TOO MANY DAYS - AN INTERVIEW WITH PAUL BUTLER
Jack: Thank you for doing this, I like The Bees a lot. “Winter Rose”, “I Love You”, the whole first record with the Mexican wrestler on it (“Sunshine Hit Me”), all great stuff!
Paul: Thanks Jack! I appreciate that. We’re kind of tidying the world up a little bit, we’re getting a few things straight. We are now known globally as “The Bees”, we were “A Band Of Bees” because of contact with another “The Bees” in the US, but now we are “The Bees” everywhere.
Jack: Excellent! I’m from the US and I had never heard of this other “The Bees” in the first place!
Paul: Yes, they were small time. They just happened to release a record roughly the same time we did, and they threatened to sue. We were young and naive and couldn’t be bothered, so we just changed our name in the US, not really understanding the implications of what that meant long term. 20 years later however, we are finally working it out.
Jack: That’s good! How did you guys come up with the name “The Bees” anyway?
Paul: We were just flying around, and we were like, “The Bees… The Pees… The Knees?” We were just throwing names around, and then we put “The Bees” on a list of names, and our label went, “Yes!”, and then we went, “No!” We tried for 6 months to come up with something else, but we couldn’t. We came up with it by accident, and we couldn’t beat it. So, we just stuck with it.
Jack: (laughs) Sounds like a band origin story I’ve heard.
Paul: (laughs) Yea!
Jack: What inspired you to start making music? Any inspirations/influences?
Paul: Well, early on, it was a little odd. Early, early, it was more instrumental; John Barry, Lalo Schifrin, Aphex Twin, with a healthy growing up of The Beatles and some northern soul. It was a fair amount of different music at the beginning, but definitely more of the instrumental stuff, and film school stuff.
Paul: Thanks Jack! I appreciate that. We’re kind of tidying the world up a little bit, we’re getting a few things straight. We are now known globally as “The Bees”, we were “A Band Of Bees” because of contact with another “The Bees” in the US, but now we are “The Bees” everywhere.
Jack: Excellent! I’m from the US and I had never heard of this other “The Bees” in the first place!
Paul: Yes, they were small time. They just happened to release a record roughly the same time we did, and they threatened to sue. We were young and naive and couldn’t be bothered, so we just changed our name in the US, not really understanding the implications of what that meant long term. 20 years later however, we are finally working it out.
Jack: That’s good! How did you guys come up with the name “The Bees” anyway?
Paul: We were just flying around, and we were like, “The Bees… The Pees… The Knees?” We were just throwing names around, and then we put “The Bees” on a list of names, and our label went, “Yes!”, and then we went, “No!” We tried for 6 months to come up with something else, but we couldn’t. We came up with it by accident, and we couldn’t beat it. So, we just stuck with it.
Jack: (laughs) Sounds like a band origin story I’ve heard.
Paul: (laughs) Yea!
Jack: What inspired you to start making music? Any inspirations/influences?
Paul: Well, early on, it was a little odd. Early, early, it was more instrumental; John Barry, Lalo Schifrin, Aphex Twin, with a healthy growing up of The Beatles and some northern soul. It was a fair amount of different music at the beginning, but definitely more of the instrumental stuff, and film school stuff.
Jack: I definitely hear most of that in The Bees stuff, especially the northern soul!
Paul: Yea, it’s very interesting times with the soul influence. There’s a lot of reorientation around cultural appropriation. It’s very interesting learning two different stories, the roots and what we grew up with.
Jack: Yea, I get that! I make music myself too, and my first exposure to a lot of soul and R&B, being a white suburban kid, was David Bowie and Beck. As I kept making music, and meeting more people, my knowledge grew into like the real soul stuff, the roots of it, like you said. It’s an amazing genre, soul is.
Paul: For sure! I had the pleasure of going down to Memphis and work down there on a record I did with St. Paul And The Broken Bones. This was an all-white band doing very soul based music. We went to the Stax museum to record a 30-piece gospel choir. The Stax museum is a recreation of the Stax studios, and just looking around there at what a handful of people managed to do, is astounding! World changing music made by a small group of people. It’s hard when you see so much taken away from the real pioneers, I get that frustration.
Jack: Indeed, that sounds like an amazing time though.
Paul: It was wild! It was one of the first things I did when I got to the States, it felt special.
Jack: So, let’s get into your time working with Damon Albarn and Gorillaz. How did you guys end up meeting Damon and how did The Bees get drafted into the project?
Paul: Well, I would say it was predominantly because of a man named Tim Watkins. Tim Watkins was roommates with Aaron Flechter (co-founder of The Bees) in university. He’s a really brilliant, funny, intelligent man who grew up in Birmingham, and he ended up working for Zombie Flesh Eaters, Gorillaz’ production company at the time. I’m pretty sure we got to work with the band through the Watkins brothers, we ended up going to the Zombie Flesh Eaters office often and hang out with the Gorillaz. I think Damon liked some of our stuff and eventually he just said, “Come in for a session and see what happens.” I get the impression he was doing that with a lot of people, and the cream of the crop made it on the album.
Jack: It’s all about connections isn’t it?
Paul: Pretty much, yea, it’s like 95% of it, yea.
Jack: Tell us about how the song “Bill Murray” came about. What was the writing and recording process like?
Paul: So, Damon had the idea of the song and the lyrics, and he wanted to do something that was kind of hitting at that kind of feel and tempo. It’s really cool we get to talk about this, cause this happened so long ago. That man! It was really amazing for me to get to work with Damon Albarn. He’s a big guy! He’s got a big presence! He did Blur, he did Gorillaz, he’s got loads of other stuff, he’s a creative force! I’m a producer now, and I get to work with a lot of different people, and I get a gauge on the creative landscape. But that was one of the most powerful and most present artists that I have ever been in the room with. He seems like he’s really, really messy in parties. I get the impression that whatever he gets his hands on, he grabs on to, and does it in his entirety, and I love that. He had a couple of assistants and engineers in there (Jason Cox and James Dring, most notably), and it was a really good example of a non-stop flow. So, like, if something wasn’t working, it was seamless before picking up something else. It was all about momentum in the studio. The rest of the band were pretty nervous to be in this scenario, cause we were kind of thrusted in there. We were touring at the time, and we were recording our own album back at home in the Isle of Wight, and here we were very tired, and very out of our comfort zone. And then there was this crazy moment, where Damon assumed the role of this Sergeant Major, and just shouted in the drummer’s face, very loudly. Like, wow, that wasn’t a joke, that wasn’t funny. The band tried to laugh it off nervously, they were like, “What the hell is going on? This is crazy.” But for me, I was like, “This is cool!” I mean, creatively, nothing was happening, there was no energy, nothing was flowing. But I was having a lot of fun jumping around the room with all the cool toys in Damon’s own studio. This was his studio, and everyone was working really hard and really fast. The speed that they were looping stems and setting everything up, that would have taken me a week, and they were doing it in half a day! I was excited being in that. I remember that Tim, the horn player in The Bees, was a lot more experienced than most of us at the time, so me and Tim were playing the horns together on the song. And I was doing that, and I wanted to do more! So, I picked up a Roland SH-101 synth and played a little part on the song (editor’s note: this part first happens at 0:29 in the song). Damon really liked that, and that felt cool like, “Yea! Something just happened off the cuff!” After all of that, I really saw the difference between who we were and the big acts that got in and would do the big Gorillaz songs. We were so far away from that form of presence; we were a pretty small band, and it was really cool that we were able to work on something like that. I got a lot of respect for Damon Albarn and the way that he operates. I don’t think he’s really sat still since the beginning of Blur, and I really liked the experience.
Jack: Wow, that sounds like such a rollercoaster of an experience.
Paul: Yea, I mean, Damon was just like, “What do you need? You want coffee? You want booze? Should we get a bag of weed? What do you need? You name it, let’s just do this. Whatever the thing is that you need to do your thing, let’s do that now.” We had a limited amount of time, just a half a day in the studio. Once we got enough little bits down, he just went “Ok! That’s cool! Let’s go!” So, after that, Damon left for a bit, and the engineers worked on the track until Damon decided he wanted to come back and do his little tweaks and the vocals. I think we all sang harmonies at moments on the song, I think Damon might have redone that stuff later though.
Jack: Going back to an earlier point, I think you’re underselling yourself when you compare The Bees to the other Gorillaz features. You guys make some great tunes!
Paul: Well, for example, Damon was talking a lot about Shaun Ryder when we were there. I don’t suppose you’ve spoken to Shaun Ryder yet, have you?
Jack: Nope, not yet! (editor’s note: shaun ryder if you'll bless us with your presence we are available on mondays... our contact info, its there! hmmm i cant think of any other shaun ryder jokes... harlem?)
Paul: Well, Damon played us his isolated vocal stem on “DARE.” He recorded it at 10:30 in the morning apparently, on ecstasy, booze and something else, and when we heard the part we went, “Holy shit! What is happening? What is this?” It was a complete fucking mess, it was nothing. It was nothing until Shaun finally sang the hook of that song, and then it was gold. Damon likes using collaborators as an instrument in a way, taking little bits of what they do sometime and that’s all he needs. That’s kind of what he did with us versus someone else.
Jack: Oh ok, I understand now.
Paul: It’s interesting to see how people work in their processes.
Jack: This is sort of a deep cut question, “Bill Murray” originated from an eight track demo Damon made while he was in Blur. Did this demo play a key role in your sessions, or was the song more fleshed out by that point?
Paul: (hums the song to himself) I mean it could be something that was used in the bassline. When we got there, there was a frame to it, we didn’t start from scratch, there was something there.
Jack: There was a report going around at the time that The Bees were gonna be the house band for the “Demon Days” album. Is this true?
Paul: Wow! I’ve never heard of that! Where did you find that?
Jack: On a Gorillaz news archive on LiveJournal I believe, some Damon interview mentioned that!
Paul: (laughs) Well we were a weird looking band, maybe he didn’t want us because of that!
Jack: (laughs) I hope not!
Paul: (laughs even more)
Jack: “Bill Murray” in its finalized state as a B-side to the hit “Feel Good Inc.”, is a lot different from the version shown being worked on in the Gorillaz documentary “Bananaz.” Were you aware of the changes Damon made to the song, or why it was cut from the album, or were you taken by surprise?
Paul: It was all a surprise. I think “Bill Murray” was cut because it didn’t really fit into the animation side of things. The animation was a big factor in what got on to the records at the time, it’s when the project really clicked. We didn’t really quite feel like a “feature” on it either, I suppose.
Jack: I get it too, but it was one of my favorite Gorillaz tunes! I like the dubby bounce it has!
Paul: I like it a lot too! I didn’t even know we were in a Gorillaz documentary!
Jack: I’ve noticed you do a lot of production work for people like Michael Kiwanuka and many others and have even won some Grammys for it! What made you want to get more into the production side of things?
Paul: I don’t think it was a want or a need, it was a natural progression. The Bees had a 10-year run, we had traveled all over the world, and I started working with other people and I just sort of went with it. That first Kiwanuka album is what really changed the game for me, and my life just kind of took a different path from there. I look back at The Bees and I loved what was going on, I look back on working with Damon too and it was great, it was expanding. I loved going around his studio, and I love using the studio as an instrument, and working in his studio was a great lesson into doing that.
Jack: Studio 13 really looks like a play pen!
Paul: Yea, it was amazing! There were toys everywhere, I’m not even talking about equipment, like literal toy keys and drum machines that he made really heavy beats out of.
Jack: For sure! What’s next for you? Anything coming out you wanna talk about?
Paul: I’ve got another Nick Waterhouse album I’ve produced coming out. I’m also working on stuff with Anna Leone, she will be releasing an album soon. She’s a Swedish artist, she’s fantastic. I don’t know when that album is coming, but it was finished earlier in the year. I’ve got other things which I don’t want to talk about at the moment.
Jack: Awesome man! I’m excited to hear those. For those of our readers who may be unfamiliar with your work, what do you wish to tell them? Any specific songs or highlights you want to share? What do you want the world to know about Paul Butler?
Paul: Hmmm… for The Bees I’d say, “I Love You”, “Punchbag” and “Winter Rose” have stood the test of time for sure. For my production work I’d say Andrew Bird’s “Bloodless”, Michael Kiwanuka’s “Home Again” and “Baby” by Devendra Banhart. Oh, Hurray For The Riff Raff’s “Pa’lante” is another good one!
Jack: I’ll have to check out the last two! I got one more question for you.
Paul: Yea?
Jack: Given the topic of this interview, what’s your favorite Bill Murray film or role?
Paul: Yea…uh…oh gosh, that’s a tough one.
Jack: (laughs)
Paul: I’d say… he was in “The Royal Tennenbaums” right?
Jack: I’ve never seen it so I wouldn’t know.
Paul: Let me look this up, one second.
Jack: Take your time!
Paul: (looks at his phone I assume) It’s not “Caddyshack.”
Jack: He was in that I know!
Paul: (laughs) Yea, he was in “Tennenbaums.” Let’s go for “The Royal Tennanbaums”… not “Garfield.”
Jack: (laughs) Yea!
Paul: (laughs) Have you seen his bit in “Zombieland” where he’s dying?
Jack: (laughs) “Probably “Garfield!””
Paul: (laughs) He’s dying, and he’s talking about “Garfield!” “Any regrets… “Garfield.””
Jack: Paul, it’s been amazing talking to you, thank you so much for this!
Paul: You too Jack, I appreciate you reaching out and it was a pleasure speaking to you too!
Editors Note: Thank you guys so much for all the support on our first interview, it's been a long road getting this all started but we're in full swing! Get ready for february because we've got something HUGE lined up! All I can say is "sorry"! ;)
Much love, Jack and Hintt
Also, don't forget to check out our custom Hip Mix curated by Jack with songs chosen by Paul Butler himself!