Pete Wareham of Melt Yourself Down: ‘I really think of Leeds as a second home’

In the intervening years he has played saxophone with four of the most widely acclaimed contemporary British jazz groups, Polar Bear, Sons of Kemet, Acoustic Ladyland and Melt Yourself Down – the latter two as band leader – as well as stints with Nadine Shah, Supergrass, Mica Levi and Ben E King.

Although he says he felt “out of place” at LCoM, explaining that then “it was all about old school be-bop and I was really into Coltrane and Pharoah Sanders, Archie Shepp, free stuff, modal jazz”, Leeds was the city where he formed a few bands.

“Before I went to Leeds, I was in Southampton and all the people I was playing with there were a lot older than me, also I had quite an isolated childhood as well, so when I got to Leeds I was surrounded by thousands of people who were the same age as me, which blew my mind,” he says. “That was the thing that has stayed with me: connecting with my peer group and doing stuff together with them.”

Several of Wareham’s early releases were on the Leeds-based Leaf Label, furthering his connections with the city. The link came via drummer Seb Rochford, with whom Wareham worked in Polar Bear. “Seb was in my band, I was in his band, so it was very much family working together,” he says. “So when Tony (Morley, Leaf’s founder) starting working together, the conversation naturally flowed over to us.

“It was good,” he adds, “because when I went to college in Leeds, I made some really good friends, I actually stayed there another year after leaving college and I was in a few bands in Leeds, so even a few years after leaving Leeds, I was still coming back all the time and played, so the connection stayed. I’ve still got really good friends in Leeds. I really think of it as a second home.”

Now signed to Decca Records, Wareham is about to launch Melt Yourself Down’s fifth album, Pray For Me I Don’t Fit In. A thrilling fusion of free-jazz, punk, soul, dance and North African rhythms, it could well earn him a fifth nomination for the Mercury Music Prize.

He says on record the band has gradually veered from his original vision of “dance music, a kind of African model, with long pieces with not very many changes in them” into something more succinct.

Early on, he says, “it was a mixture of no-wave, Liquid Liquid type stuff, I guess you could trace it back to the Velvet Underground as well, or even James Brown, that kind of thing of taking a song and stretching it a lot, having big sections that were dance-y, because everything I’d done before had been very tightly structured”. Now, their tracks are more like conventional songs. “It’s kind of evolved from the original vision,” he says.

Where Melt Yourself Down’s 2020 album 100% Yes had a strong political dimension, on Pray For Me, the questions vocalist Kushal Gaya addresses are more about racial identity and outsiderdom. “We never sit down to say ‘I really want to write something about this or I really want to talk about that’,” Wareham says. “With the last album we were more conceptual. We’ve done a lot of teaching together, Kush and I, over the years where we’ve been talking to students about ‘what’s your message, what do you want to say in the songs’ so because we were teaching that stuff I think more with the last album than this one, we were thinking about what we wanted to talk about.

“Whereas with this album, just because of the time and the way it was, it was more spontaneous. Kush came in and wrote the lyrics on the spot. I think there were a few things where he had some titles, he had a list of subjects, and we’d work that way, but we didn’t sit down to write a political album as such.”

Wareham says the Black Lives Matter movement encouraged him to look more generally at his own attitudes and beliefs. “Ever since first hearing jazz when I was 12 or 13 I’ve been obsessed with essentially a Black music and it hadn’t really occurred to me until that minute (to say) ‘hold on, am I exploring something that I don’t have a right to explore?’ And I had to really think a lot about that,” he says.

“I’d never really thought about it (before). I just followed my heart and went with what I loved, and then after all that I started thinking about the cultural significance of what I’m doing.

“With Melt Yourself Down there’s quite a lot of exploring African music as well. I know that Kush thinks a lot about that stuff as well because he’s from the Reunion Island, from Mauritius, which are African islands but his whole lineage is Indian and Hindi but then he’s over here via French school, so there’s a lot of different influences. And he’s speaking Creole which is French-based. There’s lots going on there.”

In British history, Wareham recognises “there’s a lot that is appalling and worthy of statues being demolished in the name of trying to come to terms with some of that history”, but there is more to be looking at culturally too, he believes.

“But I think ultimately if you really properly love something, you should be allowed to engage with it,” he says. “If you’re coming at it from a position of paying tribute and respect and honour and love then those values are strong enough for you to be allowed to do that thing. It’s something I’m still wrestling with, but as long as my motivation is pure then I feel like it should be okay.”

The soundclash of styles in Melt Yourself Down is representative of Wareham’s diverse musical tastes. “I’m 50 this year and I’ve been obsessed with music since I was about seven,” he says. “Naturally you travel a lot when you’re constantly searching for stuff, and also as musicians, you’re not just listening to stuff, you’re taking it apart and analysing it, rebuilding it and looking into the mechanics of it. When you do that enough you start to realise that there’s an essence to things that don’t really have much to do with the aesthetics, so a piece of punk rock can have as much of an effect as a piece of classical piano. They’re coming from the same place, they’re coming from the human heart.

“People sometimes have a quite rigid, train track view of ‘this belongs here and this belongs here and never the twain shall meet’ and that’s just not the environment that I’m in. None of my friends, none of my family, none of the people that we talk to, none of us are like that. One minute we’re listening to Gang of Four, the next minute we’re listening to something Ethiopian, the next minute blah blah blah, because it’s all coming from the same place.

“The number of times back in the day when I’ve been interviewed by a really hardcore punk guy and the first thing he did was say how much loved Charles Mingus, moments like that make you think there are no boundaries here.”

Wareham’s own interest in African music was sparked on a trip to Tower Records in 2000. “It was different to now,” he says. “Then if you wanted something from a different genre you had to go into a different room. I saw an album on the rack that had an amazing painting of all these camels on it and I thought ‘that’s really cool, I like that’. Back in those days I’d buy it. You had to spend 15 or 20 quid, take a bit of a risk, and I was in the mood for taking a risk.

“The planets were really aligned that day because this album was called Salamat and it was something to do with Cairo and it just looked brilliant so I bought that and a Messiaen CD as well, which I bought on spec because I liked the cover. My friend Seb Rochford is always doing that as well and it always works, there are all these amazing records which you’d never know about unless you took a punt. Anyway, I took them home and loved them, the Salamat album I listened to loads and loads, that was a real eye-opener.

“The other one I bought was Dahmane El Harrachi, an Algerian chaabi singer, who’s amazing. He went to Paris when they had all those troubles in the Sixties. He apparently is the sound of Algerian chaabi in Paris. Those three CDs were completely life-changing. The I left it alone and it was later on, in about 2011, when Omar Souleyman started getting popular and two or three songs of his I really loved so I was looking for some Souleyman stuff on YouTube but instead of that I found Ali Hassan Kuban, who’s a Nubian singer, who I became completely obsessed with and then realised that a lot of Ali Hasan Kuban’s band had gone on to form Salamat, which took it back to that CD.

“Also I had these amazing books called the Rough Guide to World Music. I’d been playing in Cuban bands as well since 1995, so I was always aware of that side of things. As soon as I hear African music I can always understand it to some degree because there’s a lot of cross-pollination between the continents.

“A lot of jazz musicians in London at the time were into West African music and I appreciated it but there was something about Ali Hassan Kuban which I loved, he’s like an African Joe Strummer, he’s got this amazing punk voice over this proper folkloric thing.”

Pray For Me I Don’t Fit In is out now on Decca. Melt Yourself Down play at the Brudenell Social Club, Leeds on March 16. www.meltyourselfdown.com