Steve Black sounds genuinely surprised to hear that news of an upcoming Sweet Baboo album makes people happy. How it brings a thank-goodness-for-that sense of relief to his keen audience. But it’s true; his social media accounts are bouncy with smiles and aniticpation for the release of The Wreckage, later this month, and 6 Music’s Marc Riley spoke on all our behalfs commenting how comforting it is to have him back. Sweet Baboo cheers everyone up, see. Fact. ‘It’s nice to hear that,’ says the songwriter and multi-instrumentalist over the phone from his home in Cardiff. ‘That’s what you want, isn’t it? If someone likes your music, then it gives you it gives you a bit of energy than otherwise.‘
It’s been a while since Sweet Baboo’s been active, five years since 2017’s Wild Imagination. If we want to split hairs it’s not been a total Sweet Baboo dry patch, quietly slipping out The Vending Machine Project in 2018, an ambitiously varied compilation on Welsh label Bubblewrap in association with a Cardiff-based sausage-maker. As you do. Steve admits procrastination played a part in the lengthy fallow period, stretching out time to the extent he wasn’t sure if he wanted to make another Sweet Baboo record at all, confessing to ‘love-hate’ feelings about the project.
‘Really at my age I probably shouldn’t be calling myself Sweet Baboo,’ he half-jokes. ‘So I tried to think, do you know what, maybe I don’t want to do it anymore and maybe it was time to give it up. It’s easier just not to do it. Every time I sat down to write songs, it’s easy to throw yourself into something else, so I don’t have to deal with my relationship with my own music.’
He was busy-busy anyway with distractions and routes for creativity. Group Listening his clarinet and piano project with long term collaborator and friend Paul Jones delighted with two albums, and he regularly plays for Gruff Rhys and Cate Le Bon. After wrapping up with me today, he’s to spend the afternoon practicing Teenage Fanclub songs before joining them in Europe for a few dates. And over the last year alone he’s been a magic ingredient on debut albums from GIITTV favourites Ynys, Pixy Jones and multiple others.
With Sweet Baboo albums we’re accustomed to a view of the world both childlike and weary, wistful and focussed, comedic and tragic, happy and sad, and it’s with further relief to find that self-doubt in the run-up to The Wreckage’s creation hasn’t soured Sweet Baboo’s sweetness, for the want of a better word. Within the songs on the record, he searches for and muses on the positives, exploring notions of self-care and self-help. Not in a new age snake oil guru sort of way – although that might be an interesting listen – but pulling on his experiences of the everyday and domesticity instead. On ‘Horticulture‘ he bemoans his lack of green fingers yet values the time and care taken for himself. ‘Feed, watch and I wait, water, watch and I wait, watching my plants come alive…’ he sings as we imagine Steve relax into the nourishing rhythms of digging and tending.
New single‘The Worry’ a gentle foot tapper with piano and cheery sax, personalises the preservation theme further, pushing away any negative thoughts seeping into our indiviual consciousness. ‘That’s good,’ is the response at the suggestion of the song as an emotional soother. ‘I was trying to write it from the standpoint of my son. Don’t worry. I’ll worry on your behalf. But it’s also a note to self to try not worry all the time, even though you know, easier said than done.’
The album’s cover art courtesy of Islet‘s Emma Daman Thomas is inspired by silent movie star Buster Keaton and Yves Klein’s black and white photograph from 1960, Leap Into The Void, which sees Klein leap from a second floor window embracing risky abandon but with the unseen safety net below and out of shot. ‘We wanted a photograph that was staged and had not been manipulated,’ Steve explains. ‘Buster Keaton although he was a comedian, there was a sadness to it and Emma got that from the album. She found this picture of him and he’s singing to himself into a funnel and it goes back into his own ear.’
In The Worry’s video we see Steve in a hazmat suit comedically hotfooting it down the side of a volcano, easily outrunning molten lava.There’s the ever-present Sweet Baboo balance of optimism and the inevitability of life’s sadnesses in much of his work, unconsciously mirroring elements of Keaton’s performances, now one comes to think.
‘In a way It’s a self-defence mechanism. In one way you want to pour your heart out but at the same time I’m quite a private man. So it’s a balance. I love the stranger end of lyrics but with music I feel you’re not allowed to be positive or fun. Like it’s looked down upon in a way. But It’s naturally what comes out. I think if I did something that was totally bleak I wouldn’t be true to myself really.’
I love pop music and I want to make positive music,’ he adds firmly. ‘I felt like the songs have got this underlying thing of, I’m getting older and my self-doubt and worry and anxiety about everything. It was almost a metaphor for Sweet Baboo, my musical identity and that it was a kind of wreckage.’
‘Good Luck’ (‘a bit more of a banger‘) was written by his friend Huw Evans aka H. Hawkline, and finds Sweet Baboo in a more playful mindset. Steve started thinking about the late 60s and 1970s, David Bowie giving Mott The Hoople ‘All The Young Dudes‘ to record and Harry Nilsson living the big hits dream thanks to songs penned by Fred Neil, Randy Newman and Badfinger. ‘I thought it was quite good idea and to get someone else to write your single, because why not? Give it a different angle, because I got a style haven’t I. It’s nice to have a different style on there.’
A chat with Huw himself reveals the song was initially an amusing way to pass the time, a borderline Creedance Clearwater Revival pastiche he and Tim Presley (White Fence, DRINKS) sang to each other straight and country-style when making the new H. Hawkline record. ‘Sometimes you write a song and give them to somebody else, and you know, Steve and Paul arranged their version of it together and once you took the Creedence thing out of it, it changed and became a Sweet Baboo song. I like it a LOT more than the version I demoed!’
The Wreckage benefited from a more collaborative approach from the very beginning. Steve wanted to tie all the elements of the record together, so asked his friend the playwright and screenwriter Tim Price to help visualise a plot in the title song, getting a kick out of other people’s input. ‘I just think it’s probably better for me creatively. When I was younger, I wanted total control of everything. It was like ‘my vision’. I’ve played for a lot of other people now and I love that process, it’s social and collaborative. And it makes it exciting and not quicker. It’s that’s a part in my life where I don’t mind chaos, you know what I mean? I make better music for it.’
‘The Waitress’ has lyrics courtesy of Welsh Music Prize-winner and double BBC Radio 2 Folk Awards nominee Georgia Ruth. On the recording he stays faithful to her words, singing from the female protagonist’s point of view. ‘It’s a story and memory and I didn’t feel the need to change the lyrics really. I just thought it was nice to have it as it was. It was good to put myself in to another voice, if that make sense.’
‘There’s always a process when you’re about to make an album, where you’re trying to get everything together, and then you think, Oh, God, I haven’t got this. I haven’t got that. And I remembered that Georgia had written me some lyrics. I thought do you know what, someone’s taken the time to do that. That’s a good starting place to try and write a song. A different outlook on life and and it made me write the melody, the tune in a different way. I can listen to it with a bit more objectivity because I didn’t write the lyrics.‘
We have winsome charm on The Wreckage, of course. ‘Goodbye’ is a sweetheart of a song emerging whilst walking a neighbour’s dog during the pandemic. There’s a continuance on the canine theme, the Black family’s own good boy Herbie inspiring a song of his very own. ‘They’re omnipresent, dogs in my life. So I might as well write some songs about them.’ There are, Steve rationalizes, massive things going on in the world. It’s overwhelming to try and fit the big stuff into a two or three minute song. ‘Left Out The Door‘ is simple voice, piano and clarinet, and thoughts occuring whilst taking a walk near his home. ‘Sometimes it’s good to make it make the subject matter a bit smaller.’
Comeback single ‘Hopeless’ released during the oppressive heatwave last summer, strayed into bossa nova territory thanks to a shared affection along with Paul, for Stereolab. That, and buying a cheap nylon-stringed guitar. ‘It makes you want to play in a certain way, like Jonathan Richman and before you know it, you’re like, okay, just rip this off now,’ he laughs. ’We thought “ok, let’s go let’s go for it”. And so we did. And then I wanted to play flute as well. and so before you knew it we had a bossa nova beat behind it didn’t we!’
He mastered the flute during his time away, wanting to learn a new skill.
‘Not very trendy is it, the flute.’
You can make it trendy.
‘I’m trying to make it trendy but the other thing that happens now is with Herbie the dog, he absolutely can’t stand the flute. So every time you start playing it, he goes mental...’
The Wreckage is released on his own label Amazing Tapes From Canton, an outlet inended originally to put out cassettes and side projects. A pun on Awesome Tapes From Africa, it was just a vehicle to do some fun things.
‘And then when we thought about doing this record, like I was saying in the creative process I love to embrace the chaos, but every other aspect of my life I think I’m pretty – well I definitely am – neurotic. So I wanted to have more control, and do something different. Like have my own label, releasing my own records. I thought I thought it’d be exciting.’
And is it exciting?
‘It’s exciting to to be on the other side and to try and manage what’s going on. And realise that you can only do your best, can’t you.’
Steve’s father used to work in Birkenhead, driving the relatively short journey from Colwyn Bay where the family lived. It seems serendipitous somehow the Sweet Baboo tour kicks off in the Wirral town next month. He’s playing solo. Not that he wants to be a one man band, he hastens to add. No cymbals strapped to knees or drum on his back; he’s only taking the Buster Keaton vibe so far. He’s played a few shows in Wales and a sold out night at London’s Paper Dress Vintage, but now looks forward to hitting the road proper. ‘My wife always says I look the most peaceful when I’m on stage. I tried to trick myself to think I was happy making music and no one ever hearing it, but that’s not true is it? I obviously I want people to hear it.’
A couple of weeks after we talk, Sweet Baboo is announced as support for Bill Ryder-Jones‘s festive show in Liverpool. It’s a freezing cold night. Baltic, brass monkeys. He’s driven up specially, and the next morning he’s got an early start back in Cardiff working on the new Euros Childs album. Cos, always busy. But for now Sweet Baboo is on stage – ‘I’m Stephen – or Sweet Baboo, depending who you are,’ he says with a smile – dressed all in white and shrouded in a pale smoky mist, saying he’s sorry if we don’t know some of the songs but they’re from his new album, see. It’s so damn fantastic to have him back, his off kilter charm and humour takes the edge off the chill. No apology whatesoever is needed; indeed, a new song not even on the album is an early seasonal gift. It’s been too long. Tonight, we are truly the good and lucky ones.
The Wreckage is released on 27 January via Amazing Tapes From Canton
Sweet Baboo tour dates:
February 2023
Wed 15 Feb – Birkenhead, Future Yard
Thu 16 Feb – Glasgow, Hug & Pint
Fri 17 Feb – Sunderland, Pop Records
Tue 21 Feb – St Leonards on Sea, Marina Fountain
Wed 22 Feb – London, The Victoria
Thu 23 Feb – Ramsgate, Ramsgate Music Hall
Fri 24 Feb – Brighton, Komedia Studio
Sat 25 Feb – Oxford, Florence Park Community Centre
March
Wed 1 Mar – Manchester, Deaf Institute
Thu 2 Mar – Halifax, The Grayston Unity
Fri 3 Mar – Leeds, Hyde Park Book Club
Sat 4 Mar – Aldershot, West End Centre
Fri 10 Mar – Totnes, New Lion Brewery
Sat 11 Mar – Falmouth, Cornish Bank
Sun 12 Mar – Stroud, Prince Albert
Thu 16 Mar – Aberystwyth, Bank Vault
Fri 17 Mar – Rhayader, The Lost Arc
Sat 18 Mar – Cardiff, Chapter
Wed 22 Mar – Leicester, The Firebug
Fri 24 Mar – Birmingham, Sunflower Lounge
Sat 25 Mar – Nottingham, JT Soars, Nottingham
Photo gallery – Kevin Barrett
