Freshly interpreted by maximum rock ’n’ roll duo His Lordship (James Walbourne and Kris Sonne), the most cherished staples of Chuck Berry’s songbook have been given a new – often frantic and feral – lease of life in the form of Promised Land, a covers album released to mark what would have been Berry’s 100th birthday.
In our recent wide-ranging interview with Walbourne (the guitar-wielding bandleader who is also a member of The Pretenders, currently a member of Primal Scream and one half of The Rails), he told us how electrifying it had been to come at some of Chuck’s most celebrated work with a more experimental approach.
But first, how did the album come about?
“I came back to England, and we realised it was his 100th birthday [this year], so we thought, ‘Why not? It’d be a great thing to do to honour Chuck,’” James told us. “We’ve got our own studio, [Karma Studios, London], so we thought we’d just do it. There wasn’t much thinking about it – we had the means to do it, so we did it, and the Berry family seemed into it; that was part of it. But we did f*** around with the songs quite a lot!”
Not half. Sonne and Walbourne decided to go pretty left-field with some of the new arrangements…
“As it’s the holy grail, I’d rather not do [straight covers]. There’s been enough cover versions of those songs… I think the first song we did was Promised Land, which is my favourite [Chuck Berry song]. So, we started playing it and when we listened to it, it was quite disappointing because it was normal. I thought, ‘The world doesn’t need this – it just sounds like us playing Chuck Berry’, so we decided we had to tear up the rule book and do it how we would approach our own songs, which is in a very different way. We had to deconstruct them, for want of a better word. That would be a better way of showing respect – what would Chuck Berry do in that situation?
“We had to try and reimagine the songs,” James continued. “That took a while to do. The journey was interesting and we had the luxury of the studio, so we could just go in and record – just the three of us, me, Kris Sonne and Dave Page. Dave is a great engineer and mixer – he understands it. So many times, you go into a studio, and people don’t understand what you’re after.”
Plotting out a track list that omitted Berry’s signature Johnny B Goode (“What’s the point”), the group began to re-shape the Berry catalogue n in exciting – and surprising – new ways…
“At some points it was quite challenging – we went around the houses a bit to try and reimagine the songs. It was like, ‘How would Kraftwerk do Chuck Berry? OK – that sounds pretty good; let’s do that’. I’d go away and do a demo at home and then come in and play it to the boys, and then we’d go in and record it. The actual recording of the tracks we would only do a few times – it was very spur of the moment. We didn’t re-record and re-record… Once we’d found what we wanted, we’d only do a couple of takes – all live,” James said.
“There were only a few overdubs, we recorded some [extra] guitars on the song Promised Land, because that’s what it needed, but what you’re hearing [on most of the album] is a live band and live singing. I didn’t even have earphones on – none of us had them on – and I had a little monitor. We just recorded like they would’ve done back in the day, but we modernised it with the sounds we were using. The initial recording took five days, then we went back… The master tapes got nicked somewhere along the way! Luckily, we had made initial mixes that we loved and that’s what we had to use.”
So what song was it that Walbourne and Sonne tackled with Kraftwerk hats on we wonder? None other than Brown Eyed Handsome Man, James tells us…
“That’s the one where we went quite far with reimagining it – I thought it needed to be completely different. It took a while to come up with it, but I was imagining Kraftwerk… even though it’s not. It’s that relentless riff that goes around. The whole thing with this album is not to concentrate on the sound of Chuck Berry – the big red ES-335 – but it’s more about his songs and how we reinterpret them. I didn’t want to sound like a facsimile of Chuck – I wanted to focus on his songwriting.”
Read our full interview with James Walbourne here. His Lordship’s Promised Land is released on November 13th, find out more over on their official website.
