Music, Style & Culture

Chad Valley: ‘I Know My Way Around Keys & Chords’

Forthcoming albums, Friendly Fires and collaborations. Chad Valley is a very busy man.

Chad Valley is a very busy man. When not working on his solo project, touring North America or fronting his other music project Jonquil, Hugo Manuel is setting the wheels in motion for his own debut solo full length release. We caught up with Manuel at Field Day to talk about his forthcoming album, Friendly Fires and collaborations.

Have you had a hectic Field Day so far?
Yeah, it's been nice. I haven't seen anyone play, I've just bumped into people left right, and centre. I've seen a lot of old friends. I've never been before but it seems nice. There's a lot of good bands but I'm missing them all!

Is there anyone you're looking forward to seeing later?
Twin Shadow, I'm mates with them so it will be really great to see them again. I want to see Omar Souleyman, I love his stuff. Who else? Visions Of Trees, Trophy Wife.

You've just released your second EP but we hear there might be an album on the cards…?
Yeah, absolutely! I've literally just started working on it a few days ago so it's probably going to be out in March of next year. That's quite a long time but I've got the next month free to do the album and then I'm on tour from September until Christmas pretty much. So the idea is to get it finished in the next month, which is quite a tall order.

Have you got it all planned?
Yeah, there's some exciting things coming together. I've been writing tunes for it. I finished the last EP over Christmas so since then I've still been writing a lot of stuff. There's a backlog of stuff I want to tidy up. Something I'm going to be doing a lot on the album is having some guest vocalists. I'm getting all that confirmed at the moment so that's exciting. There's some cool names but I've not actually done any collaborations as Chad Valley apart from the one time I got my friend Rose to sing on a song but this I want to do more like actual collaborations, writing with someone else. So we'll see how it goes. I don't know if I'll be that good at it.

Is there anyone you're targeting in particular?
Yeah, there are a couple of people that are confirmed to do it but I shouldn't say really because they'll pull out then. But they're cool. There's a couple of heroes of mine so it'll be really good, I think.

And you're in another band as well, obviously, Jonquil, and they've been going a little bit longer than your solo project. Does it feel a little bit like starting again with Chad Valley, especially with working on your debut full length?
I didn't really do it as “now I'm going to start a solo project”, it just sort of organically happened because Jonquil used to be a lot more…not electronic but it was all done in the studio. It was more on the experimental end of things and we weren't really a live band, we were just sort of a studio band and then Jonquil kind of evolved into more of a live outfit and we started to write songs in a rehearsal room as opposed to just in a studio. So at the same time, I started doing more electronic stuff and it just carried on getting more and more electronic until I was doing the stuff that turned into Chad Valley and that's when I put the name to it, after I'd got all the tracks finished. So Jonquil's still going and we've got another album that's about to be released in November so it's a busy, busy, busy time.

How do you balance the two?
It's really, really hard - with difficulty. As I say, I finished the Chad Valley EP over Christmas and then I got straight to work on the Jonquil album and we've only finished that last week, five days ago now and it's literally straight on to Chad Valley. It's literally just one thing to the other. I've got to switch the way my brain works around because it's really different music and really different ways of making it.

You mentioned it being different there. How do things differ in the studio and with the recording process?
The main difference obviously is that Chad Valley is just me so I've got complete rein over whatever I do. I don't have to ask for anyone's opinion, "Is this riff good? Should we have this chord change?" In Jonquil it's very democratic. I'll write the songs and take them to the band and we'll work on them together and really deconstruct them and take them apart. But it's weird because there have been some songs that started off as Jonquil songs and then turned into Chad Valley songs and then certain songs that it's been the other way around as well. There's quite a bit of crossover in a way, it's just the instrumentation that's very different. Jonquil's guitar and bass and drums and Chad Valley is just synths and drums.

You've mentioned before that you wanted to move away from the lo-fi tag that you've been labelled with. How are you going to do that with the LP?
Just get better at production. The reason that I started doing stuff the lo-fi way was just because I didn't know what I was doing in the studio. I've taught myself over the years and a good way of masking my mistakes and trying to gloss over the fact that it wasn't very well produced was to make it all lo-fi - to record something and the put it all through a tape machine and back again and then do that again and get it all lo-fi. But now I've been practising a lot and reading all up on it, and I think my production is getting a lot better. I've been listening to a lot of eighties pop and I think that has some of the best production that there's ever been just because it's so clean and precise. So it's a combination of just because I can and because the music I'm listening to now is just pure pop music.

You're going on tour soon with Friendly Fires and SBTRKT. How did that come about? They're both on XL, is there a something in that?
Oh yeah, no there's no thing there. It's just that my label is the same people that manage Friendly Fires and so that's how that came about. Friendly Fires are also mutual friends through Foals who I'm friends with in Oxford so it was through that as well. And Friendly Fires came to a show of mine in London a few weeks ago and they really dug it so they asked me on tour. I'm doing some American dates with them and Theophilus London, which I'm very excited about as well in October. I love Friendly Fires. I saw them at The Great Escape in May and they were so good live. It's scary because they're just that good that they make everyone else look rubbish. I remember when Foals toured with them and Foals said it was horrible playing after Friendly Fires because they just couldn't beat the live show because it's just such a spectacle.

You mentioned about playing abroad there. What's your position like overseas?
I've got a really great label over in America who are really proactive with getting me stuff out there. I'm going on tour for the first time to the States for like a coast to coast tour supporting Active Child, who I love as well so that's really cool. And then I'm going to do CMJ Festival in New York and then I've got these Friendly Fires shows on the East Coast as well so I've got like a two month touring things in America and then there's a Jonquil tour of America as well so that's really exciting. I get to go around Europe a bit as well. Next week I'm off to a festival in Oslo and Gothenburg and then France in September. It's cool though. It's the best bit about being in a band. This month is like the only free time I have all year and I've got to make an album in it so it's not really that free.

Finally, I read that you're a classically trained pianist. How does that reflect in the music that you make, with your tendency to be quite experimental?
I trained in a really traditional, classical way at school and then I did music at university and studied very serious composition and musicology and sound design as well. I don't know how much of an effect it has. I know my way around keys and chords and things which is important for writing good pop music. You can wing it - a lot of people who are completely untrained write great music. But I hope it helps because I've spent a fucking long time learning all this shit and I don't use it that much. I play piano every day. Every morning I'll go downstairs and make myself a coffee and play piano and that's how all my songs start, by playing piano. I used to play bassoon as well.

Chad Valley will be going on tour with Friendly Fires this November. Check here for dates and tickets.