Bonobo

It must be strange when people assign unwelcome labels to your work. Just ask Simon 'Bonobo' Green, a producer who has seen his music pigeonholed in variously dubious ways over the last few years.

It turns out that the man himself barely even sees his music as being particularly 'electronic', and suddenly his longevity makes sense; instead of concerning himself with semantics or scenes he has spent the last 10 years channeling his diverse influences and developing his musicality, delivering well-received and enduring albums in the process. We were lucky enough to meet him as he rehearsed with his live band in anticipation of his fourth studio album "Black Sands", an album which is poised to remind people of his stature as a producer, arranger and songwriter.

You're regarded as a multi-instrumentalist, how many instruments do you play?

Most of 'em, I guess. I don't play any of the woodwind or the strings but everything else on the record...so yeah, all the keys, guitars, double basses, drums, some of the horns....I played them.

Did you have formal musical training?

Not at all, no. No, I've never had formal training for anything. When I was young I was always just dicking about in the music spots, wherever I could find them. Coming through from being in little teenage skate punk bands to coming to Brighton, getting into the whole sample culture when I was 17 and taking it from there. I started getting a little budget setup of Ataris and stuff together, digging....

So you're a self-taught musician, self-taught producer then?

Yeah exactly. I think everyone around that time in Brighton in the late '90s had a little Akai and a little Atari in the corner of their room- everyone was a DJ, everyone was a producer. In fact, everyone was on Skint [big beat label home to Fatboy Slim and Midfield General], in '98, '99...or Catskills [laughs]. It was a good time to be in Brighton, it was exciting. Everyone had labels- they just had this sort of kamikaze attitude. No-one would do it now- it just seemed to be a good thing to do, like 'oh I'll just get a label together'.

Is that something you miss about Brighton?

No, because I've been in London for about 5 years. There's certain things you miss about Brighton but I think you get to a point with a city like that where you hit a ceiling and there's nowhere else to go. I mean, it's a student town really and you start becoming jaded with a town like that when you hit a certain age. It's the same people doing different things, or different people doing the same things...it's still home for me, it's a wicked town, but I just don't think I could live there anymore.

Did you feel the need to move to London for musical reasons?

No not at all, it was for personal reasons really. I was getting cynical, staying in Brighton, and I needed to get out and find somewhere else. There wasn't a street I hadn't walked down in Brighton a hundred times and it was the same people, same spots. So London was just a bit more exciting, there's a lot going on.

Did you always intend to make a living from music and do it full time?

No, I was at art college. I was always planning to come to London and do painting, go to St. Martin's college or something like that- but one summer in Brighton was enough to sidetrack me to stay there. It [college] was 3 years of pissing around- it's a safety net, it affords you that time to experiment and make mistakes and find out what it is you want to do. By the end of that I'd started putting music together, which I didn't think was very good at the time- there were always people a few years older who were putting out records and doing well and I felt I wasn't quite there yet. But I played a couple of things to Rob Luis [Founder of Brighton based label Tru Thoughts], just when he'd started Tru Thoughts, before they'd even put a record out.

I played him 'Terrapin' which I'd done in my bedroom and he liked it. I hadn't played it to many people 'cos I thought it was a bit daft. And he was like 'have you got any more stuff?' and I was like 'yeah, I've got all this'...and that became 'Animal Magic' [his debut album].

There's a sitar on 'Terrapin', did you play that?

Yeah.

You taught yourself how to play the sitar?

Yeah, but it's pretty rudimentary. I wouldn't say I can play it properly, but I can play it enough to kind of go [mimes playing a sitar] 'ding, doing', which I think anyone could do.

I assumed that you had had musical training.

No, I've just always listened to stuff and tried to emulate it. That's why I played guitar when I was little, I'd just listen to stuff and work out what was going on. From that you get a grasp of how chord structure works...you pick it up.