How legacy artists provided the creative inspiration for new music for the 2020s.
There is definitely something in the air as more and more young bands and artists are not afraid to wear the influence of ‘60s and ‘70s music proudly on their sleeves. The Heavy Heavy, who had three nominations at the recent AMAUK Awards, are part of that groundswell. Their EP was clearly in the tradition of the Laurel Canyon Artists, but their first album, “One of a Kind” brings a touch of ‘60s and ‘70s British rock to their more rootsy sound. Americana UK’s Martin Johnson caught up with co-founders vocalist Georgie Fuller and producer, instrumentalist, guitarist Will Turner at their studio in Brighton over Zoom to discuss the new album and what fans can expect in their first London show in over a year and a half at The Scala on 19th February. The band tour extensively in America, and Georgie and Will give their views on working in America more than in the UK. They also share their opinions on why the retro sound is so popular, and their view is that a key part of it is a reaction against corporate digital music, as is the publicity generated on social media as quite naturally an increasing number of legacy artists pass away.
How are you?
Will Turner (WT): We’re great.
Georgie Fuller (GF): We are in our studio at home in Brighton.
How were the AMAUK Awards? You didn’t win but you must have been pleased with the multiple nominations you got.
GF: It was lovely, really nice. We don’t spend a lot of time in the UK anymore, so it was nice to be welcomed back into a community here because sometimes we feel we are just floating around when we are back in the UK. It was nice to be part of such an enveloping community, and we were honoured to be nominated in three categories.
WT: It was really lovely. We’d been in Columbia for four weeks and we literally just landed, had one sleep, and then went off to London. Quite a rush, but it was fun.
You’ve been causing waves in America as well. What is that like for a Brighton band to spend most of your time out of the UK?
WT: It’s good, it’s very different to England and also it’s a twin country so the cultures are accessible to each other. It is great fun but it’s not too far away from the English culture, but it is different.
GF: It’s like having a fun cousin.
WT: The landscape is so enormous, and we see so much of the country and meet all these different styles of American people whether we go East Coast, West Coast, North or South, and we soaked up a lot of America. It is a great thing, it’s extremely varied and I’d say the experiences are amazingly varied. They are big music fans over there, particularly in Nashville, New Orleans and places like that, and they are ready to soak up guitar music which is good for us. America is very America, it is great fun.
Why do you think there is such an interest in retro-inspired music?
GF: I think a lot of the greats are passing away in quick succession at this point, and it’s highlighting that era of music, and where we are digitally there is so much pop that is just created from an algorithm. People hear that someone has passed away and then on TikTok or Instagram, or whatever, they hear a song for that artist and then thanks to the algorithm, in that sense, retro bands are popping up.
WT: I think it’s cyclical, I think people’s grandkids are looking at pop music and thinking they’re not sure about it, and then probably inheriting their grandparents’ vinyl records for whatever reason, and just loving the sound. I think it’s young people wanting to do that again because in the ‘90s the ‘60s and ’70s were still quite close. It was close enough for people to go, urgh, that’s what our parents are doing, but now it has gone around again on a cycle I think people are now going it’s amazing. That’s why it is having this revival, plus it sounds so good against the backdrop of this digital nonsense.
GF: I think that once someone new to it finds one album and realises how much their soul is soothed by the sound quality, they probably want to listen to more.
You make a feature of highlighting your influences in your songwriting, using the past as inspiration for new music for today. How do you approach this?
WT: We have a bit of a method to search for an interesting sound world. There are so many things to draw from, we grew up in the ‘90s and ’2000s, and realising the difference between that and ‘60s and ‘70s music, and taking the ingredients from both and joining them together seems to be more of a transparent process now because we’ve done it so much. So, we’ll look to create something new but with ingredients from something we really love. There are so many avenues of that older sound that we like to go down and explore. We haven’t delved too deep into The Doors or the Stone Roses, just look at what makes up the Stone Roses, all the percussion and dance elements, and we could do a bit of that, or can do The Doors stuff, more keyboard orientated stuff with darker lyrics and darker production. We can make a choice and all these choices are in front of us, and what keeps us going is finding one of these avenues to go down, finding something that excites us, taking the best bits of something that already exists, and putting them with something new and exciting. It seems to make sense in my head, but when I speak it out loud it seems like waffle. It has to sound new and up-to-date.
GF: And it undeniably will, because we are not sitting in Muscle Shoals we are here, in our studio, and there are many different recording avenues we can go down, but we’re not going to be where Aretha Franklin recorded ‘Respect’. What we can do, for example, is examine The Mamas & The Papas vocal lines and see how they are so very different from what you get these days. In terms of harmony, they are very straight and clear, there is no Beyonce stuff going on. You can take that and record it with what we have now, which is a hybrid situation, and you will have something that is now. A very long-winded answer.
WT: We are still trying to work it out for ourselves.
GF: It’s like therapy.
When you first came to listeners attention it was your Laurel Canyon vibe on your EP that attracted people. On your first full-length album “One of a Kind” you bring British influences to bear as well.
WT: We wanted to build on the EP, but we’ve also toured considerably since in the time between the EP and album, and our live sound is very much a busier more bombastic, more energetic heavier hitting kind of thing, a bit like the difference between The Who and The Who live and The Who live is much more ferocious and raw. We have that quality we think, and we wanted to bring that element into the recording. That element was informed by The Who and Led Zeppelin and even the ‘90s bands like Oasis and the Stone Roses, and that conscious decision to make it more like the live thing introduced this slightly other sound which was very British. We are very happy about that because we don’t want to be a British band trying to sound American, we are very proud of British bands like the Small Faces and The Who, and we wanted to bring a lot of that in. We still wanted it to be beautiful and golden, but we wanted that jagged edge there as well. Hopefully, we did that because it was a very definite choice.
The album opener ‘One of a Kind’ certainly grabs attention. What were you thinking of when you wrote that?
WT: Blow the place apart, really. It’s very primal and I like that, there is something in that primal banging of drums and shaking the mountain as it were.
How much time did you spend getting the vocals right, as you did on ‘Cherry’, and who does the arrangements?
WT: It is the main thing, I think, our vocal sound, and we are lucky the guys can do it live with us. Me and Georgie will sit here in the studio and layer up hundreds of vocals, and on some of those tracks, there are thirty layers of vocals which gives us lots of doubling and that sort of thing. We are able to play around. I have my own ideas and Georgie with her vocal training and where she comes from with the theatre and stuff, adds a different element to it. It is a joint effort when we do it. It’s funny, we’ll listen to famous records and we will go, that harmony they are doing there, and you are tempted to follow everything with the harmony, but if you listen to Crosby, Stills & Nash Graham Nash is just doing one single note which is just going over the top of it. So, we’ll find things like that, and each band does it differently, and the Beach Boys are just on another level. That is easily the most fun part of doing anything, putting the vocals on it.
GF: But then mixing them and levelling them is one of the hardest.
What are the dynamics between the pair of you musically?
GF: I think we are both very respectful of each other’s roles, we are very honest with ourselves about where we fit. I know I could kid myself and think I could start these songs, but I know I can’t because Will’s the producer and he writes into the sound he is producing, and that’s just not what I do. I come in halfway through the process, and once some of the music is down I may help with the melody, or Will will come out with a bit of melody and I will help finish it, or I’ll write the lyrics or we’ll work together. Will has always started the climb up the mountain, and I just join on a chairlift halfway up.
WT: Yeah, that’s fair.
GF: And I’m not kidding myself.
Why the Heavy Heavy?
WT: We heard it first on a very obscure BBC Radio interview or documentary, I’m not too sure exactly what it was, and there was a radio guy asking David Bowie to describe the sound on his new album, which was “The Rise and Fall of Ziggy Stardust and the Spiders from Mars”, and he was just smoking a cigarette and he said, “It’s heavy, heavy, Man”, and we were like, that’s a great name for a band. We’ve heard it subsequently in “Back To The Future” where he says it quite a lot, and even in the film “Local Hero”, which is a lovely, lovely film, at the very start the radio guy is talking about the traffic in Dallas being heavy, heavy.
GF: “It’s heavy, heavy”, and we were like, oh my god.
WT: We love that film, so it’s really cool.
Are you looking forward to your gig at London’s Scala on 19th February?
GF: We are really, really excited. We haven’t played a headline gig in London since the Omeara in May 2023. We love Scala as a venue, so getting to play there is really, really awesome. It feels like it’s high time because the album came out in September, and we’ve toured it around America, we had a little break, and we are like, let’s go, come on UK.
WT: It’s going to be really good.
What difference will people see since your last gig in London?
WT: We’ve taken on some new crew and the sound is going to be better than ever, we will be playing most of the new album, and some of the ones we’ve been playing for some time have gone, and some of the ones we’ve been playing for a while are much, much longer with jammy sections.
GF: You can manage to lose yourself.
WT: It is different, and it will sound a lot, lot better because we have a sound guy, which is great. It’s not someone different every night who we meet ten minutes before the show, it’s someone who has travelled with us through America who’s from Birmingham. It’s going to be good. We are going to Europe first, France, Belgium, and Germany, which is going to be refreshing for us because we haven’t been anywhere other than America for a while.
At AUK, we like to share music with our readers, so can you share which artists, albums, or tracks are currently top three on your personal playlist?
GF: Loving Jalen Ngonda, Charlie Crockett, and Candi Staton. That’s so funny because she closed the show at AMAUK, and we’ve been listening to her debut album for the last two years, and telling anyone who’d listen they should listen to it.
WT: I’ve been looking for it in every vinyl shop I’ve been in for the last two years, and they then released it on Rough Trade, 200 copies in the whole world, and so I bought as many as I could.
GF: And then she got the AMAUK International Lifetime Achievement Award and closed the show. It was also during the Planetary Alignment and we were like, the stars are really aligning, amazing.
Finally, do you want to say anything to our UK readers?
GF: Come to our show, come down to London. I think there are still some tickets left, a limited amount. So, if you are thinking about it book them, we can’t wait to see the UK fanbase.
WT: And thank you for liking real music.
GF: Whatever you are listening to, play it loud.
The Heavy Heavy’s “One of a Kind” is out now on ATO (UK).
Details of The Heavy Heavy’s show at London’s Scala on 19th February can be found here.
