Murder art. It was a notion David Bowie toyed with on his seminal album Outside and it’s something Morcheeba explore in depth on their new album Blood Like Lemonade. In it, poisoned dinners, traumatic car crashes and vampire priests litter an epic return to laidback back form, made all the more memorable with the return of cruisy, bluesy lead singer Skye Edwards.
Edwards took some timeout to chat to OUTinPerth about murder, music and Britain’s Got Talent.
What can you tell us about the character songs on this album? Paul has always wanted to do that. He’d always been saying that he’d wanted to write from a character’s perspective. And so he started coming up with these stories like in Recipe for Disaster, which is about a person who’s not very happy with their partner, so they decide to kill them by poison because the partner’s sick and tired of them turning up drunk. So she or he decides to poison them with a really beautiful meal.
There’s a lot of murder and death on this album. Yeah, there’s a lot of murder on there. It’s always been that way. But it’s kind of just sugar coated with the beautiful voice and it takes you back to ‘who can you trust?’ There’s a song on there called Almost Done and people say how much they love to get stoned listening to it, but if you listen deeper to the lyrics it’s about an ex-girlfriend of Paul’s and there’s a line in that which says ‘I’d love to cut your throat / You’d never sing a note’. It’s all quite dark! I guess it’s all just a little heavier on Blood Like Lemonade.
How do you feel about the British music industry at the moment? Over here, people were fed up with Simon Cowell. (Talent shows) can just get a little too much. They are fun: you can get really sucked in and actually care about these people, but it is an entertainment show. And it’s not the fault of the people up there.
Blood Like Lemonade is out now through Liberator Music.
Scott-Patrick Mitchell
