With their superb fourth album Diversions now out (reviewed here), busy super-folk trio Leveret spoke to us about spontaneity in the band, shifting roles and playing with better musicians.
Whoever has seen Leveret play a live show will have witnessed their musical telepathy, dynamism and intuition; the trio bounce off each other, guide each other and compliment each other in a way that is genuinely exciting to experience. The approach also feeds into their recordings, with each of their studio albums being cut live and quickly and with minimum fuss. “There is something thrilling about just playing in the moment and knowing it is a unique thing,” says Andy Cutting, accordion and melodeon player. “If you try to recreate that moment in the recording studio, it never works. I know of so many groups who have made demos before going into the studio, then spend hours and lots of money trying to capture the magic of the demo. I suppose the thing about recording live is that you can turn the fear button off and relax and be spontaneous and create something new.” Spontaneous and quick? “Absolutely,” says violin player Sam Sweeney. “We arrived on Monday evening to check out the space, set microphone positions and do a bit of sound check. We started recording on Tuesday morning and recorded our last notes on Wednesday evening. We then listened back to everything on Thursday and came away with some rough mixes to listen to. The vast majority of the material was very new to us, so what people are hearing on the album is the same process they’ll hear at a Leveret gig, only slightly more seat of the pants!”
Although the music the trio creates is complex and technically challenging, it seems to come naturally to them, something Andy noticed from the off. “Rob [Harbron] and Sam were playing in a trio with singer Fay Hield when she asked me to join her band,” he tells us. “We used to play some tune sets in her concerts and we thought that it would be really good to play a lot more of that music. So we got together for a couple of days at Sam’s house in Derbyshire and played for many hours. Like my duo with Chris Wood, from the first moment of playing together it just worked. Rob and I had a chat about how we were going to approach the harmony side of the music, but it became clear very quickly that we didn’t need to talk about it. We just needed to play.”
The role of each musician is perhaps less defined than one would expect, which arguably adds to the textures that the band creates. Indeed, it is unusual to see accordion and concertina alongside each other in a trio set up. “It is a bit unusual,” agrees Rob, who plays the concertina. “But it works very naturally for us. The great thing is that it allows us the freedom to play different roles. In fact, one of the things that makes Leveret special for us is that any of us can do any job, tune, rhythm, harmony and so on, rather than us all ending up in fixed roles all the time. And as Andy says, we’ve never had to discuss harmony, it all seems to work naturally for us.” And what about the role of being sole string player in the setup? “Interestingly, I don’t think of myself as just a fiddle player in the band,” Sam answers. “For me, it’s about three musicians communicating spontaneously and in the moment. When I’m gigging my own album, The Unfinished Violin, I’m very much on stage as a fiddle player and what I do with my fiddle in any given moment is the primary focus of the gig. In Leveret, it’s not so much about playing the fiddle well; it’s about being a sympathetic, communicative musician, ready to adapt and change to the direction the tune is going in.”
The shifting and flowing nature of the music Leveret produces is something special, with players and instruments shuffling position to lead the tunes or support the other. In another set up it could have been practised and perfected through numerous takes, but not with this lot. “It is totally intuitive,” says Rob. “We never decide ahead of time [who will lead] and it’s often different every time we play a tune. There have been a few occasions where Andy counts us in and then no one plays because we’re all trying to do something different from the night before. Although if you try too consciously to do something different, it can easily go wrong because it becomes too much about what you think should happen and less about listening to what is actually happening.” It sounds risky when playing live, but these three know each other well now and their live shows are legendary and never the same twice. “Given the spontaneous nature of what we do, it is always different from concert to concert,” says Andy. “We do accept that sometimes things might not work, but it has never been a disaster. If it’s not been so super we might have a very brief chat about it, but we don’t have big musical deconstructions. That’s not helpful.”
A post-gig board meeting would also seem a bit incongruous for this trio, but there is something they are doing that has resulted in four superb albums and untold ace live shows, so it must be working… “The best thing you can do as a musician is to play with people who are better than you,” Andy believes. “This makes you work hard just to keep up as well as it being inspiring. We have played a lot together now and with that comes a huge amount of knowledge about each other’s approach to music, which itself informs your own way of playing. So I suppose our development as a band comes down to the fact that we play the same. But better.”
Diversions is out now, order it here.
Watch them performing The Wounded Huzzar at Stamford Arts Centre:
Leveret are nearing the end of their March tour with just a few more dates left, so don’t miss out!
Diversions Launch Tour 2019
Fri, Mar 1 – St John’s Music Hall, London
Sat, Mar 2 – Stamford Arts Centre, Stamford
Sun, Mar 3 – Traverse Theatre, Edinburgh
Thu, Mar 7 – Calstock Arts Centre, Calstock, Cornwall
Fri, Mar 8 – Blackheath Halls, London
Sat, Mar 9 – The Bowerhouse, Maidstone
Mon, Mar 11 – The Apex, Bury St Edmunds
Tue, Mar 12 – The Wardrobe Theatre, Bristol
Wed, Mar 13 – The Lending Room, Leeds
Thu, Mar 14 – Firth Hall, Sheffield
Fri, Mar 15 – South Street Arts, Reading
Sat, Mar 16 – Widcombe Social Club, Bath
Ticket links and more details here: https://www.leveretband.com