Leo Abrahams

When I was 7 my parents gave me an acoustic guitar. I think my mother secretly hoped I would turn into one of those teenage boys who plays at parties and makes the girls swoon (when in fact you just end up providing the soundtrack to everyone else’s romantic evening). At first I showed no interest in it, preferring to mime piano on the fringes of carpets until a real one miraculously appeared. My piano teacher used to faithfully write out pop songs which I liked (but he didn’t), interspersed with a good solid grounding in music theory; but by the time I was 12 I’d found my limits and started learning guitar instead. I remember my first mail-order replica Stratocaster being taken out of its cardboard box and put on my knee. I was so excited that I was afraid to touch it.
Along with being in a succession of bands as a teenager, I was writing a lot of classical music and decided that I should go to college to be a composer. I got into the Royal Academy, but gradually became disillusioned. After a year I got a phone call out of the blue from Mickey Modern, a manager to whom I’d sent a truly appalling demo years before. He said he was looking for a guitarist to play with one of his artists and he thought of me. The artist was Imogen Heap and that phone call pretty much changed my life. As I toured round England for months with Immi it gradually dawned on me that maybe I could play guitar for a living – which is what I’ve been doing ever since.
Imogen introduced me to Ed Harcourt the night he got signed. He didn’t have a guitarist so I went up and offered my services. My ‘audition’ consisted of him asking me if I liked Tom Waits. I said yes and that was it. A couple of years later I was trying out a guitar in a second-hand shop in Notting Hill when Brian Eno walked in. He liked the fact that I wasn’t playing Stairway To Heaven with the amp turned up to 11, and invited me to play on his album. I’ve continued to work with him for the last 7 years, sometimes on his own projects and sometimes with artists he’s produced, including Paul Simon and Grace Jones – both of which slightly freaked me out - as I used to quite fancy the latter when she was in A View To a Kill, and as Paul Simon sat opposite me gently imparting a beautiful melody, instead of concentrating I kept thinking “Bloody hell, this is the bloke who wrote Mrs Robinson!”
I’ve been incredibly lucky to have worked with so many great artists (cheesy Oscar acceptance speech alert - sorry) including David Holmes, Roxy Music, Nick Cave, Jarvis Cocker, Marianne Faithfull and many more. My time at the Academy has come in handy too when I’ve had to do string arrangements – a highlight being the time I conducted the orchestra at Abbey Road for a Starsailor album and the ceiling fell in on the record company boss’s head. And sometimes this job feels like being a perpetual freshman, lost and agog in far-flung situations – supporting REM at Red Rocks, playing with Eno at midnight on Mount Fuji, working on the Oceans 12 soundtrack for months in the Hollywood Hills.
At the same time as playing for other people I was writing with and producing a succession of aspiring singers in my home studio, and struggling in an ill-fated art-rock group called The Miggs. Then I got the call to work on the soundtrack for Code 46 with David Holmes. It mainly consisted of layers and layers of my idiosyncratic textures and sounds, and I realised that maybe I should try and make a record of my own. Honeytrap was eventually released on Just Music in 2005, and Scene Memory followed on Bip-Hop in 2006. Both records were well-reviewed but seemingly unclassifiable which was a hindrance in some ways, but pleased me in others as I could never see the point of creating something that has been heard before, in a more original form. Also, I was already making a living in music so I felt liberated from worrying about who might like it – I just tried to please myself.
The Unrest Cure evolved gradually. Initial sessions took place in New York with David Holmes’s rhythm section. I then took these very rough jams home and gradually edited them into song structures, building them up with guitars, strings and (for some reason) bassoon. I was trying to let the music evolve rather than be deliberately ‘written’. After a certain point I began imagining voices in the music, and got in touch with some friends who made the wonderful contributions that complete the record: Brian Eno, KT Tunstall, Ed Harcourt, Foy Vance, Pati Yang, Merz, Phoebe Legere, Kari Kleiv and Bingo Gazingo. I see it as a kind of cabaret. Again, I’m not sure what type of music you’d call it as a whole – sometimes it sounds like a collage of familiar things pulled together into something unrecognisable. And stylistically it’s all over the place, ranging from Lynchian whispered dreamscapes to the guitar-driven foul-mouthed ravings of an apoplectic octogenarian. Each track is just something that I wanted to hear, with no thought given to where it might ‘fit in’. A producer friend of mine is fond of asking his clients what they imagine their music being ‘for’ – will people want to dance to it, cook to it, fuck to it? Anything’s fine by me, I just want people to listen to it.
video by Isobel Blank (www.myspace.com/isobelblank)