Artist Interviews

Q&A: Steve Spiro

By | Published on Wednesday 1 June 2011

Steve Spiro

Having worked as a producer for the likes of Pet Shop Boys and The Farm, Steve Spiro began to pursue a solo music career alongside his day job as co-founder of sync and publishing company Felt Music. He wrote and recorded debut album ‘Frequent Traveller’ during a year’s worth of daily rail commutes between East Grinstead and Victoria, designing it as a soundtrack to the changes in landscape he observed whilst travelling from one destination to the other.

With that album now due for release on 6 Jun through Platform 19, we asked Steve to take us through his creative processes, inspirations and future musical ambitions, as guided roughly by our Same Six Questions.

Q1 How did you start out making music?
When I was eighteen, I fancied myself as a singer, and recorded a series of demos. It was during the New Romantic era in the early 80s before people were making music on computers, and studios were expensive, so I used to go into demo studios with a live band and record and mix three tracks in a day. As with a lot of singers in the 80s, I had a really crap voice but I really enjoyed producing the tracks. It soon became apparent that I wasn’t going to be a recording artist but the record company’s really loved the sound I was getting out of my demos and started offering me production gigs with some of their newer artists.

Q2 What inspired your latest album?
Seven years after I started both Felt Music and a family, I realised I had started to neglect the thing that most fed my soul – creating music. But because both work and family life were so full on, it occurred to me that the only time I could truly claim as my own was my daily commute from East Grinstead to Victoria (and back). Two precious hours in which to read or think or… write an album. So, armed with a laptop, a small keyboard and a good pair of headphones, I transformed the train into my recording studio. My inspiration was the changing landscape I was travelling through, from the industrial decay of South London to the stunning countryside of West Sussex. Over the year I wrote twelve tracks, one for each stop on the line, evolving from harder industrial electronica to blissful ambience as the album progressed and the journey neared its end. I created transitions between tracks/stops, using the carriage ambience and announcements from my journey and added poetry relating to my experiences and some of the characters I had encountered along the way.

Q3 What process do you go through in creating a track?
When I was writing ‘Frequent Traveller’, I wanted the tracks to be the exact length in time from station to station, so the first thing I did was find a tempo and basic rhythm that best suited the feel of the part of the journey that I was writing about. I did broad brush strokes initially and mapped out the structure of the track using basic pads and loops.

As I only worked on the tracks during my commute, my creative energy was very different at either side of the day. In the mornings, I used the time to do all of the practical stuff, finding sounds that I liked and writing basic riffs. On my way home in the evening, my creative flow was more potent, so I would sift through all the ideas and sounds that I had created in the morning and pick out the stuff I was most in to and sculpt them into the track that I was working on.

Q4 Which artists influence your work?
Brian Eno, Phillip Glass, Pink Floyd, Kruder & Dorfmeister, Massive Attack, Kid Loco, Air, Aphex Twin, Penguin Café Orchestra, Trevor Horn, The Orb, Bonobo, Future Sound of London, Art Of Noise, Orbital, Leftfield, Underworld, Nick Cave, Kraftwerk and Faithless.

Q5 What would you say to someone experiencing your music for the first time?
‘Frequent Traveller’ is in its purist form a concept album, so when you listen to it, for the full effect, try to hear it from beginning to end in one serving on a good hi-fi, at a respectably loud volume.

Q6 What are your ambitions for your latest album, and for the future?
I didn’t set out to make a radio friendly album laden with hit singles, but its very sync friendly so I hope it attracts lots of film, TV and ad syncs, making the tracks very familiar to people. As it’s an album with a purpose, I hope that people buy it and listen to it as a whole and not just download individual tracks. I would like ‘Frequent Traveller’ to open doors for me to start writing film scores. I think this is where I will be in my most happy creative space.

MORE>> www.feltmusic.com/composers/Steve-Spiro



READ MORE ABOUT: