Morcheeba livestream Blackest Blue from RAK Studios London

Building on several decades of creating delicious sounds – for their own records, in collaboration with artists across genres, together as a band, and on individual projects – Skye Edwards and Ross Godfrey have regrouped as Morcheeba to deliver Blackest Blue, a deceptively gentle collection of understated melodies, playful lyrics and gorgeous guitar riffs. 

The duo performed tracks new and old with tangible precision and care in this livestream, bathed in blue-toned light at London’s mythically-significant RAK studios. Morcheeba – along with Steve Gordon on bass, Dom Pipkin on keys and Jaega McKenna-Gordon on drums – created an atmosphere of the type of smoke-filled, low-lit, five-table jazz club that very few have experienced for a good while. While Edwards held centre-stage effortlessly, with vocals sometimes light and charming, sometimes expressive, imbued with double or triple meanings, Godfrey’s guitars (plural) built up worlds around her words, navigating all different colours of magic – though, of course, mostly the blues – and made a strong argument for greater recognition of the hardworking bottleneck slide. 

The record itself slips easily between moods, naturalistically changeable, at times so distant and ethereal as to feel almost ghostly (Cut My Heart Out), and at others grounded in the solid chords of a piano or the earthy vocals of collaborators Brad Barr and Duke Garwood (Say It’s Over, The Edge of the World). The images that recur through these tracks (the moon, the sea, the dark, the light, the open road, and love itself, of course) are by no means novel to the poet or musician, but Morcheeba draw something unusual and uncanny, reasserting the particular talent that permeates their back catalogue, alongside their demonstrably powerful and ever-increasing musicianship. Blackest Blue demonstrates once again that Morcheeba can turn a blues scale into something lovely, something specific; and they can send that scale through all kinds of machines to make it eerie, or calming, or thrilling, or lovely again, but a little differently.

Sylvia Unerman

For further information and future events visit Morcheeba’s website here.

Watch the video for the single Sounds of Blue here: