License To Chill

Zero 7’s Henry Binns can still vividly recall the most embarrassing moment of his life. It happened three years ago, onstage in Hyde Park, when he attempted to sing one of José González’s vocal parts from their hit album The Garden in front of 40,000 unimpressed James Blunt fans.

“I still have nightmares about that moment,” he winces. “I don’t mind making a fool of myself – and sure enough I did. That whole tour was bizarre. The record company thought it’d be a brilliant idea to put us on with James Blunt. All we really did was make small children cry. The further in we got the more kind of rowdy we became – in as much as Zero 7 can get rowdy – and José was having none of it. I asked him was he gonna be able to sing the song in Hyde Park, and he said, ‘No, mate, I’m going to America,’ so I thought, ‘Oh shit, I better do it!’ So I did it. Nuff said.”
As we’re speaking, Binns and his musical partner Sam Hardaker are frantically rehearsing for the first date of a major tour to promote the band’s new album Yeah Ghost.
“We’ve got our first gig in Bristol in four days, which is shaping up to be like a big homecoming thing, so we’re practicing like crazy. Basically it feels like the last three years have all been building up to this moment. It shouldn’t feel like that, but somehow it does.”
Although it’s been three years since the last Zero 7 outing (the band are named after a Honduran disco bar, incidentally), the pair kept themselves busy with electronic side-projects, recording and touring under the monikers Ingrid Eto and Kling.
“It was a waste of time for all our efforts to have just the one outlet. So we decided to play around with some smaller projects, to allow ourselves the freedom to do what we like. We enjoyed the chaos, the thrill of knowing it could all fall apart at any moment.”
Yeah Ghost is something of a departure from the lush melodies of The Garden. It’s a lot more instrumental (though Binns does sing on the track ‘Everything Up’) and, crucially, long-time collaborator Sia isn’t featured. Binns insists that it was a creative rather than a personal decision: “I think after we did The Garden, we just thought it was time to try and do something different. In a way you can become creatively a little stagnant – stagnant might be too harsh a word – but we knew we needed to push ourselves into an unfamiliar environment in order to try and get something new and fresh. And in doing that, you basically have to rip the lid off everything. Sia wanted to move on and do her own thing anyway.”
Into Sia’s shoes stepped Londoner Eska Mtungwazi, who sings on four tracks, including lead single ‘Medicine Man’.
“The first day she came down to my house in Somerset, we just sat there and listened to tons of music for hours and hours, something I haven’t done for years. Just playing music of all different kinds, back to back – from Britney Spears to these weird Swedish bands from the Seventies. So we hit it off immediately. She loved our music and we had ‘Medicine Man’ written in about 30 minutes. She just blew life all over the music, put everything in shape. She did more in two days than we’d managed in three years!”
Although the Zero 7 tour proper kicks off in Bristol, the band did make an appearance at the Electric Picnic last month.
“We played on the Friday afternoon, before things were really kicking off. It was a funny time to play because things were still being set up. Also, the fact that we were playing a set composed of entirely new material didn’t help. We were like Neil Young or something, we didn’t play any old stuff. So we were asking quite a lot of the audience, but they seemed to get into it by the end.”

Yeah Ghost is out now on Atlantic Records