“We all die. It’s just a question of ‘Do we do the good stuff beforehand?’”
Musical differences are usually the reason cited when bands fall apart. For indie-folk mainstay James Yorkston, Lamb’s Jon Thorne and New Delhi’s foremost sarangi practitioner Suhail Yusuf Khan, musical differences are the reason they’re gathered in a brightly lit Glasgow dressing room a week into 2016’s Celtic Connections festivities. An hour from now, this supergroup of sorts will pad onto the carpeted stage of the Tron Theatre and revisit the semi-improvised new album — Everything Sacred — which has seen all three musicians receive a string of career-best reviews. “You can tell that we were all caught off guard by the speed with which it took off,” explains ursine double bassist Thorne, “because we never got around to thinking of what to call our group. Yorkston/Thorne/Khan is no sort of a name, really. It’s like those tour ads you see when the ex-drummer of some prog band has copyrighted the band name and the remaining members have to use their surnames in the same font as the band logo.”
The trio’s ongoing tone of surprise is borne out by the spectacle that ensues at the Tron: a version of The False True Love — a Scottish murder ballad popularised by Shirley Collins — takes flight when Khan puts the bow of his Sarangi to one side and starts singing, transforms the song into a sufi devotional. Assisted by Irish singer Lisa O’Neill, a modal raga-folk reinvention of Ivor Cutler’s Little Black Buzzer — “my bum is cold, my face is white and this is my message to you…” — hits an equidistant sweet spot between sublime and ridiculous.
For all of that, some impracticalities need to be overcome. Any show by a trio whose armoury involves a Swedish nyckelharpa (Yorkston, 16 strings) and a Sarangi (Khan, 43 strings) is going to involve a certain amount of inter-song tuning breaks. Yorkston fills one of these with a recollection of an incident that took place a few days previously. “Suhail was round at my house this week,” he begins, “I was doing the dishes and we’re chatting away… I poured some boiling water into the [washing up bowl] and put my hand in without thinking… In shock, I shouted, ‘Ya Bandit!’ At which point, Suhail came over to look in the garden. I said, ‘What you doing?’ To which he answered, ‘In hindi, you just said, “There’s a monkey.”’
Of course, it shouldn’t work, but then Yorkston says that’s what he’s been telling himself since the Celtic Connections show two years previously, when Khan introduced himself to Yorkston and, in doing so, prompted Yorkston to invite him to play that evening’s show with him. Khan’s telling of the encounter — he simply wandered into Yorkston’s dressing room and started playing as Yorkston was tuning up — reveals a lot about him, in particular, a sort of guileless curiosity which seems to occupy the space where one might expect to find ambition. “I was sent to an international school where people listened to things like Led Zeppelin and Rage Against The Machine,” explains Khan, 28, as he changes into an embroidered red silk shirt, “That was my first exposure towards Western music. There was a school band competition and one of the guitarists fell out with the band, so I just offered to fill in the empty space.”
In doing so, Khan’s full-time involvement with the group Advaita initiated a ripple effect that would push out into the Indian pop mainstream. “When we started, there was no concept of having an Indian classical musician in a band. No-one had even worked out how to amplify a sarangi before. Now, there isn’t a band coming through in India that doesn’t have a classical musician in them.”
Because in the last decade, Indian pop has changed to accommodate Khan’s aesthetic, his attempts to transcend the strictures of his classical upbringing might not seem so remarkable. But closer to home, Khan encountered resistance. The line of sarangi virtuosos in his family stretched back eight generations to a pre-colonial era of court musicians in palaces. Unexpectedly, the moment of rapprochement didn’t come from Khan’s parents, but from his grandfather Ustad Sabri Khan, a musician whose (mostly classical) recording work had been punctuated with sessions for George Harrison and, in 1992, an appearance on the first Blind Melon album. “That was the turning point,” remembers Khan, “Until then, he thought we had been wasting our time, but he realised we were just trying something new.”
It isn’t hard to see why Yorkston, father of two and 16 years Khan’s senior, seized on the collaborative possibilities opened up by the chance encounter with Khan — in the process bringing into the fold Thorne, who has played on his last two solo records. Seven albums into his own career, he says his eureka moment happened almost two decades ago when he was fronting Scottish indie aspirants Huckleberry. “We did this tour under the ‘Maker Breakers’ banner, which was sponsored by Melody Maker. And we were delighted to get it, but we quickly found out why we got it. It was a summer tour of universities. There were no students there — so no other bands had wanted to do it. Some of the gigs had no paying punters, but there were people in our band who still insisted on playing the set from start to finish. I hated that then and I hate it now. The best bits for me were when we got to the soundcheck and we would pretend to be Faust for an hour. So now I’m with a pair of musicians who are so good that I can do that and we can all find a point of intersection.”
Thorne’s own road-to-Damascus moment is, if anything, more dramatic. Not for him the lifelong hothousing conferred upon Khan. He was 23 before he heard David Sylvian’s The Ink In The Well, the song which prompted him to get his hands on a double bass for the first time. “Danny Thompson’s playing on that song set me off trying to hunt down more of his work. I got obsessed pretty quickly. When I found out he was playing at the Band On The Wall, I turned up at four in the afternoon because I wanted to see him soundcheck. He was unbelievably encouraging. I said to him, ‘I don’t think I can do this. Everyone else has had a ten year head start on me and I don’t even know which way to hold the instrument.’ He just said, ‘There’s no good or bad music, there’s just music. And if you’re moved by it, go and engage with it.’”
For Thorne, something had to change. Before meeting Thompson, he was doing shift work in a frozen meat packing factory outside Northwich. “I had to walk at 5am for over an hour to clock in at 6.15am and push frozen economy lumps of meat through a mincing machine. But when a colleague with a finger missing boasted that his missing finger had never been found and ended up in someone’s meal, I got up, took my apron off and kept walking.” There’s an all-or-nothing intensity (and attendant vulnerability) about 49 year-old Thorne, now resident in the Isle Of Wight, that strikes you within minutes of meeting him. It’s somehow not surprising to learn that, 15 months ago, after “rupturing my Achilles heel jumping around on stage with Lamb thinking I was 20 years younger”, Thorne decided to stop drinking altogether rather than simply drink less. His favourite book of all time is Charles Mingus’s autobiography Beneath The Underdog, which he read in a single all-night session.
When Thorne’s break finally came, it did so via 808 State’s Graham Massey, who was in the process of auditioning musicians for a forthcoming Bjork tour. Massey spotted Thorne playing at the Night & Day cafe in his native Manchester. Around that time, he had taken to placing the scan picture of the daughter he and his second wife were expecting on the seat in front of him while he played. “I guess Graham picked up on that drive that I had. Within a few weeks I was playing in front of 45,000 people at Roskilde.” Two years later, when Lamb’s second album Fear Of Fours was released, the sleeve notes saw him dedicate “every note” to Thompson.
As Thorne speaks, Khan gazes on in silent fascination. His phlegmatic approach to what he does couldn’t be more at odds with Thorne’s relationship to his instrument. Khan says he sees himself as something akin to a water body “that you can put anywhere and it will take the shape of that particular vessel, so I am hearing what James and Jon are bringing to the table and I react accordingly.”
In fact, his remarkably ego-less outlook scarcely begins to cover it. You’d have set your tardis all the way back to Pentangle’s 1967 sessions at The Horseshoe hotel to note the last time such disparate musicians locked into an improvisational synergy with such ease. “Do you know what?” says Yorkston, with an almost conspiratorial glee, “Sometimes it’s going to be shit. We all know that. But as you get older, your friends die away and family members get sick. With that perspective, the idea that you tried something on stage and it didn’t quite work — that means nothing. Suhail, Jon and I all had friends who went on to play in big bands and took the buck, playing the same beat or bassline every night for a year or more. Then we have other friends who are exceptional musicians and they just hang around at this level for the interesting stuff. And we all die. It’s just a question of ‘Do we do the good stuff beforehand?’ If you agree on that, everything else fades into irrelevance.”
This is an unabridged version of a feature that appeared in The Guardian earlier this year.