They thought digital was going to be so big. There would be these shiny new offices of some internet company you’ve never heard of that was selling digital music to nobody and paying artists thousands of pounds. A friend of mine got offered 130,000 pounds for their digital rights. They signed up, and a week later the company went bust and they got all of their rights back. He didn’t get to keep the check. It was a very bittersweet time; I feel like it was the root of a lot of what is wrong with today, but there was a naive authenticity to it all, too.

Age 30

Keith Jarrett: The Melody At Night, With You

I’d bought my own house by this time. I got married in 2003 [to former collaborator Dani Siciliano], which didn’t last long, but it was OK. I was feeling quite lucky to be in that position: owning my own house and releasing my own records and having my own record label and being in control of my own copyrights. I’d spent the last couple of years with Phil Parnell, my piano player that played on parts of Bodily Functions. We had a deal three years prior: I’d teach him about electronics if he’d teach me about jazz. So by 2002, I was listening to a lot of jazz.

As I get older, I listened to less and less. Now, I basically listen to one record: Keith Jarrett’s The Melody at Night, With You. It feels like the purest expression of music I’ve ever heard. I immersed myself entirely in it in 2002. After being in a lot of noisy places every weekend, sometimes you just want music to be quiet and restful when you get home.

Age 35

2012 was the birth of my first child. He was born two months early, and he and my wife both nearly died. So he was in the hospital for the first eight weeks of his life. It was pretty forlorn. That shaped that whole year and everything subsequently. Having survived it all and come out the other end was a really great experience, but at the time it was horrible. It just felt like a year of sorrow, one of those things when you find your whole life completely turned upside down. Children have a habit of doing that– it makes you question all sorts of things.

Update: What’s wrong with music today

“I’m artistically and politically utterly against how the music industry is basically funded by advertising now. It’s the fundamental fracture between the message and the music.”

I still feel that there is too much music in the world. I’m not convinced that we need to make any more music. I read this statistic that said 75% of music on iTunes has never been downloaded once. It’s depressing, but it also makes you think that we should stop making music until we listen to it all, and then we should start again. We’re in a bit of a muddle about the function of music, and why we’re making it, and what we expect from our music. I mean, surely, everything has been said about love already by now. Presumably everything has been said about war already. It feels like people think they have a right to make music or express themselves in a certain way. I think you have a right to express yourself, but I don’t necessarily think that there’s automatically a right that people should be expected to listen.

Example 1: Moby – Why Does My Heart Feel So Bad?

No other record of recent times exemplifies the role that advertising now plays in disseminating music, and how musicians now deliberately attach their work to products to be able to make money and promote themselves. We always think of political music as being of the left, but this is the most political work I can think of from the last 20 years, and it’s crudely capitalistic. The fact that it’s a white male using black (often female) voices is equally vital to the criticism that the record and its subsequent commercial exploitation is a pungent expression of a distilled, modern neoliberalism.

Example 2: Charlie Puth feat Meghan Trainor – Marvin Gaye

Now that even oil companies are accepting of climate change, the status quo of constant growth and consumption becomes an extremely dangerous state. Seen through this prism, then, in its wilfully naive insularity, this song is toxic waste. Not all music needs to be deadly serious, or try to change the world or smash capitalism, but with the ridiculous pastiche of the 50s – both musically and in the video – you can’t escape the feeling that shit like this is made by the CIA to push the idea that Americana is still on top, and that we shouldn’t take anything too seriously. Everyone involved in making this record should get a minimum of three points on their entertainment licence. The fact that the top 10 is overrun with this painfully comfortable but overly-sexual fluff ironically feels infantilising for producer and audience alike, and is the witting soundtrack to economic and ecological collapse. What’s going on?

Matthew Herbert’s notes for the Brexit Big Band’s performance at London’s Barbican on 23 October 2017

This show was originally designed to tour Europe as a kind of ‘goodbye and thank you’ party and we’ve done a few shows abroad already, but it’s been repurposed a little for tonight. It is part of a much bigger protect that started when Theresa May triggered Article 50 and will culminate in an album released in March 2019 when the UK is due to leave the EU.

The proiect itself is attempting to live, rather than just talk about some of the values that I have always taken to be critical to our collective wellbeing and survival: the warmth of compassion, the fizz of collaborative creativity, the prioritising of tolerance and love over hate and violence.

Since the Brexit campaign began, these values seem to be increasingly under vicious attack from a variety of powerful, mainly male, voices. Shortly after the result was announced it became clear to me that I had to do something musically that sought to keep the line of cultural communication open with the citizens and institutions of European countries that had not only welcomed me so generously over the years, but changed my life and that of so many people I know, for good.

The process of making the record then, is a giant collaboration with foreign big band musicians and choirs. We will take a few key musicians to as many European countries as we can, to work with a big band and as many local singers as we can get to each of the sessions. We will then spend a day in workshops and rehearsals, a day recording new music and finally a concert.

The resulting album will be made up of all these different recordings eventually hoping to capture the work of over 2000 musicians and singers. In some ways it hopes to be the exact opposite of Brexit. To that end we have also set up the Brexit Sound Swap to allow anyone to collect and exchange noises with others for free. Some of those sounds are in the show tonight.

As for the Westminster politics of Brexit, it all seems incredibly bleak at the moment. I have no confidence in this government. I’ve also no tolerance for the hypocrisy of unaccountable billionaire press barons who don’t live in this country, who don’t pay tax here, telling provocative, divisive stories about what it means to be British that are rarely true, kind or necessary.

I’m fed up reading about who this country’s chief diplomat has insulted this time. it’s hard to look at the mechanics of leaving the EU at the moment and think that it’s going well for the UK or indeed that the government is representing the broad spectrum of opinion within the population rather than small factions of the Comervative establishment.

It’s hard not to see them as out of control, out of their depth,and out of ideas. There is no clear viable vision articulated by the government as to what this country stands for either today or in March 2019. The ill-judged referendum proposed by David Cameron was the wrong question at the wrong time and as a consequence it created the wrong answer. It is the wrong answer in this context because there was never any plan. There is still no plan. There are legitimate reasons to leave the EU, but you don’t dismantle people’s lives without first working out how to put them back together again. You don’t rewrite the rules of British governance without first publishing researched studies on the impact of such decisions. You don’t trigger Article 50 and then call an election. You don’t ignore the narrowness of the result of the referendum, or the lives of the EU nationals who have been living and working here for many years. It’s a disgraceful mess and considering the amount of money it’s costing each of us, we deserve to be listened to.

This concert then is the start of our own plan. It doesn’t matter if you voted leave or remain, it’s a plan that tolerates dissent, but prioritises collaboration. It’s a plan that prioritises joy over misery. It’s a plan that tries to show that so much good in the world comes from opening your door a little wider rather than adding another lock. As part of this plan maybe we could measure the success of a nation not just on the metrics of a failing economic system, but on how many new things it learned today, or how many people met someone from another culture for the first time, or how many people could aftord a holiday from their wages, or how many people walked instead of drove, or how many women were promoted at work, or how much extra time people spent with their family that week, or played an instrument, or tried a new flavour in their food, or visited an elderly person living on their own.

The failings or otherwise of the EU is rarely at the top of the priorities list of many British citizens. The many repercussions from the current, profoundly exploitative and violent, white-men-first hegemony on the other hand…

Amongst all of this Brexit noise is the greatest threat we have ever faced as humans, that of climate change. At a point when we should be pulling together, we are choosing to set ourselves apart. In his book Sapiens, Yuval Noah Harari argues that the human imagination and its ability to tell stories was right at the forefront of our evolutionary processes. Tonight is supposed to be a celebration of the capacity of music to remind us that we are bound together by something profound, something invisible.

Whether we like it or not.

So we may as well stand and sing ourselves a better future.

And if you want to sing along with Shelley’s words:

Men of England, wherefore plough
For the lords who lay ye low?
Wherefore weave with tail and care
The rich robes your tyrants wear?

chorus:
women of england!
men of england!

Wherefore feed and clothe and save
From the cradle to the grave
Those ungrateful drones who would
Drain your sweat-nay, drink your blood?

Wherefore, Bees of England, forge
Many a weapon, chain, and scourge,
That these stingless drones may spoil
The forced produce of your toil?

Have ye leisure, comfort, calm,
Shelter, food, love’s gentle balm?
Or what is if ye buy so dear
With your pain and with your fear?

The seed ye saw, another reaps;
The wealth ye find, another keeps;
The robes ye weave, another wears;
The arms ye forge, another bears.

Sow seed-but let no tyrant reap:
Find wealth-let no imposter heap:
Weave robes-let not the idle wear:
Forge arms-in your detence to bear.

Shrink to your cellars, holes, and cells-
In hall ye deck another dwells.
Why shake the chains ye wrought? Ye see
The steel ye tempered glance on ye.

With plough and spade and hoe and loom
Trace your grave and build your tomb
And weave your winding-sheet-till fair
England be your Sepulchre.

Source: matthewherbert.com

Following a Daily Mail attack on the Brexit Big Band, band leader Matthew Herbert clears up some misconceptions.

Following a variety of news stories about the Matthew Herbert’s Brexit Big Band project, I feel I should respond.

Most importantly, this is not an anti-Brexit project. This is a project that, having accepted Brexit will occur, attempts to work out what a new kind of relationship with our European neighbours may look like. That relationship I believe should be founded on respect, curiosity, creativity, empathy, collaboration and love. I am unclear which of those ideals are controversial.

This project is not simply one person’s vision or pet project; it has already had contributions from over 1000 people from here and from all over the world who think those values are worth nurturing.

One of the things I value most about this country is its tolerance for dissent and, having performed with my big band in places such as Syria, China and Russia, I feel like the project is representing some of the very best things about Britishness abroad whilst at the same time providing hundreds of people with jobs or income in the creative industries – one of Britain’s biggest and most respected exports.

Having recently successfully applied to the BPI for part of a grant to assist with exporting British music abroad, some of the musicians fees will be covered by this. None of it is a wage or money to me. According to the BPI website every £1 they invest brings a return of £10 so it is clear that they consider this an investment rather than a subsidy.

The state subsidises many things in this country, including a lot I don’t agree with: wars in the middle east, the arms trade, processed food manufacturers, giant american tech companies who avoid tax, the DUP, fossil fuel companies and so on. If parts of our democracy can’t cope with an industry body supporting musicians in trying to bring ideas of tolerance and hopefully even some joy to others then maybe we’re in worse shape than I thought.

I reserve my democratic right to hold the government accountable in public and to propose an alternative comment that reflects what I believe to be important British values such as inclusiveness and kindness. I created this project to be part of the conversation with ourselves and with Europe about what it means to be British post-Brexit. This and any plan should aim to bring people of all identities and beliefs with it. I reject the forced distinction between Remainers and Leavers, and all are welcome to contribute or be part of the show. It’s up to others whether they wish to be part of this expression of common values or not.

Matthew Herbert, November 2017

Electronic musician, band leader, dj, composer, producer, Matthew Herbert’s selects his political music playlist.

Source: The Guardian

Tom Waits – Step Right Up

I first heard this on the Annie Nightingale show at some point in the early 80s. Her show came immediately after the Top 40 on Radio 1 and it was a shock to hear such an engaged political position after the shiny pop stuff like Belinda Carlisle. It’s amazing there isn’t a similar, well-known track like this around these days when we need it most. Instead, we get Billionaire by Bruno Mars – a political gesture of a different kind.

Moby – Why Does My Heart Feel So Bad?

No other record of recent times exemplifies the role that advertising now plays in disseminating music, and how musicians now deliberately attach their work to products to be able to make money and promote themselves. We always think of political music as being of the left, but this is the most political work I can think of from the last 20 years, and it’s crudely capitalistic. The fact that it’s a white male using black (often female) voices is equally vital to the criticism that the record and its subsequent commercial exploitation is a pungent expression of a distilled, modern neoliberalism.

Labi Siffre – Lose Myself in You

An unsung hero of British music who struggled to bring his brilliant songwriting to the mainstream after being dropped by labels for his refusal to stay quiet about being gay. Record companies are as much to blame for censorship as radio stations, not only of political music but of music and ideas that don’t fit the status quo. He did have a hit with (Something Inside) So Strong, which is typical of his emotional, moral perspective, but not representative of the invention and clarity that characterises much of his best songwriting from the early 70s. One assumes that nowadays the music industry is more tolerant of difference and variation, but with such corporate structures and a business model in choppy waters, genuine risks are still rarely taken, resulting in a blur of conservative conformity.

Billy Bragg – Levi Stubbs’ Tears

Nearly all of Bragg’s albums from the 80s were a vital part of my political musical puberty. The shock of seeing the notice on the front of Workers Playtime in Our Price that said “Capitalism is killing music – pay no more than £4.99 for this record” is still with me. There is a maleness to the bloke-plus-guitar instrumentation that has become a standard shorthand for authenticity that I’m less enamoured with, but he’s a brilliant poet and melody writer, and his songs introduced me to all sorts of political ideas – from the importance of collective action, to Robert Oppenheimer, to the mess of Mao.

NWA – Fuck Tha Police

I grew up on a small estate in a village in the country with no TV and church every week. The policeman lived over the road and occasionally came for tea. The shock, then, of hearing someone say “Fuck Tha Police” was profound: hardly subtle, but then injustice itself rarely is. Later, I realised Public Enemy were more on the money politically, but there was a crucial sense of place that was an eyeopener here. Compton wasn’t just a country, an area or even a city: it was a county. That sense of identity located in a precise place was something that again was at odds with my understanding of which stories music usually carried. However conflicted some of NWA’s messages were, there was still a tangible sense that these were voices rarely heard – and that felt electric at the time.

Charlie Puth feat Meghan Trainor – Marvin Gaye

Now that even oil companies are accepting of climate change, the status quo of constant growth and consumption becomes an extremely dangerous state. Seen through this prism, then, in its wilfully naive insularity, this song is toxic waste. Not all music needs to be deadly serious, or try to change the world or smash capitalism, but with the ridiculous pastiche of the 50s – both musically and in the video – you can’t escape the feeling that shit like this is made by the CIA to push the idea that Americana is still on top, and that we shouldn’t take anything too seriously. Everyone involved in making this record should get a minimum of three points on their entertainment licence. The fact that the top 10 is overrun with this painfully comfortable but overly-sexual fluff ironically feels infantilising for producer and audience alike, and is the witting soundtrack to economic and ecological collapse. What’s going on?

Source: matthewherbert.com

Matthew Herbert’s range of innovative work extends from numerous albums, Ivor Novello nominated film scores as well as music for Broadway and TV. He has performed solo, as a DJ, with his big band, and with musicians as diverse as Bjork and Dizzee Rascal.

Matthew Herbert’s personal contract

This is a template for my own work and not intended to be a definitive formula for writing music, either by me or by other people.

1. The use of sounds that exist already is not allowed. Subject to article 2. In particular:
   • No drum machines.
   • No synthesizers.
   • No presets.
2. Only sounds that are generated at the start of the compositional process or taken from the artist’s own previously unused archive are available for sampling.
3. The sampling of other people’s music is strictly forbidden.
4. No replication of traditional acoustic instruments is allowed where the financial and physical possibility of using the real ones exists.
5. The inclusion, development, propagation, existence, replication, acknowledgement, rights, patterns and beauty of what are commonly known as accidents, is encouraged. Furthermore, they have equal rights within the composition as deliberate, conscious, or premeditated compositional actions or decisions.
6. The mixing desk is not to be reset before the start of a new track in order to apply a random eq and fx setting across the new sounds. Once the ordering and recording of new music has begun, the desk may be used as normal.
7. All fx settings must be edited: no factory preset or pre-programmed patches are allowed.
8. Samples themselves are not to be truncated from the rear. Revealing parts of the recording are invariably stored there.
9. A notation of sounds used to be taken and made public.
10. A list of technical equipment used to be made public.
11. Optional: Remixes should be completed using only the sounds provided by the original artist.

Matthew Herbert (2005), revisited 2011