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here’s a pause. It’s hot. We’re in the
breakfast room of the Baletna Skola Hotel. It’s a few hundred yards off the A road from the airport to Split, and right by the sea. It’s pretty. The white room is flooded with light. Huge glass windows look out to the green- leafed wooded islands across the bay. The waves glinting in the sun are lapping at the shore, just feet away from where we sit. It’s very hot. The air is heavy and still. Vann goes to open the windows.
Returning to the table he says “The process is serving the music, there’s no show-boating.” “With improvisation in performance there’s an element of ‘Oh! look at me!’”, Hunt points out. And in this band the whole point of everything is to simply serve the whole. Vann’s joking when he says that anyway none of them know how to solo, though playing
music when, writing of Spiro, he used the words “refreshingly unnerving.” Though in Vann’s case, he claims any similarities with ’70s Dr Feelgood stage moves are purely coincidental.
Hunt gamely admits that “I’ve always looked insane when I’m playing. There’s no contrivance: it’s sadly genuine.”
“It’s a heightened state,” says Vann. “Moving on stage frees you from worrying about the music. I perform better when I’m moving.”
“I feel like I’m being thrown around by the music,” Harbour says. “I feel that I’m in the flow of it, on a fairground ride, and it’s making me move in different ways.”
“Actually,” says Hunt, “when the
music’s flying I stop moving because I feel like I’m floating on it. I’m being carried away on a wave and I don’t have to do anything. That’s an amazing feeling.”
They met a Sufi musician at Celtic Con- nections earlier this year. He said their sound reminded him of Sufi music. He told them that Sufi music takes you up to differ- ent levels. He said, Vann recalls, “that we’ve reached first sky and there are seven skies and he hadn’t reached first sky yet and that’s all he was trying to do with his band. He talked to me at length about ‘breaking out’, and was saying perhaps it has to be improvisation now that moves us on.”
What did they think about that? Could improvisation play a part in some- thing so tightly arranged to ensure that none of the instruments predominate?
in Spiro you can see how they might have got out of the habit.
It seems that form or technique is not just a musical issue relating to what they each want to express and what they want the whole to achieve, but an extra-musical issue too. It’s about how they see them- selves and each other and their roles with- in the band.
Unity in and through music is some- thing that they all consciously strive for. It’s not about the signature sound of any one of them, but the noise they create togeth- er. Harbour says “It’s about each one of us being small, really,” and Hunt goes one further. “It’s about being nothing but part of a whole.” They say their music is “very much about togetherness, about being one machine, rather than a band of soloists. All the parts are totally inter - dependent. It’s specifically constructed so you couldn’t take one of them away.”
You can see why the Sufi musician liked it. It sounds like they’re all doing away with their egos. “It’s true,” says Vann. “There’s a lack of ego in that the notion of playing a part and being impressive all goes out the window. It’s just about the way all the instruments relate, nothing to do with what you want to do yourself. The enjoy- ment comes from being part of a whole.”
It’s difficult with Spiro not to have a thoughtful conversation. Hunt is con- cerned that I might have the idea that ego never rears its ugly head in the band. It does in the rehearsal process, he assures me, so I start imagining punch-ups and “It
only plays a destructive role really. Ego,” he says, “is the antithesis of unity isn’t it?”
Harbour says: “Unity is a really good word for how we construct our music, for what we feel when we perform” and Vann worries that they’re coming across as pious, which they’re not.
At college I read a paper discussing the make up of bands reflecting the soci- ety that they’re part of. If the strict hier - archy of the classical orchestra reflected the politics and structure of the society that created it, I can only assume that Spiro are from some secret Utopia some- where in Bristol. In a world where One Direction are UKIP with Simon Cowell as Nigel Farage, then Spiro would be the Labour party under John Smith with their manager Alan James as John Smith. And all the band as John Smith too.
But Vann says “I don’t think we feel any great social responsibility, there is no con- scious notion of setting an example,” though he points out that the way they play their instruments, the tunes and riffs they write, what moves them musically “is all a reflection of our inner selves, so any social or political views we have will all be present on some level in the music.” I wonder if these ideas might be implicit in its structure.
They think of riffs and tunes as people whose journey through a piece involves a lot of power struggles and while they might “arrange a section giving the musi- cal parts equal power to make the overall sound more powerful” there are a lot of cycles of growth and death in the music. Hunt points out there are “allegiances between parts unifying to become more powerful and overwhelm another part. But then they might start to break up and become more fragile; become twisted, dis- torted, damaged, sometimes dying alto- gether and absorbed. There is always an ebb and flow of power of societies or indi- viduals dominating and then later being dominated themselves. I think our music does reflect this,” he says.
So it follows, Vann reckons, that their personal beliefs will “on some level come across to the listener.” It’s a view that accordeonist Jason Sparkes, to whom I speak later on the phone, concurs with. “In our case, our political and social condi- tions inform our music and I think that comes across. Not on a conscious level. I’m not sure how the process works, but I think it happens.”
Perhaps the way pieces are composed is picked up on some subliminal level. “Everyone contributes,” says Sparkes, then goes straight for the e-word. “It’s not ego- driven. We’re part of a unit and all equal. Part of the process of writing is that things evolve, though we don’t always know how. It’s a creative process that’s different to every other band I’ve been in.” He thinks the fact that they met at a demo- cratic, all-embracing and non-hierarchical open-mic session in a local Bristol pub set the tone for the way they work together.
Back in Croatia, Habour is thoughtful. “I write a good deal of the music but it’s collaborative, would you say that’s fair?” The others nod. “Imagine a big pot, a caul- dron. The initial idea is usually a riff, we put riffs and stuff into the pot and I go away with it. It goes round and round in my head and I pick out bits that I like and build on it, writing it out, making it warpy and weird, bringing it back. When I’m mak- ing patterns, working out systems, I do all that on paper, I’d go insane otherwise.”
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