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ProfilesYou are in: Bradford and West Yorkshire > People > Profiles > Hebden Bridge's valley full of noise! Hebden Bridge's valley full of noise!"It's a valley full of sound. The whole Calder Valley is awash with noise!" So says Andy Wells, one of a growing community of musicians based in and around Hebden Bridge who say it's time for their music to get heard. We've been out to investigate...  Some of the Calder Valley's noisemakers! Andy Wells is passionate about music - always has been and always will be. That's easy to hear in everything he says on the subject. He's one of a group of like-minded musicians from the Calder Valley who have been playing together in one way or another for years and who now want to show that they've got as much, if not more, to offer as any bunch of musicians from nearby towns and cities like Bradford, Leeds or even Manchester. Their sound? Well, it's being described (by themselves, no need for media-created genres here!) as the Caldersound. And what does that actually mean? Well, that's where things start getting difficult - and, as it happens, really interesting - because it's so varied as to be almost impossible to describe!  Andy Wells To try and dig a little deeper into the nature of the Caldersound, let's introduce some of those currently making it! First there's Andy himself. In many ways, he's the man who's pulling the Calder Valley's different musical threads together - not only does he make his own music with his progressive rock outfit Pilgrym, but he also works as a producer, engineer and musician with other Hebden Bridge players who are wanting to record their music for posterity. Then there's Creedy. Currently working on a project with Andy called Privileged Vagabond, he describes his music as Psychedelic Progressive Folk - and he also happens to play with Andy's band! Another participant in creating the Caldersound is Richard Dalby. He plays guitar on some of Creedy's songs, but is also in another group, Maghribibeat, a band who describe themselves as 'the REAL sound of Morocco'. Also playing in Maghribibeat is Mohammed Ibn Sina who came to Hebden Bridge in 1995 and has never left! He's the leader of the band - though sometimes he says he's not so sure! Finally, there's Nic Chapman who's travelled - musically and physically - from Manchester to South Africa and Germany before finally alighting in the Calder Valley playing what he describes as Progressive Folk. A more disparate bunch of musicians it would be hard to find, but here they all are, sat around a table in Hebden Bridge - and perhaps that togetherness and sense of community is the key to the Caldersound!
Andy, who kick-started the Caldersound project and is compiling a showcase CD to give an insight into what it's all about, admits that he takes his inspiration from another time and another place - but with good reason: "There just seems to be a bit of a thread running through everything, a little bit similar to a genre I studied at college. I just liken it to the Canterbury scene in the late '60s and early '70s. Everybody was playing in everybody else's band. Caravan's bass player was playing with Hatfield and the North. Hatfield and the North's keyboard player was playing in Egg. Egg's bass player was playing in Robert Wyatt's band...It's all a mixture and it's very similar with these guys. A bit incestuous really, but that's what drew me to it! It's the uniqueness of the sound...There's no one individual not affected by another, it's like a chain of events that creates the music that runs through the area." And if Andy is pressed to sum up the Caldersound? He gives it a go: "There's a lot of 'world' music there, a lot of folk, a lot of progressive music, a lot of jazz and things, ambient and electronica. It all just gets jumbled up!"  Mohammed Ibn Sana aka 'Mo' The problem, says Andy, is that not many people outside the Calder Valley get to hear this music. These musicians all laughingly refer to their home as 'The Sticky Valley' - a place few ever leave once they've arrived (but hopefully without Royston Vasey's dark and rather scary undercurrents, League of Gentlemen fans!). As Andy puts it: "It's nice to have these guys around, it's just a shame that the outside media world hasn't recognised the skill of people in this area. They don't really go out of the area much, they're like trolls! To get them out there, we've got to bring people in." And that's what all the assembled musicians are hoping will happen once the Caldersound is heard by an unsuspecting world... Creedy, whose work-in-progress album Privileged Vagabond currently stands at over an hour in duration ("It's psychedelic progressive folk - and the progressive bit progresses it right up to about 70 minutes!") says the difficulty, and pleasure, of describing so much of the music made around Hebden Bridge is that it's just so varied. Take his own music, for instance: "I've wanted to know for years what kind of thing I was doing. At gigs, people would say, 'What sort of stuff do you do?' And I'd just say, 'You tell me because I've no idea!'" However, Creedy admits there is one particular influence which can be spotted among all these different takes on the Caldersound - a uniting factor - and that is, of course, the place where the music is made: "We live in a valley surrounded by trees and you only have to walk for ten minutes and you're right in the middle of nowhere. It's the most inspiring thing and you're constantly in touch with nature. I think the attitude of the people is pretty chilled as well. It's inspiring, for me, certainly."  Creedy Inspiration is also important to Mohammed Ibn Sina - 'Mo' to everyone around the table - who has lived in Hebden Bridge since 1995. As Maghribibeat's lynchpin he remains impressed by what he hears around him: "Through these years I've met some phenomenal musicians around here - people just into their own stuff and always happy to take on other stuff. That really makes me proud of the north of England. I have musician friends in London and they come here and say people have a different view of world music here than in the rest of the UK." And perhaps Mo has made a very important point there. After all, it would explain why so much of the music currently emerging from the Calder Valley has so many influences - and that's what makes it sound so different to the usual 'boys with guitars'-type bands you can hear down the pub in so many places in West Yorkshire any night of the week? Hebden Bridge has, of course, always tried to be just that bit unique and it's the collaborations between musicians which take place here which mark out the Caldersound as much as anything else - there seem to be none of the territorial attitudes you might expect between bands. Richard Dalby is a good example - in fact, he says working with these other musicians has really enthused him: "I play some guitar on some of Creedy's tunes. I also in Maghribibeat. I also do my own music under the name of Sugar Fire...I recently did a recording with Andy, a tune called The Big Soul, and that's as much a collaboration as the Sugar Fire thing because Andy was a key part. He's helped to kick-start me into doing some more stuff as well as playing with Maghribibeat and Creedy!"  Nic Chapman For Nic Chapman, coming to Hebden Bridge and working with the musicians here has also been a refreshing change. He's been in bands since he was 13, including one band - The Space Monkeys - who were signed with Manchester music legend Tony Wilson's Factory Too label. But after being sacked from that band (which he now laughs about) and following some years of travelling around South Africa and Germany, maybe he's found a proper home and a community of people he can work with?: "In the last six or seven years I've tried to go solo and concentrate on songwriting without collaboration because I think it's very hard to find musicians where you can create some sort of group entity. I eventually tired of the whole process of being in a band. I went solo and travelled around...I came back to Hebden Bridge and was going to go on to Berlin but I was staggered by the amount of talented people here and I must admit I was very influenced by a few of the local musicians and decided to go a different way with my music." Nic says hooking up with Creedy and, later, with Andy Wells has made a big difference and now he's making his own contribution to the sound of The Sticky Valley. Obviously he never got to Berlin... Andy and the others are also doing their bit to pass on their communal knowledge and experience, with Andy's day job at Calder College Studios meaning he can get the students there involved in the Caldersound. He explains: "The students record the bands and I mix it. I supervise it all so the students can't mess it up! We pass on the skills to the young musicians coming to the College. We let them record not only themselves but professional musicians as well...We teach them to engineer, to mix, to play."  Richard Dalby At the bottom of all this is passion - a simple passion for creating music which means he also finds himself helping others around the Calder Valley to do the same. Nic Chapman says: "It's just something I have to do, something I can't not do. It's the way I express myself. Ever since being a spotty teenager when I used to lock myself in my bedroom and tinker with the guitar, it's been a form of expression with which, over years of playing, you can explain things in music that you can't through speaking. It's a need, it's a must." And Sugar Fire's Richard Dalby adds: "I realised that doing music was something I could do and it opened my life up a lot, really. The Caldersound thing is an extension of that. Music is an experience and means getting to meet other people...I'm very happy now!" And thanks to these guys, and the whole community of Hebden Bridge musicians currently doing their bit to create 'a valley full of sound', their music is in fact starting to be heard further afield. Playing one of Maghribibeat's songs on Βι¶ΉΤΌΕΔ Radio Six, Tom Robinson described it as "a cracker" and Sugar Fire's Joyous Heaven has been voted Track of the Week by the DJ's listeners. That, clearly, is just the start they need. In fact, Andy Wells is already looking forward to the next step: "One thing I want to see before the next couple of years are out is at least Maghribibeat or Sugar Fire doing a small contribution to the WOMAD Festival or something like that! That'd be great. Or Nic and Creedy at the Cambridge Folk Festival. That's a benchmark we've got to hit next. Once the Caldersound album's out, that's the next benchmark. That's where we're heading." All the latest Caldersound tracks can be heard via the weblinks on the right of this page!last updated: 18/08/2008 at 10:56 You are in: Bradford and West Yorkshire > People > Profiles > Hebden Bridge's valley full of noise! |
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