Paul Dunbar greets me with a friendly smile and an outstretched hand as he comes from out of one of the many doors that are part of the rabbit warren of the iconic Unity Theatre. Every band and musician I have come across in Liverpool has something special about them, from Buckle Tongue to Ian McNabb, from Jo Bywater to Stealing Sheep, Paul Dunbar and his band have something about them that makes you want to smile which fits in with the current and lasting view that the city of Liverpool is perhaps arguably the best city in terms of creativity within music to call home.
Upstairs on the third floor of The Unity Theatre, Paul and I chat briefly about the music in the city before we get down to the serious business of The Midnight Ramble’s latest album High Time/Live. This collection of 10 songs, part new material and part live session that was captured superbly at The Unity Theatre has just been released and is a tremendous album to get hold of.
Congratulations on the new album, it’s excellent. How hard was it to record and get the concept across?
Paul: “Well, initially it was hard. High Time, the three-track E.P. that has been going since October 2012 and we’d only just finished it at the end of April 2013. We started recording at Elevator Recording Studios in Liverpool and it was essentially that we got in there by luck because a friend of our guitarist Mike who used to be his tutor at Knowsley College. He left to become a tutor at Leeds Met University and he then went onto do a Masters in creative and collaborative efforts in the studio between a producer and a band so he needed a producer and a band – and the band was ourselves and the producer that he got was a guy called Marc Joy. Marc has produced all sorts of different albums over the years, ones for Oasis, Primal Scream, Radiohead, right up to current pop stuff, he’s doing some quite progressive stuff as well. Eventually we got his services for free so it didn’t cost us anything – just time and effort but it was all so much fun and we got three day’s worth of studio time in such a great studio – The Coral recorded their first album there, The Zutons and many other Liverpool bands have recorded there. So just to be there in that environment was absolutely a pleasure, you could feel the vibes, you could feel all the great music and songs around.”
I have to be honest listening to the album, I’m struck by that – Southpaw Billy especially has that feel. It has something of the golden age of music about it.
Paul: “Thank you that was the very first song I wrote for the band. I had it in a band I was in previously but that was a six-piece country band beforehand and the minute I wrote it, it was something that jumped up in my eyes. There’s a certain way of storytelling and a certain way of writing music, the song is telling a story. I’d always have a sound in my head that has been influenced by songs I’d heard in the 1960s and 70s, rock, blues, soul, all that kind of stuff. Just to have that kind of sound and to take some of those old influences right up to modern pop mixes and try and encapsulate them within this sound, that’s what Southpaw Billy means to me. It was the first song that we hit record on in the studio itself, I think we did about 15 takes of it as Marc was very particular about it, it was all very exhausting though as the track has so much energy. It was the first time we’d worked with a producer so this was a very new experience for us as well so we had to play the song over and over again, trying to fine tune it and get a certain vibe out of it. That’s what Marc kept saying, I’m looking for a vibe and a feel to your music, I’m not looking for something that’s technically spot on.”
It strikes me as not being problematic but perhaps a little more difficult to capture the music spontaneously with using brass rather than standard guitar, drums and keyboards which can always be captured but with a brass band, the music must be spontaneously different each time, it must have been incredibly difficult?
Paul: “It was difficult, again I don’t want it to sound as if it was like ‘oh we can’t do this really again?’ It was such good fun but really tiring in a positive way, such a real pleasure to play the song over and over again. Even now when we’re playing it live, we’re finding things in it that working with Marc we’d never have found. We’ve now kind of homed in on them as well and pulled things out and changed bits around.”
That’s the great thing about the writing needing to progress and to put things down so that you can hear them and read the words again.
Paul: “Even within the band, when we play live we don’t actually have any keyboards playing but certainly the E.P. has Hammond organ, piano and stuff like that on it. So we’ve caught that sound as well. We spent a day at Leeds Met University in their big, massive keyboard room and just used this really old I think B3 Hammond organ and it was just unbelievable, the sheer power and the noise of it was great. To commit that sound, to really lay that sound down – Rory our trumpet player, he played the keyboards on it, he played the Hammond and just again from his personal point of view, it was an amazing experience to do that. I don’t want to give any illusion that this was like ‘oh, we funded all of this,’ we really got this on a flyer but we’ve had such an amazing time and experience.”
Getting away from the studio side of things, the live side does really capture your sound as well. I think it’s rare sometimes for a band to capture the live sound, somewhere along the line, you’ve done it brilliantly. It frames it very neatly – for example Black Dirt and Ballad of Four Eyes. Southpaw Billy again is great live. Does that come across to you as performers?
Paul: “Yes, the live side I think one of our main worries with it was capturing us more of a straight-backed version of us as a band. It was recorded at the Unity Theatre and we played the songs a few times before it was actually recorded. We really enjoyed reworking the songs in some way but also trying to retain the Midnight Ramble’s sound within a certain framework but also being quite adventurous with it. Southpaw Billy is different on that live side obviously than it is on the studio version not just in terms or rhythm and tempo but it’s still got an attitude, still got a swing, still got a style. Again, to try and capture us in that kind of essence was really interesting, showed the different colours of the band, the quality of the musicianship which I think we’ve got, the ideas again – we’re very much an ideas-based band. We’ll go into rehearsal and we’ll literally, we will songs in different styles just for something to do, just to keep an idea fresh, we’re always progressing always trying to move forward because there’s seven of us in the band now!”
Effectively you’ve started your own new sub-genre – progressive brass!
Paul: “That’s excellent! On the live side, there’s everything from folk to country, from blues to soul, jazz to rock to stripped down acoustic. Again, we’ve got quite a range of different influences in the band. The brass lads are obviously into jazz and blues but Jess our new singer is into pop and harmonies. It’s always a very interesting thing to be involved with. I initially started the band off with our now ex-drummer, he left to be a doctor so he’s actually gone to do something proper! We started it off essentially but people have been coming in and going out! We’ve been going for about two and a half years now and we done an initial E.P. then we did Bits and Pieces and High Time/Live now, we’ve released something every year since we’ve been formed because we feel that we are continually progressing, we work quite quickly, I’ve got a backlog of songs there and stuff so we’re essentially trying to keep progressing, we’ve really written the next album, so that’s going to be recorded at the end of this year hopefully.”
I’m obviously interested that you recorded the live album here at the Unity Theatre, because a lot of larger bands record larger gigs – Iron Maiden’s Rock In Rio being an example. You seem to have captured what a smaller venue can give to an audience – an intimacy which you just don’t get with other live recordings, which is why I’m usually sceptical of them. How do you think the Unity Theatre worked for you in that respect?
Paul: “Basically what you’ve just said. We wanted it to be intimate, to feel that the audience were included; I was singing three feet away from them. Before, we were quite an inclusive band with people just coming in, bringing ideas to us. There was never that fourth wall there, we like to get into the audience and get singing with them, just making it a real performance, an effort, there’s no ego between any of us. We all really have a good time and we want to show that we’re not just going to stand there thinking we’re the next best thing to sliced bread, we’re not! We want to keep it very real and write good songs and I think the Unity Theatre has caught that side of us very well, we really enjoyed it and we just hope that the audience will get that same level of enjoyment and intimacy, so yeah, it was an absolute joy.”
Ian D. Hall