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ABOVE & BEYOND
JONO GRANT, TONY MCGUINNESS, PAAVO SILJAMÄKI
Acoustic II
Biography
Where
do you go after you sell 12,000 tickets
in Sydney in one day, 12,000 tickets
in Amsterdam on another day and raise over almost
$300,000 for charity at a sold-out Wembley Arena show? After you’ve
headlined stages at festivals everywhere, from Glastonbury to Creamfields,
from Electric Daisy Carnival
to Pukkelpop to Lollapalooza?
How do
you top a global run of shows in 2015 that makes you the second-highest grossing electronic act in the U.S.…but the only act
of any nationality, in any genre, that can get “Breaking Bad” legend Bryan Cranston to join you onstage in Las Vegas and, you know, play along?
If
you’re ABOVE & BEYOND,
after all that, what next? You go acoustic.
Specifically, you go ACOUSTIC II and record a follow-up to your 2014 album, Acoustic, which was a stripped back reworking
of some of the biggest songs from your catalogue. But because you’re ABOVE & BEYOND, a London-based trio for whom progress is
everything, you go further, in every sense.
So
for this second collection of re-imaginings of your songs, you record
strings and brass at Abbey Road, and
you present these wholly different productions in iconic global venues
befitting Acoustic II’s
ambitious, intimate-yet-expansive brilliance: the Royal Albert Hall, the Hollywood
Bowl, San Francisco's Greek Theatre, Sydney Opera House, New
York's Beacon Theatre and the Waikiki
Shell in Honolulu.
And
you do that with a travelling party of 17
musicians – or, in the case of the Hollywood
Bowl, you do it with the addition of
34 of Los Angeles’ finest classical players.
You
are ABOVE & BEYOND, the U.K.’s
most adventurous electronic band, and all of this is something only you can –
or would – do.
Having
spent much of 2015 touring We Are All We Need,
JONO GRANT, TONY MCGUINNESS and PAAVO SILJAMÄKI were keen to maintain
the accelerated momentum created by their third album. Yes, they still had
their weekly radio show “Group
Therapy,” as well as two record
labels (Anjunabeats and Anjunadeep),
and their publishing company and
management agency to keep the trio busy. As GRANT points out, “…running a label and having a radio show
naturally keep us in touch with what’s going on musically. If we didn’t have
those we’d make music in the studio and that would be great, but we wouldn’t
have so much context for it.”
But
for a band who pride themselves on the song craft at the heart of
their dance floor-friendly anthems, the untapped possibilities inherent in
their music was a far bigger buzz – and challenge.
“With
the first acoustic album, it was guitars, piano, strings and vocals that were
the bare bones of what we were working with,” begins SILJAMÄKI. “This time around we started from thinking: ‘Well, what
other kind of things can we do?’ So brass is a really big player on Acoustic II: we added a lot of John Barry-esque brass
horns. And we wondered what interesting things we could do with the voices, so
there are a lot of choral and bigger vocal arrangements than on the first one.
Really, this album is standing on the shoulders of the first one. If we’d have
tried this then, it would have been overwhelming and too much for us to do.”
“It’s
funny, we originally wanted to copy MTV’s ‘Unplugged’ and use that name,”
continues MCGUINNESS. “But they said
no. So we called it ‘Acoustic’, even though there were things that weren’t
acoustic on the first album. So now 'Above & Beyond Acoustic' has come to
mean that band with acoustic and electric guitars, double bass and electric
bass, Rhodes, strings, horns and everything else. It doesn’t really mean acoustic
in the old sense any more, it's like we’ve invented a new genre. I’m really
pleased with that.”
In late summer 2015 ABOVE & BEYOND asked genius Leeds-based composer/arranger Bob Bradley, who’d worked on Acoustic, to
assemble a new selection of songs from their catalogue, with a view to scoring,
re-recording and reinventing them. In discussion with the trio, a core of 13 songs were agreed upon.
The Grammy-nominated title track from their last album, a collaboration
with singer/songwriter Zoë Johnston,
was an obvious choice. The addition of ukulele was less obvious, but
the instruments are an inspired addition to the wee-hours, orchestral-jazz
rendering of “We Are All We Need”. “Sticky Fingers,” an album teaser single
from 2013, is another standout, here re-rubbed into a stirring,
swelling, 007-worthy love theme.
“The
great thing about this version of ‘Sticky Fingers’ is that, before this, the
only version we had out there was the dance mix,” says MCGUINNESS. “There was more of the
song written that we hadn’t included in that version. So the whole
song is in this version of ‘Sticky Fingers’, and it’s the same with ‘Peace Of
Mind’ – there are extra verses here.”
But
while it’s in with extra verses, it’s out, obviously, with a lot of what made ABOVE & BEYOND one of the biggest
electronic bands in the world: the beats and the production. And while harp and
French horn help offer a whole new take on festival anthems like “Blue Sky
Action”, what of the sense of momentous occasion brought by the band’s famous “Push The Button” moment
in their DJ sets, when they invite a fan onstage to take the party several
notches higher?
In Vegas last summer, that honor fell to one of the band’s heroes, Bryan Cranston. ABOVE
& BEYOND are such huge “Breaking Bad” fans
that they wrote a song called “Walter
White.” Getting Cranston to join
them onstage made their headline appearance at Electric Daisy Carnival even more memorable. “He was totally into
it,” smiles GRANT, “but he was a bit
nervous. He’s done theatre but this was in front of 50,000 people.”
Making ACOUSTIC II
and then touring it offers no opportunities for button-pushing or banging
beats. Was that a concern?
“Absolutely,”
admits MCGUINNESS. “We felt like we
were kicking one of our legs from underneath us, which was the sound and the
power of the dance productions for which we’d become famous. But over the
years, the experience we’d have at our gigs is that our other leg – the songs
we’ve written – came through. We’d end our sets with beatless versions of some
of our songs and people were singing along at the top of their voices. That
gave us the courage to do this.”
That
sense of enhanced connection with audiences was apparent at 2013’s six shows the band performed in
support of Acoustic, at London’s Porchester Hall and LA’s Greek Theatre (the film of one
of the London shows has had over ten million YouTube views). GRANT echoes that sense of intimacy and
potency when he describes performing these acoustic/orchestral versions as “a
musical holiday. It makes you realise how important the music is to other
people, and gives you a focus.” Clearly
that sense of occasion and importance goes both ways. Most of this spring/summer’s six-week ACOUSTIC II world tour is
already sold out, including the Royal
Albert Hall and both shows at the
Sydney Opera House.
Are GRANT, MCGUINNESS and SILJAMÄKI
daunted by playing to eagerly expectant, packed houses in such august venues?
In only positive ways.
“That
is part of the charm of this,” nods MCGUINNESS,
“it unlocks the door to these venues that we have absolutely no right to go to.
An Above & Beyond electronic show is never going to happen in the Sydney
Opera House. And that’s just great fun for us as musicians.”
“That
we get to play places like this is proper bucket list stuff,” adds SILJAMÄKI. “This is stuff I didn’t even
know I could dream about.”
“And
just to make sure it’s not a dream,” concludes GRANT with a smile, “we’re going to make a documentary about the
tour, and film the Hollywood Bowl show in its entirety – if nothing else, so
the three of get to see what Above & Beyond performing with 34 LA classical
musicians looks like. That’ll be as much a thrill for us as it will be for the
18,000 people in the audience.”
ABOVE & BEYOND’s Acoustic II will be released on June 3, 2016
on Anjunabeats/Ultra Music.
For more information on ABOVE & BEYOND,
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