by Benji Heywood (@benjiheywood)
Good luck putting Beak> in a box. The bizarro synth rock band is the alchemy of Bristol-based trio Geoff Barrow, Billy Fuller, and Will Young, whose music sounds fit for warped musicals and long-lost sci-fi films. Or, as they’d insist, just three guys playing music without expectation.
I’m not sure that’s entirely true. The band is extremely intentional, not only in how their music sounds but also in the way it’s presented. The band’s latest album, their fourth, cheekily titled >>>>, was released by Temporary Residence and Invada Records without advance notice, eschewing the now-standard industry practice of six-month album rollouts. But Beak>’s no-fucks-given attitude isn’t disingenuous, either.
Speaking with drummer, vocalist and songwriter Geoff Barrow, one gets the sense Beak> is a band made of music nerds weathering a relentless storm of outside expectation. Barrow’s day job as a successful film score composer, whose work with collaborator Ben Salisbury includes the recently released Alex Garland film Civil War, and his work in the genre-defining juggernaut Portishead, necessitate that Beak> remain a haven from the demands of the commercial music industry.
Yet as much as Barrow is wary of participating in the corporate machine, he admits the band’s wiliness at rock festivals to shut up and play the hits in part contributed to Beak>’s desire to return to a simpler time. One where he and his bandmates would explore the left-of-center oblong of pop and prog’s Venn Diagram before hitting the pub for a few laughs and a pint.
Case in point: their new album. If you’ve never listened to Beak>, >>>> is an ideal introduction. It’s a showcase of Barrow’s idiosyncratic vision of music—part psych, part prog, all strange. The album, which Fuller, Young, and Barrow wrote together, carries an exciting air of improvisation, even while it’s clear that the music is painstakingly deliberate.
Contrary to his prickly reputation, possibly attributable to his now-defunct Twitter presence, I found Barrow to be convivial and open, quick to laugh, comfortable in self-depreciation, if occasionally biting in his wit. What follows is our free-ranging conversation, lightly edited for clarity, about all things Beak> and how Barrow’s experiences in the music industry shaped one of music’s most unusual bands.
credit: Hollin Jones
Geoff Barrow: Sorry, mate, you just get me. Bill has no reception and Will is just, well… he’s just an asshole [laughs]. No, he’s got two little girls and things can get a bit chaotic… But he’s also an asshole.
Post-Trash: Totally get it. Should we just launch into it?
GB: Crack on.
PT: Working off the press release from the new album, you said you wanted it to be listened to in its entirety—no singles beforehand, etc. Was the album written as one cohesive piece of music or was it written in pieces then assembled over time?
GB: We assembled it over a long period of time. I’m trying to think. It’s strange because it was more about whether (a song) fit the mood of the album, its ebb and flow, rather than the song itself having to work. Take a song like “Secrets.” I didn’t want that on the album. It’s not on the vinyl release. But Bill and Will really liked it and I got outvoted—in a fun way, not a serious way. But, yeah, as a piece of work I didn’t really dig it and still don’t. But that’s democracy, man.
PT: That one stuck out to me as being the only song built around a drum machine.
GB: (“Secrets” not making the album) has nothing to do with the production of it. It’s just more to do with the vibe. It’s an unfulfilled pop song and I just felt awkward with it. I thought that as the poppiest thing on the album that if we’re not in control of certain things, people would hear “Secrets” and then really go for it. I'm nervous about that, because I don't know how many records I got left in me.
PT: Your concern was, someone might hear “Secrets” and then when they listen to the rest of the album, be like, what the hell is this?
GB: Yeah, absolutely. It’s like, a band has a certain vibe on an album that you really dig then you expect that band to keep on that vibe.
[Bill unexpectedly drops into the call, but his connection is poor.]
Bill! I was just telling Benji –
Bill: —how you wrote all the songs and me and Will did nothing?
GB: [laughs] No, how much I dislike “Secrets,” mate, but how I totally understand why it’s on the album. [To me] We started talking about the album as a mood album and what happened was, we always record at Invada (Barrow’s studio in Bristol), but now we have things in our lives like work and kids and it made it kinda difficult for us to concentrate. So, we did the rock and roll thing and hired a farm in the north of Wales, went out there for a week with an engineer and a friend who makes great black bean burritos, and recorded. Two tracks from (the Wales sessions) made it, “Secrets” and “Strawberry Line.”
[Bill’s connection is lost and does not return. We soldier on!]
PT: You’ve said that “Strawberry Line” is a tribute to your dog, Alfie. The song has real elegiac vibe to it, so I have to ask. Is Alfie okay?
GB: He’s dead!
PT: Oh, I’m so sorry.
GB: No, it’s alright. Alfie was 16 and we’d had him for a long time. He was a rescue and became part of the band. He’d be at sessions and in the studio. He was great, a rough ass little terrier. He appeared on the back cover of the third album with our other dog, Nelly, when we were wearing our weird suits. It was like, why didn't Alfie appear before that, you know? So, it just totally made sense when he passed away to put Alfie on the cover as a tribute.
PT: “Strawberry Line” is beautiful. The chord progression. How the drums and arpeggiator fade in. I can see how the mood informed the album. What did you work on next?
GB: We worked on other stuff (in Wales), bits and bobs, but nothing really worked out. There was a track called “In the Way” that might get some airing at some point but didn’t suit the album that well. It’s weird you saying that (“Strawberry Line” sounds elegiac). What happens in Beak> is I’ll sing a melody while we write the song, but lyrically I won’t know where to go. With “Strawberry Line,” possibly for the first time as a songwriter—which I’ve never considered myself to be—I wrote something that deeply affected me. I mean, I’ve written about war and English classness, but never on a personal level.
PT: Yet there’s so much emotionality to Beak>’s music.
GB: I’ve always had a fascination with musicals like Hair or Age of Aquarius. We used to cover “Let the Sunshine In” and I just loved singing it. The emotional side of Beak> has always been quite weird, it’s kind of theatrical, kind of John Carpenter, Ennio Morricone, soundtrack stuff, with all these harmonies inspired by musicals.
PT: I can definitely hear that on a track like “Hungry Are We.”
GB: We really like the theme song from M.A.S.H. (“Suicide Is Painless”). Can you believe the kid wrote that when he was like, fourteen or something? I think that’s one of the most perfect songs ever written. It’s personal but it’s not. Because of the harmonies you get that distance, like with a singing group or in church. It’s interesting because it all ties in. It's not until this record that I've really felt confident enough to really be a singer.
PT: Did you grow up going to church?
GB: I lived in this little village and I was in the choir and had to go to Sunday School. We sang at church with the other village children, and it was all very weird. We had to wear a smock and I think we got, like, 75 P from my parents if we did a wedding. Our house was right next to the church, so I could never escape. The Sunday School teacher would walk past our house and call out “Are Geoffrey and Sarah coming to Sunday School?” and I was like, “oh no!” But, like, it gave mom and dad a chance to shag on a Sunday morning, which was the real reason why they were paying us, it wasn’t a religious thing (laughs).
PT: I wanna go back to what you said before, that this is the first album you’ve felt like a singer. What’s changed?
GB: Just confidence, really. I think playing lots and lots and lots of festivals, and, and having a laugh and chatting to the audience like we do and singing and being able to sing in harmony under really stressful scenarios without being able to hear yourself. Maybe it’s more being confident in the sound of your own voice, even if it’s drowned in effects.
PT: It’s interesting you say playing live provided that confidence because you also said playing all those shows made Beak> lose its identity as a band. Do you want to expand on how those two disparate consequences interconnect?
GB: Every band knows that when they go out and play, it’s a performance. Beak> started as a band with three people who didn’t know each other—we liked each other but we didn’t know each other—just going into a room and making noise without any expectation at all. Let’s make some music then go to the pub without any thoughts of doing anything with it. But then we started playing festivals and it got to a point where we were playing Europe and the United States. We showed up for the first gig and there was a sandwich board out front that just read “Portishead” and “Massive Attack” and I was like, ah man, this is not what I should be doing. I get it, the promoter is trying to get people into the show. But here was this thing, we were just making noise, no song structure, there was no way it was ever going to be on the radio, it was total freedom.
PT: So, the negatives of playing live were more pressure, more expectations?
GB: You set up at festival and you have 40 minutes, so you pretty much just play the bangers and maybe one slower tune. It got to the point that we knew we could go to any festival and compete with loud rock music, play our tunes, have a laugh and take the piss and hopefully people like it. We’re a weird band, we’re not smoke and mirrors, with leather jackets on pretending we’re cool. We’re old! We don’t give a fuck. But we want people to have a good time. Caring about that is the exact opposite from where Beak> started. It felt wrong to have those gigs inform our next record.
PT: How were you able to deconstruct that festival mindset and get back to your original vibe of playing with no expectations?
GB: We slowed things down. Instead of, bang, play the hits, next band, bang, play the hits, we took a more emotional approach than straight-up synthesized rock or prog or whatever. Just three blokes in a room. It’s not the same as the original album, it was never going to be the same.
PT: For the upcoming shows, you’re going to play the record front to back in its entirety, no?
GB: We’re gonna try. Going out and playing this album live will be a lot scarier than playing our festival set. Unless it’s a specific arts festival where we’re playing between someone with a jet engine and a laptop and a dentist drilling teeth, Beak> is always going to be a bit of a weird fit.
PT: Your concern being that the festival setting isn’t conducive to the album’s emotionality, it’s intimacy
GB: Exactly.
PT: The album sounds like it was recorded precisely to capture that intimacy, everything recorded at very low volume, like you’re just barely tapping the drums.
GB: Everything I’ve ever done has been recoded (at low volume). It’s really, really rare for me to hit the drums hard. At all. I never really have. From the start of Portishead until now, I realized the sound of drums that I like were never ones that were hit really hard. Coming from the sample world, and drums supposedly being my specialty, I spent my youth analyzing drummers’ techniques and sound. Then working with a great drummer like Clive Deamer (Portishead, Radiohead, Jeff Beck)—I recently broke my ankle and he came in and played on a BBC Radio session. It was really great to play with him again. He’s such an amazing drummer.
PT: I want to ask about some specific sounds. “Bloody Miles” sounds like two different songs in one with the first half reminding me of the score you did for the film Men and the second sounding more like a Beak> song. Was there anything on the new album that was originally planned for something else?
GB: You’re basically right. The beginning of “Bloody Miles” was written for a Mexican political documentary we’d just done which we were working on at the same time ( as >>>>). When we put “Bloody Miles” together it just didn’t seem right in its own standalone universe. There needed to be something before it so it was like, hey go get that track (that didn’t make the documentary). It’s like Can—not that we’re anywhere near them—but the way they used to record and take different parts from different sessions and splice them together. I always liked that idea. Then we did it and I was like, oh no. That’s really Can. [laughs] That’s over the line that musicians don’t like to step over, you know what I mean?
PT: Totally. There’s all sorts of legend surrounding the recording of progressive rock records. Like with (Talk Talk’s) Laughing Stock where none of the musicians knew what anyone else was playing and there's just the mad genius in the control room making everyone record alone in the dark or whatever.
GB: We’re trying to avoid any kind of standard-isms. People say we write by “jamming.” Jam to us is a dirty word. Jam is like, you know, getting your kicks off playing blues riffs. We play music together and hope it turns into a song. The other thing—I realized a long time ago that if you like a piece of music, you don’t really care how it was recorded. Those ancient blues records where you can hardly hear the music over the surface noise. It doesn’t matter! I mean, people will say it adds to it, the warmth and all that kind of bollocks. For me, Beak> is a band. It’s not an experiment or a project. It’s a real band with three people. If when you are recorded you can hear those three people, then it’s alright. I got tired of creating atmospheres. (With Portishead) everyone was talking about my production, so with Beak>, I wanted it to be anti-produced.
PT: I’m glad you brought this up. There’s an intentionality in the distance between the sound and the listener. So, if you're familiar with futurist architecture—when we look at these buildings built a hundred years ago, they look like they were built anticipating a future that never arrived. These buildings look both old, new and out of time, all at once, and that's what I feel when I listen to Beak>. That’s whatever your anti-producing is.
GB: Not to burst the bubble, but if you break down what Beak> does to what it really is, it’s dudes playing old instruments. The instruments are old so they have an old tone, and my drums are muffled. The bass is old and the bass rig the same, and the guitar—it's all old, right? So instantly you're playing something from the past. Then it's recorded in a room, which is a traditional recording room, or in a farmhouse that’s deadened. When we write, we try to avoid standard-isms in musicianship. So, if you’ve got old instruments and you’ve got people avoiding the blues, you’re gonna sound like this.
PT: And this has been the case since the beginning of Beak>?
GB: Julian Cope (legendary British post-punk musician) did some odd records on our label Invada. And he came in when Beak> was recording the first album and he called me afterward and said, “You’re avoiding all the blues notes! To make the best music, just avoid the blues notes” [laughs].
PT: It does seem to me that Beak> exists in opposition to all the projects the three of you have done in the past.
GB: Yeah. It was mainly me being involved in the marketing side of music. I was always heavily involved in the marketing of Portishead—not that it needed it—but just so the right people got to hear it. This was especially true on our last album, Third. We were signed to a major and I had to intervene and say, please don’t just put it in an envelope and send it to Coca-Cola Radio, ‘cuz they just won’t have a fucking clue. But by that point, the major industry was already dead. In retrospect, we should have been signed to an indie. So that’s the reason why we released this new Beak> album without any promo. If an album is there by a band you really like, that’s kinda all you need. It doesn't need to be judged by “industry insiders,” or what track works best for radio. And because we never expected that anyway, going back to where we were for the very beginning (felt right). We love the band, and it will be as small or as not as it will be. You know?
PT: How has this approach made you feel?
GB: It's a funny thing. I feel like I'm kind of at the end of my entire career in the music industry.
PT: Why do you feel that way?
GB: Because I look at a lot of young bands, and I think, Oh, they're brilliant, and I suppose I just want to do other stuff. I've got a huge interest in film, you know, and I’m making plans in that world. I wake up and I go, that’s what really excites me. Playing music doesn’t.
PT: Do you mind if I ask you a question about scoring? With Beak>, you're collaborating with two people in a room. Does scoring feel like a collaboration with the filmmaker? Like, I know you’ve done most everything Alex Garland has directed, Ex Machina, Devs, Annihilation, Civil War…
GB: We pulled away from doing Dread because they wanted a very different soundtrack and I’m a big Dread fan and I’m just like, nah, no.
PT: But most everything else. I’m curious how collaborating with a director is different than playing in a room with your bandmates.
GB: You’ve got to go down a different path, really. These film people have come to us specifically to help them make their film or TV show work. Some come to you because you did that other (film) and they want you to do what you did again. They aren’t looking for collaboration. With Alex it’s interesting because you work for him. But also, by now, hopefully he trusts us to know musically if something’s right. At the same time, we can believe something’s right musically and he can believe it’s not right for the film. That’s happened on many, many occasions because he’s got this vision in the back of his mind and we’re not quite there yet. You turn a corner you think is right, but Alex is like, actually, we thought we’d massively underplay that scene, and you have a big row about it, but of course, the next day, you realize he’s right. That’s genius filmmaking.
PT: Scoring films has always been part of your repertoire. Didn’t Portishead do a score? (To Kill a Dead Man, 1994)
GB: That was an ambitious move [laughs]. We’d heard people were getting 40 grand to make a video and we thought, we can make a film for that. Being into soundtracks, we thought, right, let’s make a film then we can score it. That was our main concern, the score not the film. The film’s really awful. People say all the time that it’s alright, but it’s not. For us, it didn’t matter. We get to score a film! I must admit, Adrian (Utley, guitarist in Portishead) was very pivotal (in scoring the film). He was very into film scores, and I had sampled film scores, and so we met on many different levels. It’s a bit like what we’ve done in Beak>. We’ve done Couple in a Hole (2015 arthouse film from director Tom Geens) and we’ve just done this Mexican documentary, which strangely enough, was the easiest score work I’ve ever done. I don’t know whether that’s because they understood the oddness and minimalism of Beak>, so when we do it, it’s just really natural. Or maybe it’s because there’s less money riding on it than a Netflix series or whatever.
PT: I think filmmakers are coming to you because of the sui generis nature of the music you make. Nothing sounds like Portishead. Nothing sounds like the scores you make. Frankly, nothing sounds like Beak>, the three of you playing in a room. I think that’s special.
GB: That’s good that you think that! We enjoy making it, especially now that we broke this album and got off the train. A lot of bands will know exactly what it’s like to get on the train. It's the train you want to get on but once you’re on you just can't get off. I see a lot of bands work really hard to get to where they are. They play all the festivals in the summer then they go on tour in the fall but everyone has already seen them at the festivals, so they have to make another record so that they can start the album cycle all over again. It’s fucking madness. I get it because it pays their mortgage, and bands like them are the lucky ones. Although I wonder at times if they really are the lucky ones. Maybe the ones who just go down to bar and play on a Friday night, pick up 40 quid and go like, there's that—they're the ones that have got it sorted. But you could never say that because people would go, “Easy for you to say because you fucking made it, you twat.”
PT: That reaction is indicative of a misunderstanding about the soul-sucking nature of prioritizing commerce above art. Whereas Beak> stepped outside that system, looked at it and said, nah, we’re fucking done with that.
GB: We were never part of it anyway. But what happens is, you get a song played on the radio and think, right, we need to write more songs that get played on the radio. I understand why because it means when you play that festival, your money goes up 2,000 quid. That’s basically it. Your money goes up 2,000 quid. I don’t want to be an asshole, but, like, that’s not the reason why I did it. It’s not the reason Beak> formed in the first place. So, we’ll go back to where we started, and if people don’t want to book us, then fine by me.
PT: One final question, Geoff. From talking to you today, it sounds like Beak> exists in opposition to all the projects the three of you were in before. So, the question is, would Beak> exist without Portishead?
GB: Yeah, no, absolutely not. But it’s the same with, like, personal relationships, isn’t it? You could be sitting in your new flat with your partner. How did you get there? Was it because of what happened with your previous partner? Your previous job? Why are you in this job? Why are you in this cinema? Why are you on holiday here? I’d like to think about the 16-year-old me, getting into music and playing in soft rock cover bands, I’d like to think I would have got here. Beak> was a way for me to tie all that up. Portishead was this fucking monstrosity that no one expected. There was a lot of pressure and a lot of breakdowns and a lot of good stuff. A lot, a lot of good stuff. Which I always have to be reminded about [laughs]. To tie it all up, the day we sat down and played with Beak>, I felt the same way that I did when I was 15 playing Marillion covers. It was about fun. It was about playing with no expectations. My trajectory was being that kid, then having a massive bump in the middle of whatever that was, then landing straight back on my drum stool, still being a pretty weird drummer. So, that was the fear. Beak> were never going to be massive. But it was growing, becoming more important for like, paying the mortgage, it’s like, nah. Not for me.
PT: I lied. I do have one more question. Is there a new dog in the picture?
GB: Yes, there is! We already had Nelly. She was found down a storm drain in Spain as a puppy. She’s eight now and really lovely, and recently we got Mad Frank. He’s a Puli Mudi cross. He lived in the woods for four years on his own in Hungary. So, when we got him, he'd never been upstairs before. He looked at the stairs and just went, what? I don't know what those are. He’s a lovely dog, and he’s doing exactly the same thing Alfie did, going around biting everyone, scaring the hell out of everyone (laughs).