ow, Norwich knows all about Gogo Dragons, don’t we. But what about their more grounded cousins, Gogo Penguins? Tis Mancunian three piece have been going
great guns since their Mercury Prize nomination a couple years back, and their new album is due out this month. With influences from Aphex Twin to the classical greats, they’re a classy cut above the rest. I spoke to Nick, the Penguin’s double bass player, about jazz and how they got their intriguing name.
How come you’re called GoGo Penguin? Initially we were just three guys getting together to make some music; there wasn’t even really a plan to make a band and go out and gig, we just wanted to get together to play. A friend of ours who was running a night in Manchester had a band pull out so he got in touch and asked us if we fancied playing. We didn’t have a name. Tere was a weird, stuffed papier-mâché kind of magpie thing that looked more like a penguin. Someone sug gested our name could be Penguin, then Go Penguin, and finally Gogo Penguin! Do you own that crazy bird now? No I don’t know what happened to it, it’s been lost in the mists of time, probably for the best!
24 / February 2016/
outlineonline.co.uk
How would you describe your sound? Would you describe it as nu jazz? No I probably wouldn’t. It’s really difficult for us to describe it because we’ve got so many influences. Chris and Rob both studied classical music and I studied jazz, so there’re obviously those elements in our music but we’re also really into electronica and try to replicate electronic music in an acoustic way. In fact somebody called it acoustic electronica, which doesn’t make much sense! We try not to think about it too much..if we call it jazz people expect certain things from the music that we might not necessarily do. To what extent do you include improvisation when you play live? How does that work between you?
“We couldn’t really believe we were signed to Blue Note!”
We’re looking at some of the new tunes now. We wanted to record the songs in the best way we could for the album but then when playing them live we want to incorporate some improvisation. Normally we play the tune and then there’ll be solos and stuff. We like to keep it fairly loose so we can go wherever it takes us on a whim but without getting too free jazz about it. It’s quite difficult to explain. At what point did you start getting into
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