I Morcheeba will be back in Italy this summer with a date at the Carrarese Castle of Este (PD) Wednesday 6 Julywithin the framework of the EstEstate. I tickets for the show will be available from from 4 p.m. today on the Ticketone e Vivaticket.
March 2020, Skye e Ross were nearing the end of another long tour, and their diary suddenly became empty. Once they had parked the tour bus, they started writing Blackest Bluetheir tenth studio album, and by December 2020 they had completed 10 stunning new songs about the disintegration of family and romantic relationships, love and kinship, the world outside and the solace offered by cannabis.
On tour, the Morcheeba are composed of Skye (voice), Ross (guitar), Dom Pipkin (keyboards), Skye's husband Steven Gordon (bass) and their eldest son Jaega Mckenna-Gordon (drums). In the studio, however, they are just Skye e RossHe plays guitars, lap steel, bass, keyboards and percussion. Skye started playing the cello during the lockdown, as soon as she had a minute to herself. "It's an instrument I've always wanted to learn to play," she says. Ross encouraged her to play it on one of the tracks on the album, Falling Skies.
Initially Ross had found the lockdown idyllic, to say the least. He was composing with his acoustic guitar, swapping ideas between his home recording studio and the one at Skye. He spent time with his wife and children, reading books about forests, psychedelic plants and quantum physics. "I had more time to play the guitar," he says with a note of happiness. "This put me back in touch with feelings I hadn't had since I was a teenager. When I started playing as a child, it was an activity for me to do in solitude, a kind of meditation that made me transcend the bad times I was going through."
The duo got carried away, writing and playing whatever came to mind. "I had written a poem about diving in Thailand," he says. Skye on the individual Sounds of Blue. "Oh Oh Yeah is a song about being high. In the old days we didn't think about singles, or the need to hear the chorus within 30 seconds. We had seven- or eight-minute pieces, and we started writing them again."
