BE GOOD

Photography by Kaye Dougall. Interview by Heather Hawke

 

Interview with singer and guitarist Ash Cooke

The Oxford four-piece BE GOOD only have four tracks out, yet they’ve already garnered the recognition from BBC having played the organization’s Introducing stage at Latitude festival last year.

BE GOOD is comprised of Ash Cooke (guitar/vocals), Charlie Clark (drums), James Cunning (synth) and Patrick Burley (bassist). Although Ash and Charlie went to school together is wasn’t until the pair reunited nearly four years ago that the idea to create a band came to fruition.

At that time, both were heavily listening to doo-wop and older soul artists, because of that the initial music they shifted towards producing was a mixture of soundscape that incorporated folk music with doo-wop harmonies. After a few months, feeling the need to move on to something else, they saw the shift into an R&B sound as an exciting challenge.

Their newest track “Nightbus” – which was a part of Communion Music’s 2017 Singles Club – is influenced from some of the R&B and old funk records they had been listening to. The subject itself is about what it’s like to grow up in the suburban small towns like they had. It touches on feeling so isolated from everywhere else that anything that happens in your town – even the most mundane and unglamorous of things – take on a bigger significance.

Keep on the lookout for new music from them this year and check out “Nightbus” below.

I want to start from the beginning. Where did you grow up? What was your childhood like? Was creativity a part of your childhood? 

We all grew up in various sleepy towns on the outskirts of Oxford. My town was pretty quiet – not much to do and nowhere to go – but my childhood was good. When I was 12, me and my family moved to Taiwan for my dad’s job and I went to an international school there for a few years. Creativity wasn’t a big part of my childhood, that came a little later.

Tell me about your musical upbringing. When did you first become aware that music was going to be a part of your life?

I went to church every Sunday whilst I was in Taiwan. I remember I used to be absolutely mesmerized by the live band that they had there playing gospel and Christian rock. I don’t think I was much of a believer, but my experience with the music felt almost religious. Even though some of the songs were terrible, I think that had a big effect on me. Other than that, my exposure to music in Taiwan was pretty thin. The albums I listened to were pirated copies that I found at the night markets which ended up mostly being boy band albums.

Coming back to England from Taiwan when I was around 14 was like a second musical awakening. My old friends from the town had become teenagers and were listening to bands like Nirvana, The Pixies and Weezer. I hadn’t realized that music could even sound like that and talk about life in a way that connected like that. We used to just sit on the cricket field in the evenings talking about music and girls. Like a lot of kids, we started bands, I started writing songs, and since then it’s become part of who I am.

What was your formal / not formal music education like growing up?

Since about 8 years old I learnt jazz piano and went through all the exams and stuff. My dad initially taught me guitar when I was bit older, then I had lessons with an Argentinian jazz guitarist for a couple of years. Formal music education can be really great, and taught me my way around a keyboard and fretboard, as well as in other ways I’m not even conscious of. But once I became interested in songwriting, technical skill became rather unimportant to me. I’m probably a worse pianist now than I was when I was 15, but I can live with that!

I know you all met in sort of a scattered manner, but it worked since you had a similar music taste and interest in the local scene. What is your local music scene like in Oxford and how have you seen it change over the years?

BE GOOD came together through a few fortuitous encounters, helped by the fact that we were all interested in the local scene. Oxford has always been a pretty fertile place for forward-thinking music, especially for pretty cerebral yet popular music. Radiohead and Foals are probably good examples of that. The small size of the place gives bands a chance to figure themselves out without being swallowed whole by the machinery of a big city. Right now, it’s an exciting time with a lot of great bands and artists with really different styles helping each other out. We’ve got two or three good venues and touring bands are starting to see Oxford as an exciting city to come to. We love the bands here.

Besides playing a couple shows late last year, one in London and on in Oxford, you guys spent your evenings recording for an EP release at the beginning of this year. How are the new tunes shaping up?

We’re really excited about the new songs that are starting to take form now. Most of our songs are set in a kind of twilit suburbia reminiscent of our adolescence, and the new tracks all very much exist in that world too. We’re still recording with our shitty equipment in our bedrooms, but there’s a greater confidence to production which we might not have had before.

What’s the writing process like? Is it an individual thing that comes together over time, or is it a group effort?

The beginnings of a new song usually come from pretty undramatic and surprising places – little moments or things that I overhear. My phone is full of notes and voice memos, quite often recorded on the bus or train. We’re interested in making the mundane feel dramatic. Our latest single “Nightbus” documents a drunken ride home which is a pretty familiar and unpleasant experience to most people in the UK, but we wanted to make it seem beautiful because in a way it is. Writing about the extraordinary is difficult. Writing about the ordinary is harder.

Production is also a big part of the creative process for us, and that’s where the rest of the band comes in. A lot of the time the song will really come to life as we record it, and almost always sounds completely different to how it starts.

Are you ever intentional when you sit down to write? Is there ever a “I’m going to write a song now” moment or is it more ephemeral, like you’ve been kicking something around in your head for days, weeks, months, and then suddenly it comes spilling out?

The architecture of a song may come about intentionally, but the real process involves living with it over the course of a few weeks or sometimes months. It’s a naturally slow process for us. Apparently, Charlie comes up with a lot of drum beats whilst he’s running.

When you first start writing a piece of music, is writing something you enjoy doing? 

The act of writing is not something I particularly enjoy at the time. Sometimes it feels like hacking through a big piece of rock looking for a kernel of something beautiful or true. Yet I still feel compelled to do it. Listening back to something we’ve spent a few weeks recording – when everything hangs together –  is a pretty euphoric experience which makes it all worth it.

What has been your favorite part about the writing / EP creation process?

We’ve spoken about this together before. There are kind of two points in the process that are really exhilarating. The first time listening to the sketch of a song is really exciting. You’re hearing something that may have not existed a couple of hours before that point. At that stage, you’re not just hearing what it sounds like, but also what it could sound like. Then there’s the point at the end of the process where we’ve finished everything and listen back to it together in a bedroom. At that stage, we may have already lived with the song for quite a while, and it feels good to finally be happy to let it go and exist by itself.

Have you had any mentors along the way?

A musician called Richard Walters took us under his wing last year. He’s an amazing songwriter with a beautiful voice, and a lot of experience in the industry. He helps us with the management of the band, gives us a lot of good advice and has sorted most of the releases for us. There’s a lot to be cynical about in the music industry so it’s good to have someone who has our back.