From Sample to Sonic Boom

It could be said that England's premier instrumental hip-hop outfit, The Herbaliser, is actually two different groups - a studio group and a stage group. Of course, they're the same group, but the music's execution in the studio and on stage are very different things. The core of The Herbaliser's broad sound, enveloping the combined brain power and driving force of musician and producer Jake Wherry and DJ Ollie Teeba, a pair of songwriters whose love for hip-hop music and the soundtracks from films of the 1950s, '60s and '70s has produced music that's taken the electronic music scene by storm. The pair's body of studio work represents masterpiece after masterpiece of layered samples and drum loops; emotive passages of storytelling music that takes on a life of its own.
In the live setting, however, The Herbaliser is a grand eight-piece band, with Wherry on bass and Teeba on the turntables. The remaining members of the band are all funk and jazz pros, and as a result, the live recreation of the music breathes an almost tangible feel to the music, and opens up options that don't exist in the studio. The Herbaliser's latest release, Something Wicked This Way Comes, represents a blending of the two approaches to the music, employing more live instrumentation and vocals in unison with programmed beats and samples. According to The Herbaliser's Jake Wherry, it's all part of the band's continuing growth within the original vision.

This new album is a bit of a departure from previous work - though it's still very soundtrack-y, there is more of a live feel. How has The Herbaliser changed on Something Wicked?
We've kind of evolved in the sense that we started off just loving hip-hop and rather than not make any music because we didn't know any rappers, we started making instrumental beats. We always have been into soundtracks, people like Lalo Shifrin and Quincy Jones and John Barry, and we soon realized that when we were making these instrumental beats, we had to try keep people's interest in the instrumental songs, so we used the approach that they use in making soundtrack music, where you sort of change tempos so it can be exciting and have crescendos - make music that's not just loop after loop. We try to build arrangements and built them into the songs from the start. Since then, we've developed a live eight-piece band and we've toured all around the world and by the time we got to this album, we'd finally been able to improve our studio and get some decent recording gear so that we're able to capture the full-bodied sound of acoustic instruments, including flutes and strings and double basses and stuff. We'd had enough experience in working samples and for this album we had some really strong ideas and we needed the sound we want. I play some bass and guitar, but in the past most of our music has been made up of samples and I haven't felt the need [for live instruments] - whereas on this album, I play bass on every track and guitar and some keyboards.
We actually started off with a really strong concept on this album, because before we'd even made any music, Ollie said he liked the title Something Wicked This Way Comes - it's a Ray Bradbury novel and a movie, and of course that comes from William Shakespeare's MacBeth. It was just a really strong title to write songs to, because of the ambiguity of the word 'wicked' - it can be good and it can be really bad, evil. So there's that theme running through all the songs. A long time ago, we developed this technique where, when we made instrumental songs, we made them to be pieces of music to go in an imaginary film. We're very much into the chase scene and the love scene and the suspense scene, the tragic space movie or sci-fi movie. A lot of songs throughout all of our albums have been music for scenes in imaginary movies. And now that we've toured, we've gotten the chance to meet a lot of MCs, and now we really into working with rappers and doing the more conventional side of hip-hop as well.

When you started to incorporate more live instrumentation, how did you have to adjust the songwriting process?
Well, we don't record with a band in the traditional sense that we all set up our stuff and record it all in one go. Ollie and I still come into the studio, hook up some samples and spend a lot of time in record shops as well, so we're really into buying records, and very often we'll find something on a record that's really strong and that leads us in a direction. So we'll hook it up in the drum machine, add some live bass and some other live instruments and then at that point, we'll decide if it's going to be a rap song, or an instrumental and develop it accordingly. We never get the band all in the studio, we'll just get certain members in, one at a time. We'll give the beat to the horn section and they'll come up with some parts, and we'll record. We treat those recordings the same way we treat a sample, and so there are a lot of samples of the live band in there.

What determines whether it's going to be an instrumental or a rap tune?
Just how we feel about it, really. I mean, specifically on this album, we'd already to agreed to bring in certain MCs. For example, Rakaa from Dilated Peoples - Ollie has known him for four or five years, and him doing a track with us has always been talked about, so we know his style and we sort of tailor-made that beat on the new album for him. Same thing with Blade.

So is the music more production oriented than live band oriented?
Well, no because the live band has done 350-odd shows, and we're not the best band in the world, but there's certainly no other band that sounds like us. We've got this live eight-piece band, kind of a funk and big-band jazz band, but at the same time, we also play with a mini-disc that has elements from the studio that we've always felt necessary to have at our live performance. So the combination of beats and scratching and live music is very dynamic and there's nobody like us. I put the band together in the mid-'90s, a time when the festivals in Europe were starting to accommodate to dance music, but most of the dance acts that were performing at festivals were just standing behind a sequencer or a laptop and having visuals, there was nothing too live about it. I've been moved big time as a teenager, seeing James Brown, George Clinton, Bootsy Collins, to name but a few, so we decided yeah, fuck it, lets have a funk band, So we revived the funk band and rehearsed them up to the new Herbaliser stuff and it was a kind of a reaction to how cold the live dance music scene was. And now, seven years later, most groups who are doing dance music, when they play live, will try to put together some sort of semi-live thing with at least a percussionist or a drummer.
We're quite meat-and-potatoes about our band. We're all old-school musicians who will go to a cold hall and set up our stuff and play. We don't need lasers and visuals and stuff like that. If you're standing behind a laptop and you're fucking around and doing some new technology, to be honest, there's not much of a performance and you may need as much visual support as you can get. But our band just rocks it by playing our instruments. We give a solid, interesting performance as the instrumental band, and that's how we've become known.

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