You heard it here first: when the new season of American Idol cranks up in January, a singer many of you know will be in the running. I wish I could be more specific, but the litigious drones that toil at the behest of Emperor Murdoch’s network would wreak a horrible vengeance were I to divulge names and places.
I mention this only to whet your appetite for seeing a band from Noid, England, Saturday night at Bottletree. When they played the considerably larger Ed Sullivan Theatre on The Late Show, the four gentlemen from the little village laid down such a big sound that Uncle Dave Letterman was roused from his usual torpor, shouting aloud, “There’s your American Idol right there!” Then he did something I’ve never seen him do in nearly thirty years of nocturnal entertaining: he asked the band for an encore. (If you haven’t seen this hair-raising TV moment, hurry here now and viddy.)
The band is called The Heavy, perhaps because their music is weighted with so many diverse yet congruent influences. When you listen carefully to this rockin’ soul music, you might be put in mind of Irish Jimmy Joyce in Finnegans Wake, saying, “Here comes everybody.”
By now you likely know the song that got Dave’s attention, for shortly thereafter it became the theme for a surreal Kia Sorento Super Bowl commercial. “How You Like Me Now?” is sung with all the nuance the question could contain by Kelvin Swaby, a young man with an old soul who was gracious enough to phone in as The Heavy prepares for an epochal swing through the Deep South.
Birmingham Weekly: Will this be your first visit to Alabama?
Kelvin Swaby: Absolutely. I can’t wait. I’ve heard all about the Southern hospitality; it’s supposed to be amazing down there, and the food is supposed to be incredible as well, so, cool.
BW: There’s a considerable appetite here for the kind of music you play. A lot of people were galvanized by your Letterman debut.
KS: Well, that was like five minutes of fun, y’know? When we get down there, we’ll probably tear it up some more. Be prepared.
BW: It’s been said that The Heavy are like a group of chemists, experimenting with compounds. Tell us about the laboratory you work in.
KS: It can be anywhere, whether it be four of us or just myself in an airport, just working on some beat or chopping up some horn part that we’ve kind of half-played. Or it might come from myself and Dan [Taylor, on quicksilver guitar] just working around. It really doesn’t matter where the inspiration comes from, we always manage to find a way to get it down.
We’re not super anal about the way that things are recorded, so it means the laboratory is a lot wider than just being “in a studio.” So many people get caught up with the idea that you actually have to go into a studio and get this super-slick sound, but a lot of the music that I like sounds---terrible! The recordingthat. I think that’s what we kind of aspire to. does, y’know? I love
BW: Some of the great records of all time are completely out of key.
KS: Yeah, exactly! It’s about the vibe of the time, basically, and getting it down. For me, a thing sounds right when it sounds right, not necessarily after a hundred takes, and it might be the one take you sang into your phone, listening to the beat in your ear. I mean, you can Bluetooth off your phone, put it into Logic or ProTools, and that’s it!
That’s why the guy who helped us finish our record [Jim Abbiss on The House That Dirt Built] last year got on board, because he could see that that was the way that we thought. He works with so many bands that believe they have to be perfect, but sometimes you can overlook perfection. So our laboratory is just everywhere and anywhere.
BW: Critics have talked a lot about the multitude of musical influences on your songs, but there’s also a considerable cinematic influence, isn’t there?
KS: Absolutely, absolutely. I think we try to write every song with a scene being played out. Like with “Short Change Hero”, we wanted that to sound like some kind of villain coming into town. So because of the sentiment of the song, it had to be a Morricone kind of style, like we’d ripped it from Ennio. When it comes to something like that, we’re very, very much influenced by film.
BW: Do you ever fancy yourself up on the silver screen performing?
KS: You never say no, but I can’t see myself being an actor. I think I act well enough on stage.
BW: There’s another interesting aspect of your background, and that’s your early DJ work. What’s it feel like to have been on both sides of the turntable?
KS: To me, why it’s so good having been a DJ, I used to play our demos whilst I was dropping in bits and pieces of other groups and singers. So I’d be playing such a mishmash of music that, to throw our stuff in, you could see how it’d sort of work. It was a good way of road-testing our stuff, y’know?
BW: Are you better able to get over to a crowd as a performer, now that you’ve learned what works for an audience in a room when you’re playing tracks for them?
KS: I wouldn’t say it’s easier; every room is different, but I think, just because of my record collection, the diversity of music I kind of collect, I try to look back to the old masters of that music I so adore and try to keep it like that. That’s the way we try to perform, remaining true and absolutely passionate to what we do.
BW: How big is your record collection?
KS: Pretty large. I think I’ve got, 45s, probably only about 4,000. Twelves [12-inch single discs] and albums, probably about the same. But it’s the 45s that really, really move me. The first record I remember stealing from my father was a 45. Had to be Al Green, “I’m Glad You’re Mine.”
My father used to play so much stuff. There was a lot of rock and roll around the house, it was great. And he had the Frankie Lyman, “Why Do Fools Fall In Love.” I used to play that all the time.
BW: Were a lot of people in Noid into soul music when you were growing up?
KS: Well, when my parents came over [from the West Indies to England], my dad was an avid record collector, and he used to hold a whole heap of parties at our family home. So it was always great for me to see people coming in and dancing to all this kind of music.
BW: Did your father enjoy the classic calypso?
KS: Some, yeah, but he was more into bluebeat, rock steady and ska, before it hit into reggae. Prince Buster, the Imperials and stuff. He loved all that.
BW: What was it about American music that grabbed your ear?
KS: For me, personally, it’s the instrumentation. I love the big band thing that’s involved in a lot of music that I collect from America. Huge horns, huge strings. And I prefer when the beat’s just stripped and easy and very, very simple. You guys are so good at that. You have so many amazing players over here, this country is so vast.
For me, one of the best drummers of all time is Al Jackson [of Booker T’s MG’s]. If you hear Al Jackson play on anything, it’s so simple, it almost sounds like a child could be playing it. But---the intricacy of those simple, simple fills, they’re just incredible.
The beats, for me, the horns, the power of the vocals---I was listening to “Say Yeah Yeah” by Yvonne Fair [once of the James Brown Revue] before I came on here, actually, and that woman was just incredible! I can’t believe she wasn’t bigger than what she was.
It’s the passion in the soul, but we can also look at the Sonics, we can look at the Wailers, look at Bunker Hill and that whole side of rock and roll. It’s the same sentiment, y’know? It doesn’t sound super-polished, like a Berry Gordy offering, but it’s the same kind of soul, and it definitely hits a nerve with me.
BW: Here in Birmingham, we’re a couple of hours away from Muscle Shoals, where so many great soul records were recorded. There you had the anomaly of a bunch of white country kids playing behind Aretha, Wilson Pickett and such, playing with authenticity because they loved that music.
KS: Exactly. It’s not about color, it’s about the passion. I think that’s what people can see with us: you’ve got one black dude of Jamaican heritage, you’ve got Dan who’s half Italian, half English; you’ve got Chris {Ellul, the stalwart drummer] half Maltese, half English and Spencer [Page on dense, dense bass] the Londoner.
It doesn’t matter if we have to drive thirteen or fourteen hours to get across the country to get to our show. As soon as we get to the stage, it’s one hundred percent committal, because we know people have come to see our show. That’s the way it used to be. From all the documentaries I’ve seen and all the books I’ve read about the performers I love, that’s what it seemed to be like. We try and do that, not necessarily to replicate it, but to have that within our ethos.
But Muscle Shoals. That’s where the Black Keys finished their last record, isn’t it? I’ve heard so many records cut there. You never know. We may come and cut our next record down there. We’ve already started talking about the next record, and there’s gonna be quite a heavy, heavy kind of gospel vocal vibe. We’ve sampled gospel vocals and we’ll probably wind up in Atlanta for three, four weeks, and go around to churches and see if we can get girls to sing some stuff on our next record. Then we’ll take it back to England and make it kind of sound like it’s taken from an era before.
This next record’s sounding really, really quite cool at the moment. I can’t wait to actually start recording it in December.
The Heavy open for Mayer Hawthorne & The County at Bottletree on October 23. Tickets are $16 in advance and $20 the day of the show. Doors open at 7:30 and you must be 18. Visit www.thebottletree.com for more info.
Courtney Haden is a Birmingham Weekly columnist. Write to courtney@bhamweekly.com.
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