Exclusive: Matt Johnson 'New The The album next year'
06 March 2015
Newsdesk
Matt Johnson took some time out of his busy schedule to give a rare interview exclusively to Music-News.com about his latest film soundtrack for Hyena, in cinemas today. A project directed by his brother Gerard Johnson.
Matt Johnson told us how writing the soundtrack had reignited his passion for music. “In 2002 I put all my instruments away, I was quite disillusioned really and I took a lot of time off and lived abroad, and slowly it was through film soundtracks that I started to get my enthusiasm back. Also the pressure of not having to write words and having everything over analyzed, the feeling that you’ve got to make a statement all the time I suppose. It’s quite freeing, I love being in the studio more than I love being on stage. So it was a natural thing for me to do.”
On the inner working of his soundtrack recording process he said “I see the scripts at the very start of the inception of the project and they will give me footage as it’s going along. It’s a different process than working purely within music as the music has to work with the images as well. Rather than with a song based album it’s much more internal, I’m just expressing my own inner feelings as well as observations on the world. But this has to work in tandem, try different ideas out while looking at the images. I think it still sounds like one of my records, it just doesn’t have the singing on it.”
He went on to reveal, “What’s interesting is that it has given me the passion to do another [The The] song based album too, and I’ve been enjoying being in the studio. I’ve just started writing it, and the writing process you never know how long that will take. There’s a lot of material but there’s no finished songs yet. I’m still working away, and because I’ve got so many other projects going on at the moment, I can’t devote myself to that yet so it will probably be some time next year.”
Asked about the sound the album would take on Matt commented, “I think very stripped down, very simple, very melodic. I may play everything myself, I may get some of my old band mates back, I don’t know yet. But the songs themselves will have the usual combination of political and personal. There’s a lot going on in the world, it’s an interesting time, frightening time but a fertile time."
The full-unedited exclusive Music-News.com interview is below in two parts. To skip to this segment go to 9.15 on part one. A genuinely gracious, passionate and interesting man with a rich family history.
Hyena is a gritty and stylistic drama about a corrupt cop who gets in too deep. It opened the Edinburgh Film Festival this year and is written/directed by Gerard Johnson (Tony). It stars Peter Ferdinando (A Field in England, Starred Up), Stephen Graham (This is England, ‘Boardwalk Empire’), Neil Maskell (Kill List, ‘Utopia’) and Richard Dormer (Good Vibrations, 'Game of Thrones').
