Our Season 12 launch episode was recorded live with British trip-hop legends Morcheeba. Skye Edwards and Ross Godfrey joined me at Bang & Olufsen’s flagship store in London’s Mayfair to walk through their 30 year career and the impressive new album Escape The Chaos. An enlightening evening…

SEASON 12, EP 1: morcheeba take us on a journey into sound. deeper than you think…

During our live interview with Skye Edwards and Ross Godfrey of Morcheeba, I found myself at one stage scrolling through my notes to find a description of the band’s sound I’d queried using Chat GPT. I couldn’t find it at the time but here is what it said:

“Morcheeba’s signature rich, mellow music became the soundtrack of the suburban homes and chillout rooms of the late 90s and early 00s”.

That’s a composite of much that has been written about the band over some 30 years, and it doesn’t really flatter does it? “The devil’s own lounge band” is the quip that Skye Edwards recalled from an early review. The music press loves to characterise bands, but in Morcheeba’s case, it comes across somewhat dumbed down. Contained within Morcheeba’s mellow sounds are multiple layers of influence that reveal hidden depths with every listen. The interview with the band for this launch episode for The Art of Longevity (Season 12!) manages to scratch just beneath the surface at least. That said, Morcheeba know their place in making music that can be the perfect backdrop, to quote Ross Godfrey: “We’ve always made relaxing music. You can get home from work on a Friday night, have a glass of wine or smoke a spliff or whatever and play our music”. 

On the other hand, the sheer depth of their musical influences and references can be breathtaking. Within the mix are Bacharach, Barry and Moriconi of course, but also Brazilian late 60s Tropicalia, and somewhat less obviously (but most certainly in terms of always impressive guitar work) classic rock from Ross Godfrey’s childhood favourites Neil Young and Jimi Hendrix. Meanwhile, Skye’s lyrics and styles include 70s country music, along with ska and dub reggae. All of this is somehow weaved into the seamless Morcheeba sound on the new outstanding album Escape The Chaos. 

Launched in the mid-90s and quickly swept along on the British ‘trip-hop’ wave, Morcheeba outlasted most of their contemporaries including Portishead (who refused to heed to the repeated calls to re-form). Morcheeba is one of those bands you might easily have forgotten about. And yet the band has (give or take a short hiatus and shuffling of personnel sometime between 2003 and 2009) steadily worked their way to 11 albums over 30 years, most of it under the radar of music industry gatekeepers and without much love from the music press. “They hated us” was Skye Edward’s response when I brought up the subject of early press reviews. And yet, Pitchfork gave their debut album Who Can You Trust (1996) 8.3/10, but then stopped loving them as the band’s popularity took off. Recent single We Live & Die references “in the old days of NME” which had me going on to Wayback Machine to dig out an NME review from 1998 of the breakthrough album Big Calm. It was the now legendary music critic Syvia Patterson, who wrote:

“Morcheeba you see, sounds nothing like Portishead. They sound like they like life”.

That has certainly proved a lasting observation. Escape The Chaos is a delight from start to finish - relaxing yes, but never boring, with a wholly effective meditative effect. Godfrey quips that listening to the album is also a lot cheaper than therapy. The songs often employ the classic conflict of matching a lovely lilting tune with an acerbic, dark lyric. In the band’s words: “The dichotomy of sweetness with an underlying threat of violence, a Morcheeba trait that goes as far back to the early track Trigger Hippie” (from their debut album). 

We Live & Die is a Bond theme in waiting (not the first time Morcheeba has made a potential 007 theme…check out Namaste from previous album Blackest Blue). 

Far We Come is a new Art of Longevity theme tune and features many hallmarks of the classic Morcheeba sound; trip-hop beat, lush vocals, strings and great guitar work - in this case Godfrey plays a classic Silvertone slide country guitar. 

Dead To Me has a 60s classic vibe to it which you and I might recognise as Bacharach except Ross Godfrey always goes to the source, and so the references take us deep into his Latin influences of bossa and psychedelic Cumbia from the Amazon. 

That’s just the three songs we talked about, but the album is consistently strong throughout, with no filler. The closing song (and title track) is one of the band’s greatest achievements according to Edwards, and that’s worth paying some attention to. Coming back around in such great current form, what is the secret of Morcheeba’s longevity from the band’s point of view? It turns out the band had planned to stick around from the very beginning, whatever the ups and downs of the music industry rollercoaster. “We managed to thread the needle and become this music that you can grow old with. We wanted to do this for the rest of our lives and we’re lucky in a way because the style of the music is all retro, which hopefully gives a timeless quality to it”. 

Whether or not the band rode a wave with the early trip-hop 90s trend and the Balearic era of chillout sounds that came along with the Ibiza lifestyle of Cafe De Mar and such, it was always underpinned by those deeper, wider references from Godfrey’s world music obsessions and Skye Edwards’ experience of being born to a British Jamaican family but adopted and brought up “by Mr & Mrs Smith” in the East End of London. Moreover, Morcheeba have always been a family band one way or the other. Originally formed by multi-instrumentalist brothers Ross & Paul Godfrey, Skye Edwards stepped in seamlessly as vocalist and frontwoman. After Paul eventually left, Skye & Ross continued, adding their own families into the equation; Skye’s son Jaega (drums), her husband Steve Gordon (bass) and Godfrey's wife Amanda Zamolo (backing vocals).

After all of the band’s ups and downs over three decades, this particular version of the Morcheeba family bandwagon keeps on rolling, with beautiful results. 

Escape The Chaos is available on Bandcamp.

the meta verse (afterword)

This was never going to be just a 90s conversation with Morcheeba, but two weeks before interviewing Skye and Ross for our first Art of Longevity Live’ event at Bang & Olufsen, I had been digesting the album reviews the week of the release of Escape The Chaos, Morcheeba’s superb 11th album. The slate of releases that week, alongside Morcheeba, included: Skunk Anansie, Stereophonics and Stereolab. A week later came a new album from Garbage, and the following week a new album from Pulp (after 24 years). Is summer 2025 a 90s moment in the UK? Is there like a big 90s reunion tour going on this summer or something? But - what struck me on listening to these records, is how relatively strong they are - all truly resurgent records in their own way. Something in the water perhaps, but how amazing that bands born of the 90s are still hitting new creative peaks now.