Meet Chartreuse, the indie band finding strength in numbers
The Midlands band started recording new album ‘Bless You & Be Well’ amid a world of personal turmoil. The process of making it in Iceland provided shelter from the storm
When Chartreuse decamped to the rural Icelandic studio Flóki to make new album Bless You & Be Well, the location and the process that followed provided them a sanctuary.
At the time, bassist Perry Lovering was grieving their late father, while keys player and vocalist Hattie Wilson – Lovering’s childhood friend – was about to undergo surgery at 29 which would require her to learn to walk again.
Their bandmates – brothers Mike and Rory Wagstaff, with Rory Hattie’s long-term partner – joined them to create an album that could have felt like intense therapy, but actually ended up as a glorious affirmation of the joy of being in a band and making art together.
It’s fitting, then, that Bless You & Be Well sees the band sounding more united than ever. There are more than a few hints of Radiohead in the way their guitars interlock and rhythm section skips along, surely helped by recruiting The Smile’s producer Sam Petts-Davies for the record.
“No matter what’s going on in our lives, and the shit that happens, this is a steady thing for all of us, and we all enjoy it,” Mike says of the importance of Chartreuse in the members’ lives.
Read our Play Next interview with the band and listen to them via our Play Next playlist on Spotify below.
You made your second album in a very different way to the first – why did you feel you had to change the approach?
Mike: I don’t think we would have made a second record if we did it like the first one. The first album was a lot of hours at home and a lot of self criticism – it was quite uninspiring. We treated it like a day job and it wasn’t healthy doing that for months on end. After we finished all that, it was such a relief. I don’t think I picked up the guitar to write until maybe six months after, because I was just like, ‘I’m so done with it’.
What specifically did you want to change for Bless You & Be Well?
Mike: We all agreed that we wanted an external person to come in and produce it, just to give me a break, and also just to make something different. We wanted to mix it up. At the start, there were a lot of conversations about producers, and then we hit lucky with Sam [Petts-Davies].
Hattie: And then we got offered to go to Iceland!
Yes! Tell us about recording in remote Iceland and how it affected the album you made…
Hattie: It didn’t get dark at all, so we were in there from 11 till 11, and it just felt like you were reliving daytime over and over again. I definitely think that fed into the record, because we just didn’t really know what time it was, and we just kept going with things.
Mike: When you stepped outside, you weren’t walking out onto a street with buses and cars and planes going by – there was literally nobody there. It was in the middle of nowhere. You walked out the front door and there was a sea and then you walked out the back door and there was lakes and mountains. It was just fucking insane. It didn’t get old or lose its charm. It was great!
Hattie: We kept being like, ‘How are we going to tell people about this?’ It doesn’t make sense unless you were there because it was so beautiful. Everywhere you looked, it looked like a postcard.
What made you work well with Sam?
Mike: His credentials aren’t bad, to be fair. He’s worked with Radiohead. He’s worked with Frank Ocean. We were quite nervous to meet him, really, and quite nerve-wracking having another person in the room after so long.
Hattie: As soon as we met him, we knew.
Mike: It took me a few days for sure to loosen my grip on the steering wheel a little bit. But after that, I was just kind of like, ‘I’m just a singer in a band right now. ‘I’m just having a good time’.
Listening to the album, it feels like you’re embracing being a proper band with this record – is that accurate?
Mike: We wanted to push ourselves out of our comfort zone on this album. We’ve always been anti-band in our sound. If it doesn’t sound interesting enough, or it doesn’t have enough fucking bleeps and bloops or weird noises on it, we’re just not interested. Sam was like, ‘But you are a band – you should just have clear drums, bass guitar, singing and piano. That’s not something that you should hide, because you are a band. You are for four people in a band’.
That was actually uncomfortable. In our heads we were playing more traditional sounding things and stuff that we wouldn’t play normally, or that we feel like a little cringey playing. But then you play it, and then you listen to it back in the control room, it’s like, ‘Yeah, that’s good. It just sounds like music’. It still sounded like us, which was good and interesting.
Was writing the album an important distraction and a form of solidarity amid a hard time for the band personally?
Hattie: Definitely, especially for Perry and me. It felt like a good way to get away and just focus on one thing, rather than what happened or what was coming up for me. It felt important to be able to get in a room, just focus on making that record, and detach yourself from what any of it really means.
Mike: When we sat down and were trying to plan out what we would say to people on what the album is about, what we kept coming back to was that we just love doing it, and we love being in this band. We love making music. No matter what’s going on in our lives, and the shit that happens, this is a steady thing for all of us, and we all enjoy it. We all love being together, and that feels like a big part of it. That’s why [the album] is so positive. We just fucking love doing it, and probably always will.