It's high summer in Fountainstown, a beach village 20 minutes
from Cork city, and July is proving to be something less
than a swelter: sheets of apocalyptic rain fall from the
blackened skies, a nasty south-westerly is rippin' up from
the Azores and there is somehow an icy bite in the seaside
air. But inside a small quaint house overlooking the beach,
something discordantly lush and humidly tropical is pungently
a-brew.
Surrounded
by banks of space age recording equipment, hemmed in on
all sides by swanky keyboards, sophisticatedly humming computer
gizmos and assorted techie playthings, a man called Skully
is fiddling merrily with samplers and sequencers and gazing
good-naturedly at the deluge outside. "Well, there's a lot
of wetness that runs right through our story" he says. "A
lot of water and a lot of rain". Skully is a tall, gangly,
looming sort of character, mid-30's, kind of weather beaten.
You see him as the sort of fellow who might have only recently
crawled down from the side of a mountain in West Cork. You
wouldn't be so far out, as he hails from the town of Bantry,
a windswept ( and yes, very watery ) place on the verge
of the Beara peninsula.
Aïda, Skully's partner and collaborator, is somewhere
around her late 20's, born in the Ivory Coast and brought
up in France, all poise and composure and small elegant
gestures. She's very gorgeous. Together, they make up Métisse,
which means 'mixture' in French and it's probably as good
a coverall description of their music as you'll come up
with. It's a kind of organic electronica, a blend of pastoral
idyllic shades and smoothly sauntering melody lines, all
of it moulded with a shrewd technological nous.
When
it began to seep through about three years ago, it proved
the kind of music that would quickly ignite that terrible
inferno of music biz lust that is generally referred to
as an A&R frenzy. A small and tasteful Parisian label you've
never heard of was first off the mark, tabling a small deal,
but they were shunted back down the queue ( merde! ) when
Trevor Horn got to hear a Métisse tape, and sent
his label, the legendary ZTT, in with an offer. According
to various industry guesstimates, anywhere between six and
thirteen other labels became involved in the catfight. Eventually,
Métisse signed a deal with Sony Publishing and hammered
out a recording contract with Wildstar, an offshoot
of Telstar.
This
pincer movement of a development project has to date seen
a figure in the high, high six figures invested in the act.
They're getting the best of everything: the best studio
in the best recording house in London, the niftiest engineers,
the tastiest video-makers, personal security people, and
for the photo sessions, Rankin, the man who shoots
Madonna.
It's a quare size of a leap from just a couple of years
ago, when the pair were living in Bantry. " We were in the
grocery shop one day," recalls Skully " and there were actual
tears when we found that we didn't have the price of bread."
But the ink dried on the contracts and the bucks started
to roll in. Métisse relocated from Bantry to Fountainstown
because it was handier for Cork Airport, facilitating the
relay of agents and publishers and assorted industry gurus
who now arrive from London on an almost daily basis. The
house got kitted out with state-of-the-art recording equipment
("a happy day" - Skully) and work continued at pace. The
act's first single, 'Sousoundé', has just been released
in Ireland to test the waters and, next month, their debut
album gets an international launch.
Sitting
back in Fountainstown as the pair play back tracks from
the record, you can understand why. The music is very polished,
baroque and orchestral, very lush and velvety, with Aïda's
stunning voice colouring the tunes in a many-hued wash.
You could be cruel and say it's coffee-table-ambient-dance
-music-for-adults, songs for swinging mortgage holders.
It's very radio friendly, and it's just a little different,
what with Aida singing in French and English and a couple
of African dialects - Dioula, her mother's and Agni,
her father's. It's all pretty catchy, and kind of cute.
It certainly sounds as if it could sell a million. And so,
as the rain gossips viciously on the windowpane, and the
clouds thicken and squat on the deserted beach, we talk
about the way it all panned out. "I was about 14," says
Skully, "and I set up this band called Real Mayonnaize,
with me on keyboards. We were megastars around the northside
of Cork city and it was great fun, but we were kind of ropey.
This was the heyday of Microdisney and Burning
Embers and all that and we all hung out around Elm
Tree Studios. That was just its own little world. "The
first band split and I put together Chapterhouse
and that got a little further. We were the best new band
of '86 in Hot Press, there was airplay and TV and
we met a guy from Virgin but he signed Something
Happens instead and I gave up. I followed my heart and
went to Toulouse." Music was by now off the agenda. "I gave
it up completely. I started teaching English and enjoying
the sun. France was very different from Ireland then, it
wasn't in recession and I was living it up. I avoided music
completely, I didn't even listen to it. In the end, I didn't
touch a keyboard for nine years." So there was joy, there
was fun, there were seasons in the sun. But it couldn't
last. "I hit a low point in my life," says Skully, "I was
down and a friend came to me in Toulouse and said go back
to the music, give it a try. So I hauled the keyboard out
from under the bed, an old DX7, and I started doodling
onto a cassette machine and instantly, I was in love. That
was it. It wasn't going to be put away again."
Things
developed a little. Skully messed around with a reggae band
and then a close-harmony girl group ("great fun") but he
needed something to set his own music off. "I heard about
Aïda. She was singing with this cabaret and I tried to get
along to see her a couple of times but it never worked out.
Then one day I was sitting in a coffee shop looking out
the window and I saw this girl loading amps and speakers
into a car and I knew it had to be her. So I went up approached
her and said, "scuse me, you wouldn't by any chance be a
singer?" Eventually, she agreed to listen to some stuff
and I wrote some tracks specially. After a couple of weeks
of hassling her, and stalking her, basically, she agreed
to come up to the house." One thing led to another. Tapes
were sent out and things started to roll at quite a clip.
"For the first time in my life, I had record companies ringing
me, pestering me," says Skully. "It all seemed kind of unreal."
By this time a couple, Skully and Aïda decided that Toulouse
was just a shade too far removed from the main action (
this was pre-Air, pre-Daft Punk ) and they
hit the road for Bantry. "We gave up our lives in France,"
he says. "We packed everything into a van and took off in
the middle of the night to catch a ferry. We drove right
across France in lashing, pouring, awful rain, and we got
on the boat and crashed and the we woke up and looked out
and we were sailing past Cobh. It was just the most glorious
sunshine."
The meteorology aglimmer with happy portents, they set up
home and studio in Bantry and waited for a deal to be completed.
"After we turned down ZTT, there was a scarey couple of
months," says Skully. "We were broke and wondering if we'd
done the right thing. We were a bit shaky about the whole
business." Then Sony came through. "The guy came over from
Sony and we brought him up to Sheep Head in West Cork, drove
up there on the most wretched bloody awful night imaginable
- pouring, lashing, pouring rain - and we got out the contract
and the pencil and we signed it on the bonnet of the car."
All the while, the pair had continued recording and with
the move to the rugged splendour of County Cork, the music
started to subtly change. "It had to really, I suppose,"
says Skully. "Looking out the window at Bantry Bay while
you're recording, or down here, looking out at the beach
and ships rolling into the harbour, it has to have an effect.
But that doesn't mean it all went Celtic. Our music definitely
isn't that sort of Afro-Celt thing. Actually, when
you're away from Ireland, there's probably more of a temptation
to go down that diddley-aye road." Much of the preliminary
work for the album was recorded in Fountainstown before
an intensive period in the plush environs of London's Townhous
complex ("Studio A" - Skully ). All the vocals were put
down in Cork. " It's just so much more relaxed," says Aïda.
"In a big studio, everyones looking at you and talking to
you and moving around and because the songs are so intimate,
it's very difficult for me. But here it's quiet and dark.
"
"And it's just the two of us." Says Skully. "and it might
be four in the morning and we're talking to each other on
headphones and the ships are rolling in and out of the harbour
and the gas lamp is going." "And it'll usually start
with some music," says Aida. "and that might give an idea
for a line or a melody." By now, there are 37 tracks in
the can, currently being whittled down to ten or a dozen
for the record. Skully boffins together most of the music,
Aïda most of the lyrics. " It's all about how we live,"
she says. "and the people who are around us. Some of it
would be quite dark." Métisse first caused a stir in the
clubs, when remix icons FreqNasty, 4 Hero,
and DJ Cam reworked one of their tracks. It zoomed
to the top of the deejay charts and got hyped in the dance
mags. The band, however, see this element of their work
more as a side project. "It's very useful," says Aida. "That
kind of collaboration with people you never meet can send
you in all sorts of new directions, can give you so many
new ideas." But the album won't be a dancefloor thing. "
It's got more of a late night feel," says Skully. "We have
done some serious dance tracks but we have ballads too.
The technology allows us to do so much, we sample stuff
around the house. You can record the sound of a pepper-shaker
and with the equipment, you can give it emotion." Sometimes,
the music needs to be opened out and for one track, a song
about domestic abuse called 'My Fault', Métisse recorded
with the BBC Philharmonic Orchestra. "They
did a take of it and it was technically superb," says Skully.
" but it was kind of cold. So we went back in to them and
told them what the song was about and the second time, it
was unbelievable. It turned into a very emotional thing,
the double bass player was crying. It was a huge day for
us."
After
the album's release, Métisse will do a series of live shows
and they are confident of presenting something of a spectacle.
"We just want to do it right," says Skully. "We've all seen
the same stuff at gigs for so long, the same flashing lights
and the same two speakers in front of the stage. We want
people to leave our shows saying, 'well, that was different'.
The music is kind of cinematic so we'll synchronise images
with each track and the way we'll work it, I'll be in the
middle of the crowd with the keyboards while Aïda will be
alone on stage. So I'll be able to gauge the crowd's mood
and at the same time, they won't have to look at me! We'll
mess around with quadrophonic sound and we've been talking
with Macnas about getting involved and The Light
Surgeons and it seems to be coming together."
Right now, things are tensing up for Métisse as they await
the album's release. They will stay based in Fountainstown,
shuttling back and forth to th UK to take care of business.
Aïda is happy with the place, though she sometimes misses
French food and French sun. "Who could want more?" asks
Skully, his eyes pinned to the sodden beach. "We're looking
out to sea . . . making music . . . getting paid for it
. . . it's unreal" I leave them to it and head back to Cork.
The rain doesn't stop.
Kevin
Barry . . . HOT PRESS . . .18th August 1999.