On his latest album, Heard Noises, Matt Berry takes a musical leap of faith and brings in a more reflective – and, at times, confessional –approach to lyrics. The actor-musician tells Prog about the mind-shift he experienced after entering his fifth decade, and the gift he received from one of his musical heroes that played a role in the album package.
Reaching 50 last May was more than just an age thing for Matt Berry. His half-centrury milestone coincided with the end of his successful run in TV comedy-horror What We Do In The Shadows. He’d been a central part of the series, playing pansexual vampire Laszlo Cravensworth, for more than five years.
“I turned 50 on the last day I filmed,” he tells Prog. “So that was a significant day for me. I hadn’t done it consciously, but everything I’d been writing from the year before was all geared around that. When I look back, it’s all pointing in that direction. I think certain things happen to you that force you to progress.”
This subconscious reassessment of life and work fed into what eventually became Berry’s new album, Heard Noises. As did the recurring dreams. “This obsession with nostalgia was creeping into my subconscious.
“I was having a repeated dream of basically seeing my younger self in the distance and working out whether I should run up to him or just let him get on with what he was doing. It felt so real: I could see him and all my friends, exactly how we were about 10 years ago. And it kept happening, so I couldn’t ignore that.”
One new song in particular feels like a direct result of that experience. To Live For What Once Was finds Berry wrestling with notions of past and present: of living in the here and now as opposed to some idealised memory palace. ‘No matter what I do I’m trapped,’ he sings, ‘Like a man in a jail of his own.’
Other pieces, such as Stay On The Ground, serve as a kind of self-support device, its protagonist negotiating a path through fear and bullshit until he can simply ‘ignore the sound.’ And so it goes. Heard Noises tends to be more confessional than anything we might have previously heard from Berry.
Opener Why On Fire? contains the lines: ‘There’s a chance for me to run and to be free/But I’m scared to move my arms and move my feet.’ Here he is, idling at the crossroads of middle age, conflicted by the possibilities of where to turn next. “That’s exactly what that song is,” he confirms. “It’s me thinking, ‘Now I’m free to do other things, but how much of a leap do I take? And if I do something that’s radically different, could it fuck up everything I’ve done before?’
“Then at the same time – being sober about it as opposed to being precious – it’s like, ‘But who gives a fuck? No one really cares.’ I’m never precious about myself for more than 10 seconds.”
If Heard Noises represents a fuller, more complex lyrical portrait of Berry, then the same applies to the music. For someone who often imposes certain constraints on his work – 2018’s Television Themes revisited signature tunes from his youth; 2023’s Simplicity was an instrumental collaboration with library music label KPM; Nashville-era Dylan informed 2020’s stripped-down Phantom Birds – this latest effort is a free-roaming affair.
The album’s warm grooves pivot between classic Californian acid-pop and 60s R&B, judiciously textured with acoustic folk, space rock and prog-leaning electronica. It could all broadly be described as modern psychedelia; a more expansive companion to 2021’s Blue Elephant.
I got my mum’s choir to sing individual notes going up a scale, which I could then map onto the sampler
“I thought I might have shaken off the psychedelia thing by now, but I just can’t,” says Berry. “It’s like experimental instrumentals – I can’t shake that off either. That’s what I’m sort of based on. That’s partly because of how much of a statement of freedom psychedelia was during the 60s. You could do absolutely anything with any kind of sound. The whole point was to make it sound like something you’d never heard before.”
Heard Noises is also very specific at times. The glorious Silver Rings, for example, was inspired by the collision of musical generations during the 60s, when veteran session players would be called upon to back the hippest young artists. “I’ve always loved that idea,” Berry explains.
“The band they put together for Simon & Garfunkel’s The Sound Of Silence were a bunch of blokes in their late 40s who’d been playing since the 1940s and 50s. So, you’ve got their styles, but through a modern act. And that brings its own character. That’s what got me off, trying to recreate that sort of backing band.”
He isn’t entirely alone in these endeavours; the album features various collaborators, including regular drummer Craig Blundell (Frost*), Fruit Bats’ multi-instrumentalist Eric D Johnson and American actress Natasha Lyonne, whose spoken-word turn on I Entered As I Came mirrors the song’s spooked-folk ambience. Elsewhere, Kitty Liv of Kitty, Daisy & Lewis appears on the fabulously punchy duet I Gotta Limit. Then there’s Berry’s mum, billed with the ‘S Club 60s Choir.’
Jean-Michel Jarre understood how much of a fan I was. A week after I came home, a box arrived with a note
“At Christmas last year, Mum and her choir mates were doing a carol concert,” he says. “I went along and found it really interesting. Because they’re all amateurs, they weren’t all in tune with each other. As a result, you got a slightly unearthly choral sound. A few months later, in the village hall, I got them all to sing individual notes going up a scale, which I could then map onto the sampler, which goes onto the keyboard. If you make a chord or cluster of that, you get something almost Ligeti-like.”
This ingenuity has become something of a trademark. Notwithstanding the hired help, Heard Noises was mostly recorded alone, Berry presiding over banks of vintage weaponry in his home studio: guitars, bass, Mellotron, pianos, Moogs, Vox and Farfisa organs.
Exploring the potential of analogue gear has been a lifelong obsession, ever since his parents gave him a transistor organ as a kid. “Every note is slightly out, in the same way that my mum’s choir is,” he says. “So it’s going to poke out of the mix, because it’s not perfect. It’s more human.”
The sleeve art gathers together a host of items that map his journey thus far: scale-model synths, character toys, eight-track cartridges, Laszlo Cravensworth’s plastic fangs, and an effects pedal that once belonged to Jean-Michel Jarre. The latter’s Oxygène, alongside Mike Oldfield’s Tubular Bells, were formative influences on Berry’s DIY aesthetic – solo albums built from the ground upwards.
I don’t buy comedy albums; I don’t have any comedy DVDs or comedy movies… Other art forms kind of linger more
“I went to Jean-Michel Jarre’s studio in Paris to do a podcast and we talked about Oxygène at length. He was explaining how he got the sounds from the organ through the guitar effects and onto tape, and he understood very quickly how much of a fan I was. A week after I came home, a box arrived with a note: ‘I could see how much this was exciting you, Matt. Please enjoy.’ It was one of the actual pedals he’d used on Oxygène, which just blew my mind.”
Given that Heard Noises acknowledges all areas of Berry’s multifaceted career – writer, actor, comedian, painter, musician – how does he prefer to categorise himself? “If I had to put a label on it, it would just be as an artist,” he reflects. “But I feel like a wanker saying that!”
Yet nothing quite satisfies his artistic urge, it seems, like music. So is it fair to say it’s his primary creative outlet? “Well, I don’t get excited by comedy in the same way,” he admits. “I don’t buy comedy albums; I don’t have any comedy DVDs or comedy movies. For me it’s all about doing things in the moment. As soon as I’ve finished I’ve lost interest.
“Other art forms kind of linger more. Music is the one I dream about, the one that I get excited by. It’s like being a kid again.”
