Cameron Picton on My New Band Believe: 'It breaks up and reforms after every gig'
Cameron Picton is keen to draw a veil over the demise of his former band Black Midi, which happened a couple of years after he last spoke to The Yorkshire Post while they were on tour in the US.
“I remember the week that we were in New York was very fun, but then touring after that got not fun and it was a bit like, what’s next or whatever,” the 26-year-old says diplomatically before the conversation moves on to his new collective, My New Band Believe, whose debut album was released earlier this month.
Picton recalls a period when the much-vaunted experimental rock band Black Midi was starting to fragment that he started doing solo shows “not really through anything of trying to start a solo career but just working without relying on other people to make music – and I’d also never really done any solo performances before so it seemed an interesting thing to explore while no-one was really paying attention because the band was still going on”.
“It was more a way of just writing songs,” he adds. “So I’d book a show at two weeks’ notice and say I’ve got three songs, let’s see if I can write three more. I kept doing that and not worrying about how good they were, just seeing what happened.”
That eventually “morphed” into a collaborative mixtape with the folk rock band Caroline that “ended up morphing” into My New Band Believe. “I initially left the songs very open and had sections that I’d intentionally left unfinished, then I did a bit more touring while Caroline were recording on their second album and the songs were really finished so there was no real reason to make it so collaborative any more, which meant that more musicians could come in and then it became this.”
The folk influence remains within My New Band Believe’s eponymous debut album, but it’s intermingled with pop and strings and experimental flourishes. “I think that because it’s a record that foregrounds the acoustic guitar it’s in the same aesthetic realm as folk music, but that’s more the arrangements. The influences behind the writing are broad, I think, and even in the production there’s influence from electronic music that I made when I was a teenager that’s not necessarily audible but definitely linked to it in the editing.”
Ever ambitious, Picton’s pivotal eight-and-a-half minute track Heart of Darkness “flicks back and forward between England and America” with an “interpolation of a John Renbourn tune” that then switches to “something like Otis Redding (or) my rubbish version of Stax”.
The songs are also conversational. “It’s recited conversations, it’s not necessarily like I’m playing them...but it could be like two things are happening at the same time within the same verse, and because I’m only one singer you can change your delivery to get that across. It’s just an interesting thing of that tension between who’s delivering what line. It’s not necessarily me, it’s not necessarily that character, it’s kind of something else.”
On tour this month, Picton will focus on “just playing the songs” from the album, but he says he is still “trying to work out how the project will develop moving forward – if it’s going to be an actual band or something that stays really loose”.
At present, he says: “It’s a band but it breaks up and reforms after every gig. We’ll see. I’ve got various ideas which might come to fruition or might not, they might be good, they might be terrible, but I just want to give them a go. Obviously now the album’s happening I’ve got to focus on more of the album stuff, but I feel like when I was doing shows in London with loads of different people and trying out different ways the band can line up I think there was a lot more to explore there that I’d still like to go for.”
My New Band Believe’s self-titled album is out now. They play at Brudenell Social Club, Leeds on Wednesday April 29. https://www.mynewbandbelieve.com/