Introduction

Our music is influenced by and trawled from a disparate mix of musical contraband, be it string soaked old country and western records, 70's Bowie, Phil Spector's wall of sound, Lee Hazelwood and Nancy Sinatra, The Velvet Underground, Mantovani, aging crooners, young punks, old punks, synthesizers, Philip Glass, Stax, Moroder, 60s R'n'B, French pop - I dunno, I could go on forever - but essentially we are music fans rather than "musicians" and a band that has evolved in isolation from the rest of the world, which in today's climate of short-termism, attention deficit and faux-insanity isn't necessarily the key to fame, but if we were in this for fame and fortune I guess we'd have slung the towel in a long time ago. We simply do our own thing, we've learnt our lessons the hard way and survived on on our own terms, never forgetting why we are a band in the first place and I'm confident that we have a far longer shelf life than so many other bands out there, partly because of the type of music we make, and partly because we don't crave the instant success or care about being a part of any zeitgeist, we'll just continue to make albums and play shows for as long as there are people out there that want to listen.
The most miserable time for us as a band was when we were "signed", the most satisfying time was when we turned our back on all of that and took control of our own affairs, it was the best decision we ever made and we haven't looked back. We've managed to raise £20 000 through selling shares of our album to our fans and have recorded a critically acclaimed album entitled 'Bob & Veronica Ride Again'.

The Early Days

Anne and myself first met while Anne was performing at The Queen Elizabeth Hall with a dance company called V-tol (Anne is an accomplished and highly respected contemporary dancer and choreographer). I was working on V-tol's sound-score with Graham Cunnington of Test Department at the time, when myself and Anne eloped to form a band with a friend of ours called Chuck Whobrey who had a recording studio in a tiny village out in the sticks called
Anne GilpinMoreton Valence.
Before we knew it, we'd morphed into a 3 piece band known as 'Florida' (not to be confused with Flo Rida) and released a record through Gudrun Gut's Berlin based 'Monika Enterprise' label - Gudrun, along with Blixa Bargeld was a founder member of the legendary Einstuerzende Neubauten - Florida had a minor hit with the single 'The Girl on the Escalator' and made an album entitled 'Bob and Veronica's Big Move' and thus Bob and Veronica were born.

We toured a fair bit, in particular in Germany and the fact that our entire backline consisted of an Akai MPC, a kiddy's toy keyboard, an ironing board and a wooden table made it logistically easy, our tour-bus being an old Ford Fiesta.
Our music was electro by default, years before it became incredibly cool and years before terms such as 'electro-clash' or 'indietronica' came into existence. At the time, every band was pretending to be The Strokes and people in the indie world thought we were mad because we didn't have a drummer; the only reason we didn't was simply because we didn't have a big enough van. We had some great times though, we played with Jeffery Lewis and British Sea Power in London, Barbara Morgenstern and the late Saint Thomas in Germany and the last ever Florida gig we played the Brixton Windmill supported by the then unknown Hot Chip.

Florida, L to R Chuck, Anne,
and Hacker

"Musical differences" put an end to Florida with Chuck leaving the band to become a full time hypnotist, taking his MPC and wooden table with him, which basically left Anne, myself and the ironing board as an a cappella turn.
But we were determined to build a band up from scratch and became acquainted with Colombian bassist Leo Fernandez who at the time was touring with The Band of Holy Joy.
We hit it off immediately, not because Leo is an amazing bass player - which he most certainly is - but because we all had an unhealthy obsession with Serge Gainsbourg's 'Histoire de Melody Nelson', it brought us together and we would listen to it on rotation stoned out of our minds in Leo's bedsit on the top floor of a tower block in Leather Lane, looking across the great sprawl that is London and wondering how it could be possible to create such incredible music.
Leo Fernandez

And I guess this is the point that today's incarnation of Morton Valence was conceived. People often ask about the name, and even more often can't spell it, which in these days of search engines can prove somewhat problematic, it's not the easiest name in the world to remember either, but it's who we are and we ain't about to change it.
It's a name that can multitask, Morton Valence could be an old crooner, a classic motorbike or a soap opera perhaps? A mythological hero, a type of washing machine, a clothing line and of course a hick village in the middle of nowhere.
It's strange, but it feels like we never actually chose the name, rather it chose us whether we liked it or not.

Morton Valence

Anyway, we located a drummer - Virginie Blanc from Evian in France - added Leo's mate Yuri Pagos on maracas and a Chinese girl - Gigi Chang - who looked great and would sing 'Word Up!' in Cantonese from time to time, as well as play bits of random keyboards, possibly making us the most cosmopolitan band of the day, which was completely unintentional.

An early MV show with Gigi & Yuri

Morton Valence was now a band, albeit an extremely ramshackle one and we set about booking some shows, the first one being a short set in a pub in the Angel with The Pipettes, followed by an 'Adventures in the Beetroot Field' date supporting Breaks and British Sea Power which gave us good exposure and some good reviews, including one in Drowned in Sound.
We self-released a single - Man on the Corner - and were given the 'Best New Band' award by Fopp and the PRSF. The Filthy Dukes featured us on one of their 'mixes' and we were clearly having fun.

Fashion had caught up with us, as in the type of lo-fi electro music our old band - Florida - made was now very much the thing, even though we were moving on from that, the detritus of our electro past was still a part of our sound at that time.
Then out of nowhere we suddenly had a whole bunch of record labels knocking on our door, hotshot lawyers calling us up, "meetings" in swanky restaurants, we picked up a manager, or maybe a manager picked us up, I'm not sure? It was all very hectic and all I remember is a constant feeling of adrenalin rushing around my body all the time, finally putting pen to paper and signing a deal with what seemed like a very cool little indie label called Cheap Date. We went into it with a lot of excitement, feeling we'd taken the logical next step.

Wrong!

I don't want to go into a tirade into how utterly useless the label were as I think that would be a bit of an insult to uselessness, but I would suggest that the fact that Cheap Date no longer exist and we are going stronger than ever speaks for itself. You're probably thinking why did we sign with such a label if we had had the chance to work with something better? And it wouldn't be an unreasonable question either, the truth was, the more established labels were asking for a massive commitment from us for very little in return, lots of contracts on the table that from the point of view of an artist I found shocking - I later realised that this is completely standard - Cheap Date seemed to have a more enlightened approach and were willing to sign us initially on a single deal and then talk about albums later which seemed to make sense, plus they appeared to get the band on an artistic level.
How totally wrong and utterly idiotic we were, but wisdom is a great asset with hindsight, not least in the hurly-burly world that is the music biz. We were starting to see how the business operates and meeting so many bands with the same sorry tale, but we were determined to continue without repeating the mistakes of the past, our modus operandi simply being one of survival.
We had delivered Cheap Date a single - Sailors - which they sat on for about a year doing more or less nothing apart from inflicting artwork on us we didn't want and getting one of their mates to do a remix that I can only describe as a musical aberration, but we grinned through gritted teeth and acquiesced, after all, we had a "deal" even if it felt more like a prison sentence or a year of purgatory.

Camilo, Anne, Hacker and
Leo during the 'Chandelier'
video shootWhen 'Sailors' finally did come out, it received some great reviews, including 'Record of the Week' in Clash Magazine and was a favourite of Jon Kennedy's on X-FM who listed it in his 'Big 5', but the year of being snookered had taken its toll on the band with members dropping like flies, going through a succession of drummers including Marcelo Wig who left to go and play with Patrick Wolf, settling with a compatriot of Leo's called Camilo Parra who is our current drummer. We briefly went out as a 4 piece playing a couple of nights at Cargo in Shoreditch and some dates out of town including a ball at Cambridge University, attended by a friend of Camilo's - Alejo Palaez - who ended up replacing Federico Goez on synths and keyboards.
With Alejo it felt like the final piece of the jigsaw was in place and Morton Valence were complete and ready for action.

Shares

My favourite word in the English language apart from 'elbow' is 'serendipity', I probably sound like a daft hippy, but when things go wrong it's usually for a good reason and the only choice is to put things right, which will invariably be an improvement on how they were originally.
We are driven by a deep belief in what we do and knowing we had an album inside us, we were determined to keep going.
The whole music industry seemed to be in freefall and after our bad experience, signing another deal didn't look like a wise choice.
There had to be an alternative, and then we hit on something.
Our good friend, eco-activist and filmmaker Franny Armstrong - maker of 'The Age of Stupid', starring Pete Postlethwaite - raised a budget for her film through investment from individuals who wanted to be a part of her project. We met with Franny who gave us counsel in a pub in Soho, imparting some invaluable advice and pointers on the practicalities of going about such an undertaking.
The obvious difference with 'The Age of Stupid' being its explicit political stance, however the circumstances in a stagnating music industry seemed to be perfect to take such a risk - albeit fairly trivial compared to saving the planet - but nonetheless we put it to the test, our first port of call being our fans on our mailing list.
The response was overwhelming.
Selling shares at £300 each, we managed to put £20 000 in the bank in a relatively short period of time enabling us to put an infrastructure together to rival any small to medium sized indie label, ultimately giving us a budget to record an album.
We were able to do this mainly due to the fact that we'd built up a respectable following, doing it the old fashioned way by going out there and playing live.
The greatest asset any band has are their fans, record labels understand this and their job is to step in and exploit the fans and the band for the mutual benefit of everybody, well that's the idea, but they often get it wrong, especially when the label's agenda and vision of things doesn't tally with the band's, I would imagine this tends to happen when a band is signed as the "new" whatever happens to be big at that given moment without the band even realising it.
We had in effect cut out any such nonsense by cutting out the middleman, and besides, trying to sell MV as the "new" whoever is probably not a good idea, anyway we'd tapped into something truly radical, we were genuinely amazed by the response, it felt like a win-win situation, creating a strong bond between us and our fans, giving us total creative control over our music and sharing the rewards of any success with the lifeblood of any band, the fans.
In the summer of 2008 we went into the studio with our first choice producer - Brian O'Shaughnessy - and after a hiatus of more years than I care to remember Bob and Veronica were reborn in our album that we now owned collectively with our fans entitled 'Bob and Veronica Ride Again'.

The album is also a novel that comes packaged with the hard copy of the CD and is the story of how Bob - a south London neer-do-well - gets together with born again Christian, Veronica, I would describe the fiction as Mills and Boon on acid.
The novel is a conceit that accompanies the music. I'm a songwriter that dabbles in a bit of prose, the two things are kind of like distant cousins and I'm very proud of the story, but the songs on the album are what really matter, you can read a review of the story on the condemned to rock n roll website.

Morton Valence 2009The way we operate is certainly a lot more time consuming than simply putting one's faith in a label, but the satisfaction is so much greater when things work out, for instance, when our song 'Chandelier' got a record of the week on Radcliffe/Maconies BBC Radio 2 show, the sense that we did it through our own means in collaboration with our fans was all the more satisfying, we have complete creative control and feel like masters of our own destiny, things are going from strength to strength with a tour of Germany coming and big plans for Bob and Veronica for the rest of this year and into 2010, plus we are putting the finishing touches on a new album that will be released in 2010.

Conclusion

So, after many trials and tribulations over the years and even more drummers, it finally feels like we are a band at ease with itself, we aren't afflicted with the problems bands with "deals" have and the reason we continue playing is simply because we love what we do, it's beguilingly simple I know, but so many bands forget this fundamental point and that's why they don't last, we have carved and are continuing to carve out a space for ourselves where we can do things on our own terms and more significantly, we can survive and continue making music, which I for one will be doing as long as I'm able to get out of bed in the morning and pick up a guitar.
See you soon

Robert Hacker Jessett, x
September 09

 

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