The Man From UNKLE

Sixteen years in the business, James Lavelle has seen his musical outfit UNKLE transform and mutate many times, from its original incarnation as a trip-hop frontrunner, to the psychedelic rock band it is today. Lavelle himself is no longer the trip-hop wunderkind of yesteryear. The kid who ran block parties aged 15, the kid who formed the influential Mo’Wax label, aged just 18. The label that spawned a sound and a scene all of its own.

Now in his mid-30s, the spotlight may have dimmed on the man whose 1998 collaboration with DJ Shadow, Psyence Fiction, represents something of a high watermark. That album now stands up as one of the most significant electronic records of the era. Lavelle, for his part, has always been about the next thing. He keeps moving forward, recently releasing Where Did The Night Fall, though he has paused briefly this year to finally take stock.
He does so in front of a camera, in the documentary Lives Of The Artists, created as part of a Relentless Energy Drink series. The film juxtaposes interviews with Lavelle and recent concert footage of UNKLE with another tale of two freeride snowboarders as they traverse the fjords of Greenland.
“The documentary came about because I knew the director Ross Cairns a long time,” explains Lavelle. “He had been involved in the international department with Mo’Wax. My manager came and spoke to me at the end of last year about making this film. Myself and Ross got together, he gave me the first film he’d done, which I really liked, and it basically came from that.”
There’s a whole heap of history for Lavelle to rake over, and it seems the UNKLE journey has been quite the uphill one. For Lavelle, speaking about it was healing, and gave him a kind of closure. “I just wanted to get it out,” he says. “Be done with it and move on. It puts a full stop on things. It’s quite cathartic to put the past behind you. It’s been dragging around for a long time and I just felt it would be a good way of saying goodbye.”
He scored the film, drawing on the glacial beauty of the landscape the snowboarders encounter for inspiration. This gives the soundtrack a gorgeous ambient wash. “We’ve done a lot of stuff like that so I wouldn’t say a departure – you’re working towards a theme and the theme suits a certain style. You’re not going to go in and suddenly start putting massive beats when it doesn’t lend itself to that!” he laughs. “So really you’re just trying to work with emotion at hand.”
It must be odd, if not nigh-on impossible to soundtrack footage of yourself? “Pablo [Clements, Lavelle’s current musical cohort] had a really big hand in it because when it came to myself, I couldn’t really work on those parts of the film,” he says. “I could work on the music as an audible thing but not with those pictures because it did my head in. I can’t watch the documentary. I saw it at the screening and that’s probably the only time I want to watch it. I mean that in the nicest possible way! I’m not into watching myself. It was more about a process for me rather than the end result.”
It’s characteristic of a man not taken with looking back for more than a moment. Lavelle has long loved the live experience for that very reason – it is the place where the process and the end product interwine. With UNKLE forever changing, his solo DJing has been a comforting constant. “I really enjoy it still, though I haven’t played that much this year to be honest with you. It takes you to a very different mental place when you’re doing DJ gigs. It’s a lot more hedonistic, basically. The environment is, and the atmosphere is. That can be quite a physical thing sometimes.”
The current UNKLE set-up is the closest they’ve ever come to what could be described as a conventional band. It’s evidenced in the May release Where Did The Night Fall, a psychedelic trip of a record, and the accompanying tour, caught for posterity in the documentary, and showcasing a band indebted to Lavelle’s Britrock contemporaries. With members of Big In Japan filling out the UNKLE stage, it gives them there most assured live presence yet. “Yeah, it’s been good,” agrees Lavelle. “It’s got that whole comradery of being out with your mates. When you’re with a group of seven people on the road it’s really fun. Everybody’s watching over everyone’s back, it’s not such a lonely process. We’ve been doing the festival circuit, including Electric Picnic, which was brilliant. We’ve been playing a mixture of the last four albums but the new stuff has been getting a great reaction, ‘The Answer’ in particular.”
The partnership with Pablo Clements remains harmonious. UNKLE is, for the moment, a sturdy unit. “Yeah, I would like to think that we’re pretty solid right now.
It always helps to have a steady line-up. But, y’know, I had a steady relationship with Rich File for a long, long time,” qualifies Lavelle. Is the future looking rosy this time round? “I hope so. I can’t make promises, it’s always so much about the personal decisions you make at the time. It’s been a massive amount of work in the last year and that always puts a strain on things but the kinship within what’s going on is really good.”
It’s the inevitable and understandable strain that comes with making an UNKLE record. Each album has been like a revolving door of guest vocalists and musicians – it must be a massive project to undertake every few years. “It’s just logistics. You’re always waiting for things to happen, it’s always on the time of somebody else. It dictates what goes on the album a lot of the time.”
On Where Did The Night Fall, Lavelle looked to lesser known talents to give voice to his songs, the Ashcrofts and Yorkes of this world replaced by the likes of Katrina Ford and Gavin Clarke. A conscious decision? “Yeah, it was. Just because it was good to work with some new blood. Being involved with some up-and-coming artists is a really good feeling. It’s important to be supporting new talent.”
In truth, that has always been Lavelle’s ethos. The household names on old UNKLE records were just getting their start when Lavelle came knocking. The back catalogue reads like a recent history of British music. After all these years, does UNKLE feel like the same entity as when he started out?
“It definitely feels like the same thing. It’s just the environment changes. It’s the same process, the same aesthetic. It all stays pretty similar. It’s very close-knit, coming out of the whole Mo’Wax social environment that existed. So there’s a lot of incestuous behaviour!” He laughs. “It hasn’t changed much, it’s just that there are certain people that have just moved on.
“But then there are people that come back around. I’ve been spending a little bit more time with Shadow, stuff like that.” DJ Shadow and Lavelle had an infamous falling out over who deserved creative bragging rights for Psyence Fiction. A musical reconciliation remains a mouth-watering prospect. Would he work with Shadow again? “I’d never say never,” Lavelle offers. “I think it could be a really good thing to do. We’ll just take it one step at a time and see where we get to.”

Where Did The Night Fall is out now on Surrender All records.