Ute Interview March 2011
By: Liane Escorza
Ollie, Michael and Joe are Ute, a band from Oxford playing experimental folk-pop. They manage to bring a high level of fun to their performance through a theatrical approach that whilst engaging visually, doesn’t jeopardise the effect of their musical prowess. With an acoustic guitar that needs to be played as loud as the drums, they manage to create a freshly defined sound combining, paradoxically, both intensity and lightness. We had a playful chat before their gig at the recent Blessing Force warehouse party in Oxford.
Tell us of the origins of Ute...
Ollie: It all started when I was in Cardiff at uni and I tried to get a band together. I knew all the way through uni that I want to be start a band and I don’t know why but I always felt that Oxford was the place to do it, even though I prefer Cardiff as a city and I loved living there and I would naturally go back and live there. So I came back home and I started looking and it took ages to get it going, actually. About a year or something? I went on Gumtree, went to gigs, open mic nights and I ended trying not to take a person’s number at the end of the night because they were real psycho (laughter). And all they wanted was to go for a crazy night out. Before I met Joe, it was desperate. Yet I stayed, working in crappy jobs… just wanting to do this; it was a real feeling. So anyway, Joe ran into my brother and I had met Joe at school but at that time he was still at uni…
Joe: Yeah, I was studying chemistry in Edinburgh… but anyone could’ve failed as badly as I did (laughter). And I came home and saw Ollie’s brother in the street and he’s like ‘Ollie’s looking for people to form a band’ (we had played together when we were 15)…
Ollie: Yeah, we were puppies then… but I remember coming home and thinking what my perfect band would be like and I knew it was Mike and Joe but I just never thought that would be an option because it’s like ‘how do you make someone come back to Oxford?’ just to be in a band, playing your songs. It’s a craaaazzzy thing to do.
Joe: But he tried to get me onboard while in Edinburgh.
Ollie: Mate, I was watching Steven Segal’s films with my dad every night (laughter).
Joe: So he gave me a call, and I don’t think I’ve ever talked about this, and he’s like ‘what are you up to?’ and I’m like ‘Oh, I’m in the middle of a four-year degree?’ (laughter) and I was set to finish off this course even though it was bloody horrendous. And I said no…It was just the chance of bumping into your brother when I came back.
Ollie: And so he sent me an email a couple of days later asking me to send him stuff over. And I was thinking ‘This is NEVER gonna happen’. I was in despair. But then Mike sent me an email.
Michael: NOOO, you’re missing a whole lot. Get CHRONOLOGICAL!! (laughter)
Ollie: Ah, well! So Joe and I meet up and we play some gigs together, amazing fun shows.
Joe: Ollie on guitar, me on a broken down kit… on casserole pots (laughter). SERIOUSLY.
Ollie: Yeah, It was quite a folkie outfit.
Joe: QUITE.
Ollie: I had some leftover songs from Cardiff, and they turned into folk; lyrically more dense songs. And THEN Mike sent me an email.
Michael: Yes, I remember sending it cos I was at uni in Cambridge but being vaguely in touch with what was happening in Oxford. I always had an eye because it’s where I am from. And I came across Ollie and Joe’s stuff and I was coming to the end of my course and I thought ‘hey, that’s pretty cool; I wanna be in a band’ so I sent this liner at the end of it saying ‘If you ever want a bass player…’ kind of dropping it there but really meaning ‘I kind of REALLY want to…?’ (laughter).
Ollie: And we had played with these people, one of them after 15 min going ‘if I don’t get a coffee now, I’m gonna get a migraine’ (laughter) and another going bonkers into Led Zeppelin stuff…So that email was like a message from heaven. I couldn’t believe people from school would turn out to be the ones in the band…
Michael: And so Ollie had been asked to play at the Secret Garden Party and he had to put a band together and he asked me to join and I said ‘F*ck yeah’, and there was another guitar player – we were initially a four-piece – but we carried on as a three-piece.
Joe: I think now our personalities have developed a lot. It started off with Ollie’s ideas and getting us together but now it’s more like him giving us the tunes and then we incorporate things, work on it and it may end up differently to how it first sounded like.
I remember that house party in Oxford at 323. That was the first time I ever saw you guys play…
Ollie: Oh really?! Oh, that was a loooong time ago!
Joe: Woah, those parties in that kitchen……. (laughter).
…yet I could see it was a band still developing their sound. It was certainly not as defined as it is now.
Michael: I think a lot of our early stuff was a lot of ‘finding out’ what we wanted to do, trying things out and realizing what worked out and what didn’t. We’ve got three really different musical backgrounds. Joe is into dance and electronic music, I grew up as a jazz player and even though It was not exactly what I wanted to do, it provided me with more opportunities to play… so bringing it all together can be a bit tricky.
Ollie: But we definitely respect each other. We are open to listen to each other’s recommendations...
Joe: Yes, and gradually we’ve been blending things… also in a practice environment as well; we are in a totally different position, even where we’re looking to go to…
Where are you looking to go to?
Joe: Well YEAH, OK! (laughter)… umh, we’re definitely trying to understand each other first.
Michael: And when we work on a song now we have a level of understanding what people will actually like too so we edge ourselves to push that sound…
So you take your time to think what listeners would like to hear? That’s a quite a forward-thinking marketing tool…
Michael: Oh Absolutely.
Joe: We obviously think of ourselves, we want to play what we enjoy but we also do not want to be the guy at the back. We are here to create something for someone else, you know?
Ollie: We make up stuff sometimes like the chorus shouts of ‘Innocent Tailor’ that we never ever thought would go down that well, but they do. So sometimes we don’t get the listeners expectations right, yet we go ahead because we feel it is … Ute.
Michael: Yes, it has become a theatrical element that works well live, but it was something we incorporated because it suits the song, the lyrics. And it is a bit silly, it shows a bit of our personality and people seem to respond to it. We’ve been doing this section of our set for about six months now. When we play Equitruck that was the first time people shouted back. It started off with a couple rounds, now it has extended so much within that song, it’s funny. We did this festival in Southsea in Portsmouth and we shouted for 10 seconds but now it’s going on for f*cking ages!
Joe: There is definitely a certain sense of not being geeks or just wanting a party. We want to create an atmosphere.
Ollie: But we obviously don’t want to make it look like a pantomime (laughter). We have to strike a balance. So yeah, going back to the question, most of the time I write the songs as singer songwriter and then we play together and see if it works without any agenda and after 5 minutes or so we may say ‘Oh, we’re knackered, let’s go to the shops’ (laughter)… or say ‘ that is rubbish’ or ‘that sounds pretty good’. But in terms of direction, I really have felt now that I have found my feet when it comes to the lyrics. I have worked out pretty much what we’re about, our style, based on that…how I feel lyrically where I want to take it. It’s focused on a massively intense side of it, where the lyrics are story-telling pieces. They are quite dark yet humorous too. Slightly twinned thoughts with sparkly bits on the outside…. (laughter).
Michael: Yeah, I mean, people seem to love the ‘Innocent Tailor’ song because it is about someone going about killing people! But there is a conflict between the dark side of the story and the ‘accessible’.
Joe: So that, in essence, not singing that song ‘straight’ and without a ‘double-bass drum’ (laughter) is the key to our sound at the moment and what we’re are sort of focusing on.
Ollie: Well, even in our song ‘Dissolve’, which is not on our EP but we play live, it’s got silly bits within intense sections. I’ve now written a song about a guy that lives a completely perfectly life and it is so perfect that he can’t handle it so he goes out and gets drunk and the person owning the brothel asks him if he’s a counsellor and he says ‘no, you’re mistaking me’ and he finds himself in this room and then he realizes he is in a really low situation and picks up the phone and he’s apologizing to his wife saying ‘I love you, I’m sorry’ and… dives out of the window and is run over by a lorry! It’s the irony of it that makes people tick.
Do you value musicianship as much as the enjoyment of it all?
Michael: Well, if it wasn’t fun, we wouldn’t do it. Being in a band is hard. You definitely want to play music that you enjoy.
Joe: Yes, we are very passionate about what we do. It would become like tedious work and that’s a massive NO-NO for us…
Michael: It is exciting when we come to a point while creating music when we are all just feeling it, it kind of falls into place. That is pretty special.
Ollie: We played a song the other day, quite folkie. It took a while. It was at first as if they both were backing my music and then suddenly someone played a rhythm and from about 5 seconds playing it the whole thing turned into this mashed up, weird tune and it was like ‘That’s IT!’.
A complicated one here, why and how do you think a set of notes put together create all these feelings and emotions in the brain?
Michael: Woooaahh (laughter).
Joe: Ahhhh, from my perspective all genres are defined by rhythm. As a drummer I love to see the dramatic effect of it. I mean, yes, you can change the mood of a song with the lyrics, the singing, but rhythmically it can be the total antithesis of it and yet it makes sense. So, I don’t know… It is a natural human gift that we all have? What I know is that I see drumming like a base to everything else that comes on top, which makes it even more exciting.
Michael: As a three piece, there is nothing we can do that will go unnoticed though…
Ollie: Instinctively, you just feel melody and rhythm…right?
Do you believe that music can change the world?
Michael: NO! (laughter).
Ollie: Maybe. I think it can have a really positive effect. I remember getting really stoned when I was 15 and listening to Bob Marley and I was like: YEAAAHH, MAN! And we had a chat and we both came to the conclusion that we wanted to be in bands. We wanted to write one tune that someone at the end of a really crappy day would put on and listened to it and changed their mood and made them feel good. I was at this conference thing at the BBC the other day and someone said they wrote a song… no, hold on, who was that? Oh I can’t remember, this someone wrote a song and this guy heard it and wrote to him a letter and… OH, it was GARY BARLOW!! (laughter). Anyway, he wrote a letter to Gary saying he was really depressed and had listened to the song and it changed him. And yes, it might be Gary Barlow (laughter) but the music had a positive effect…
Joe: There are things that give you a chill, a tingle, a… but music to me is the most powerful, really. I mean, I could be eating a… SERIOUS steak, yeah? (laughter), un asado in Buenos Aires (laughter) and I could go wobbly in my knees for it but, still, music is much more powerful to me.
Michael: Having someone come to you after the gig and saying ‘that was f*cking amazing’ is such a humbling thing. It shapes your experiences. Especially if it was a sh*t gig (laughter). Even if it was just ONE guy saying ‘F*cking amazing’ (laughter).
Joe and Ollie in unison: F*cking amazing!!
- All photographs by Liane Escorza
Artists in this article: Ute