Deluxe: Your album - A Quickening - is centred around your own journey of entering into fatherhood. Were you at all anxious about sharing that deeply personal experience?

Orlando Weeks: There is something reassuring, especially just before the baby arrived, of being in the company of people like midwives. How incredibly competent they are, so calm too. Somebody told me yesterday that there are currently over half a million pregnant women right now in the UK. It makes you realise that your experience is just a drop in the ocean. At the time, it feels like you must be at the very centre of the world, but of course, you aren’t. There are many centres of many worlds.

D: Across the album I found it hard to get a gage of the time of day, it feels like the songs are recorded during a strange sort of ‘Never-hours’. It’s quite ambient in that way, does it feel like a specific time to you?

OW: I like ‘Never-hours’. A lot of the record was written before becoming a parent. All of the finishing, taking the ideas and expanding them and getting them into the finished state, all happened in those ‘Never-hours’. It doesn’t really matter, your time is not your own and any time that you do have is just borrowed in waiting, so you’re not functioning on the same schedule as the rest of the world. It’s fascinating how that changes the creative process, just fitting moments in. You’re at the mercy of a different master.

D: (laughing) “the employer”

OW: The tyrant.

D: The artwork feels like such a massive part of the record.

OW: All the way through making the record, one of the things that I was really looking forward to, that I felt that would be quite a treat to do, was making the artwork. When I was in the Maccabees, I worked with Matt de Jong - ‘Go De Jong’ - on all the visuals, but I stopped making my own work and we started using other peoples work. It was a brilliant experience working with interesting people like the brilliant fine artist, Boo Ritson and Andy Goldsworthy did one of the covers for us. It was a fun and inspiring approach but it had meant that I had maybe, lost my nerve a bit with my own visual work? I was so sure that if I was going to make this album and it was going to have my name on it, I wanted to put my work front and centre on it.

D: Did either the music or the artwork sound or look like you had imagined?

OW: The time it took to make the record took about the same time it took for the pregnancy, it’s about the right time because it gives everyone enough time to get their heads around the enormity of what’s going on. (laughing) I’m not comparing making the artwork for the record to pregnancy but what I mean is that, sometimes that gestation period usually ends up being about the right amount of time. The artwork started really early on and feeling the development of it was a big part of the process.

D: I was really impressed by the scale

OW: Yes, well. I work with quite small stamps, and by then blowing them up - changing their scale - they look more impressive and take on a more ‘sculptural’ look, which I really like.

D: I found there to be something quite spiritual about the shapes.

OW: I wanted to find something that could exist in multiples, as soon as I found that by having a limited number of those shapes, limited configurations, they still felt connected to one another. Almost in conversation. They feel to me like amulets, or drawings or examples of ancient Greek house gods. But also like stone age sculptures or cave artwork, they look also like Kinder-eggs toys. There is something dinky and familiar, but as soon as you change their scale and put them visually in conversation with each other they become almost hieroglyphic.

D: Could you tell when you got to the point where you ‘had the cover’?

OW: I am on optimist in that I like that panning for gold moment where you see it, ‘that’s the fucking nugget’ or ‘that’s the cover’. I wanted to show progression.

D: How does it feel seeing your artwork in the racks of a record shop?

OW: There was a time where I’d go to Resident (in Brighton), and seeing that release of yours in the shop – especially as I knew the shop so well and have done for so long - it really clarifies the whole experience of physically releasing music.

D: They’re not too bad those guys.

OW: They’re amazing, and they have introduced me to so much stuff. They really are.

D: I saw that you drew some icons of shops that you really like the other day. You included Resident, but it was really interesting to me that you also had Sister Ray and Sound of Echo. They’re all very different shops. What have been formative experiences for you that make all types of shops different so special?

OW: Rounder and Resident in Brighton were really formative experiences. I bought a couple of Pixies records as soon as I arrived at the University in Brighton and they feel very locked to that time. I also bought a copy of Five Leaves Left really early on and had that in my room on display. It was a badge of honour.

D: It’s a real gateway record

OW: Oh god, yeah totally. It was quite erratic early purchasing but all of them are special. I remember buying Brewing Up with Billy Bragg and playing that a lot. I loved really getting into his first few albums and reading his book ‘The Progressive Patriot’, I was really quite intrigued by him. I got up at some early hour to go and watch him opening one of the stages at Bestival and also taking along my copy of The Progressive Patriot in a plastic bag to be signed.

D: (laughing) fair, you don’t want all of the corners of the book getting all ‘tenty’

OW: (laughing) I’m pretty sure they did get quite tenty.

D: On your travels which record shops have stuck in the mind?

OW: There is an amazing shop - that is essentially a whisky bar - right in the centre of Shibuya (Tokyo) called Music Bar 45.

“It is nice to go and feel out of place but welcome. That’s quite a hard balance to strike.
”

D: (laughing) Whisky aside, what makes for a great record shop for you?

OW: I think why I love the World of Echo shop – aside from thinking that those guys are such sweethearts – is that they absolutely love it, in a way that I absolutely can’t begin to explain. I love music, but the way that they do and the joy they get from sharing it is pure curation. I love that it’s un-pushy and every time you go in there you just want to know what it is on the stereo. I’m not even anywhere near left-field enough for that shop, I’m quite quickly out of my depth, but it is nice to go and feel out of place but welcome. That’s quite a hard balance to strike.

D: I totally agree.

OW: I think that’s the line, out of place but welcome. There is another great shop that’s on the main drag just by Norwich Arts Centre. I played a bunch of times at the venue and I remember going in and speaking to the guy there about what I had been listening to. We were chatting for quite a while, he thought and said “maybe you’d like some gospel music?” I was amazed, I’d never even thought about playing gospel music. Sure?! You can’t beat that sort of interaction.

D: I think that’ll be Soundclash Records

OW: He dug me out some super old Mississippi Records compilations, really early recordings of deep southern American choral recordings. “Oh graveyard, you can not keep me always”.

D: A great title. Great experience.

OW: It stays with you.

Orlando Weeks

Although Orlando Weeks will be a voice known to you as part of The Maccabees, his debut solo album - A Quickening – is very much a solo piece. Musing on fatherhood and its profound changes, we spoke about all sorts of formative early experiences.

Jenny Cobden