Morcheeba’s Ross Godfrey on his Kent roots, Trip Hop and getting back to festival season

Morcheeba are Skye Edwards and Ross Godfrey, forming the band in 1995 and going on to sell more than 10 million albums the world over. Simply spellbinding, their hits include ‘Rome Wasn’t Built in a Day’, ‘Enjoy the Ride’ and the timeless summer goodness and effortless golden vocals encapsulated in monster hit ‘The Sea’.

Having heard that Ross is a son of Kent, we got in contact to find out about his musical beginnings and the band’s upcoming Kent gig at Dreamland in Margate.

Hey Ross, we heard that you grew up here in Kent. Is that right?

It is indeed. I grew up in Saltwood in Hythe. But I spent most of my early teens hanging around in Folkestone. So, yes, I’m definitely a Kent boy.

That was before you met Skye in London. What was the music scene like at that point?

There was a bit more of a music scene up towards Canterbury and, you know, the sort of Medway scene, with The Milkshakes [with Billy Childish] and bands like that. We used to go to a lot of shows in Herne Bay and The Penny Theatre in Canterbury and once I got a band together we started playing around those sorts of places.

Have you ever thought about moving back this way?

I moved to London when I was about 16 and went to music college and, you know, just tried to get a career together in music.

I used to think ‘I’ll never move back, it’s too boring, blah, blah, blah’. But as I reached my mid-40s, whenever I’d go down to Hythe, I’d think ‘Oh, it’s really nice down here’.

My wife and I just bought a house in Seabrook, which is sort of near Sandgate. We use it as a holiday home at the moment, but I think the long-term plan is that we’ll probably move back at some point.

My kids are in school in south London at the moment. But it’s lovely hanging out down in Folkestone, especially in the summer on the Harbour Arm.

And I’ve got a lot of friends who still live down there.

Margate is having a similar creative-fuelled renaissance to Folkestone – how much are you looking forward to playing Dreamland?

Yeah, I mean, it’s really bloomed. I remember when Gorillaz played there a few years ago and it was like, ‘Oh, that’s interesting, they’re doing gigs at Dreamland’. And then, you know, this year, it’s wall-to-wall gigs from June till September. We feel really honoured to be playing there and it’s a great line-up on the day we’re on. I can’t wait, really. I’m going to bring along my family and I’ve got an airbnb booked down the road. So we’re just gonna hang out for the weekend.

All this talk of the coast, does that mean that your hit song ‘The Sea’ is based on the Kent seaside?

I mean, most of the song was written by my brother and I, one drunken night. I think I had two chords and he came up with the lyrics. And I should imagine that we were or he was thinking about Kent when writing the lyrics.

But then, when we gave the song to Skye, and she came up with a melody for it, I think it was just after we played our first-ever show in Brighton. And at the time, Skye lived in Stratford in east London, so I think in Skye’s mind she was thinking of Brighton. But my brother and I were probably thinking about Hythe seafront.

Excellent, we’ll take it. We’ve heard Morcheeba’s sound described in so many ways over the years because it’s such a unique sound. How would you describe it?

At the time in the 90s, I didn’t think it was that special. To be honest, I much preferred the music from the late 1960s, early 70s. I’ve lived through the 80s and I didn’t really like any of the music from then. I much prefer to listen to old music.

And that was kind of what was interesting in the Kent scene, because there were so many bands we used to consider retro. And now people don’t really care about being retro, they just play whatever music they want to play. No one says to The Black Keys that you can’t play 1950s rhythm and blues.

So it was a case of looking backwards to look forwards?

We had connections to bands like Soft Machine, who were in Canterbury, and we got Hugh Hopper to play fuzz bass on one of the first Morcheeba records. We were really into the sort of traditions of where music came from, especially like psychedelic rock and things like that. But we also wanted to fuse it with modern electronic and hip hop.

There were a few like-minded people doing it around the country at the same time, you know, bands like Portishead and Massive Attack. And we managed to come up with music that was song-based and had real instruments in, but at the same time it was kind of hypnotic and atmospheric. And so I think it was a real Zeitgeist moment. Trip hop was a great little movement at the time.

Do you look forward to festival season?

Yes, I definitely do. We did quite a lot of touring last year – we did about 100 shows, a lot of which were club and theatre shows, which are fun, but they’re quite gruelling. And obviously you kind of get sick of your own sound and the same people being around. So it’s really nice to go into festival season where you get to see loads of different bands and see loads of old friends. And it’s generally outdoors!

I’m not going to tempt fate by saying it’s gonna be a nice sunny day, but it is generally in a more open environment. So it’s always very refreshing to get to festival season and genuinely be outside. I think we’ve got about 30 festivals around Europe and a lot of them are in seaside places. You know, whether it’s in Margate, or Marseille in the south of France, or on Lake Geneva, it’s half an excuse for us to just get out and about really.