Drumming with Portishead, touring with Radiohead and brewing up a jazz storm: Clive Deamer's a busy man, writes LAURENCE MACKIN
One of the greatest myths in music is the myth of the scene – suddenly, and for no particular reason, a single location starts producing bands and musicians of exceptional quality: Laurel Canyon in the 1960s; Seattle in the early 1990s; and Toronto in the mid-2000s.
Clive Deamer came of age musically in one such place: Bristol in the early 1990s. As the drummer with Portishead and Roni Size, he was sharing a Bristol underground with the likes of Massive Attack, Tricky and The Wild Bunch. And yet, he’s the last person to say it has anything to do with location.
“The only thing that makes a scene is individuals who happen to cross paths and cross-pollinate,” he says. “Usually when there is a documentary, it boils down to one environment, or café or a studio. But it’s not that; it’s one or two key individuals who happened to have the drive, the imagination to do something that hasn’t been done before. They are trying to get some musical memory or imagination out and they can’t get satisfaction [until it’s out there].”
As Deamer sees it, the “scene thing will become another ‘international, the world is shrinking’ phenomenon. There will be so-called scenes that will pop up in cities because it is possible to record a string part in Copenhagen and send it down the line to Los Angeles with ease. The individual with the idea: they are likely to be the technical or the physical means by which the new music will happen.”
Deamer is not a man to be taken lightly. As well as forming Portishead’s rhythmic backbone along with bassist Jim Barr, he’s a member of Radiohead’s touring band, and tomorrow he and Barr are bringing their jazz outfit, Get the Blessing, to Ireland for a tour.
The band might be jazz, but it’s probably the least serious group Deamer plays in. There’s a sense that the four members, all heavyweight session players, use it as an outlet, away from the strictures of being musical guns-for-hire. “There isn’t a band leader. They way we play is the way we operate at all levels, whether it’s ordering a meal in a restaurant or approaching a recording,” Deamer says. “It is a bunch of guys who get on very well and can simultaneously occupy a music idea and have fun with one another.
“There’s a really interesting phenomenon that happens because we’re perceived as a jazz group. You get people who think they don’t like jazz, and then they come along, enjoy it, and wonder, ‘What is this called?’ There’s a great deal of humour that runs through the things we play. It’s slightly deliberate and accidental because we have so much fun with what we are doing.”
Deamer reckons the “jazz” label is a double-edged sword that is probably stopping a lot of people giving Get the Blessing a fair listen. “Being labelled jazz immediately does box you into a certain thing. That’s another reason we play the way we do, why we do the bags over our heads [the band and the Rubberbandits appear to have the same tailor]; it’s another way of pulling the rug out from under the audience.”
Musical boxes are a bugbear for Deamer full stop. “I took issue with David Firth from Rolling Stone when I was with [Radiohead] in New York. He interviewed me and kept saying ‘rock band’. I said, ‘Hold on, why do you keep calling them a rock band, they’re not a rock band’. That’s so lazy. Kiss are a rock band, Aerosmith are a rock band.”
Radiohead probably “don’t give a toss” what they’re called at this stage, he says. “They know whatever they do they’ll get criticised and judged . . . All they are care about is breaking new ground, not being cliched and doing something that is genuinely creative and a progression from the last thing.”
Is it an extraordinary gear change, then, to go from playing in a hell-for-leather improv jazz outfit to playing in Radiohead, a band that seem to have everything refined to the nth degree? “Fortunately my experience in playing with Radiohead was quite similar . . . I was hired to play the show because they liked what I did and the gave me some artistic licence to put a fresh interpretation on the drum parts.
“Now with Portishead, it’s completely nailed down, it’s totally disciplined. You have to play within such a controlled musical world, you can’t mess with it. There a few bars here of there where I’m allowed some freedom to change the dynamic. But Portishead is the sound of extreme control of every last little item, every little phrase. There is no superfluous musical information in their music any where.”
As Deamer points out, one of Get the Blessing’s key elements is their improvisation. Live, they tend to let the leash off their bass-heavy, groove-packed tunes and see where they end up. “I’m very bored with the standard jazz thing, play the head and do the solos,” says Deamer. “We try not to do that, we try to change the form and personalities so that the solos appear more like a characterisation in a film plot instead of technical showboating.”
Can he envisage a time when, whisper it, rock bands or other genres will have the confidence to take the improv road? “I think in one sense it already happens. I was at a DJ event in Palm Springs with Thom Yorke and Flying Lotus and they did a DJ set together where they both traded ideas and what I heard was, to my ears, a digital contemporary jam session where they were cutting and pasting on the spot in real time . . . changing wildly from different tempos and grooves and sound ideas. It really was a psychedelic fireworks display. There were kind of trying to out-do one another. That’s how I interpreted it – a digital improvisation.”
Get the Blessing play Whelan's, Dublin tomorrow and then tour to Belfast, Sligo, Leitrim and Galway. see musicnetwork.ie
