Article: On The Lamb

On The Lamb



“It was almost like Lamb came into the room without us even planning it."”
No, not Gwen Stefani’s fashion label. LAMB, as in the modest Mancunian drum ‘n’ bass duo who gained attention in the late ‘90s and early ‘00s with heartbreakingly beautiful tracks like Gorecki and Gabriel. Still not ringing any bells? Well, you could be forgiven for having a mental blank because as a unit the pair have largely been absent from the music scene ever since their 2004 split. It took a five year hiatus, three solo albums and a lot of soul searching for singer Lou Rhodes and programmer/beat maker Andy Barlow to reconvene and resume touring. Finally this year has seen the release of 5, the group’s fifth album and follow up to 2003’s Between Darkness and Wonder.

But before we talk about that, let’s jet back in time a little to late December 2009. Your writer was in attendance at Melbourne’s Prince of Wales hotel as an enthusiastic Rhodes and Barlow took to the venue’s cramped stage for one of their first Australian shows since the split. The pair played their opening song and afterwards were met with a deafening roar that lasted at least a minute, leaving the band gobsmacked and unable to continue until the ruckus had receded. I put it to Rhodes that moments like that must have made her and Barlow think ‘why on earth did we ever stop?’

“Gosh,” she laughs, “I think you’re lost for words at those kinds of moments. It’s just amazing when you get that kind of response. It’s like ‘wow... I’m just going to have to take this for a while.’” But, as happened at the show in question, it doesn’t take long for Rhodes to get back on point.

Despite the sort of rapturous reception they received from audiences, she continues “we’re both glad that we did split because I think we’ve come to a really good place as a result of that time apart. We’d come to the end of a chapter for Lamb back in 2004. We’d had ten years, four albums and our relationship had become a bit frayed.” In addition to the pair’s inner tension, they also faced mounting outside pressures from their record label Mercury (a subsidiary of Universal) to release more commercial sounding music.

Rhodes admits that she had been longing for a change in musical direction, but not quite the shift their record label was after. “By that time I was really aching to make acoustic music,” she explains. “I guess I was trying to pull Lamb in that direction and in retrospect that just doesn’t work. Lamb isn’t about that. So I was able to go off and do my solo records and tour acoustically and fulfil that need. It means that [now] Lamb can be Lamb.”

During their time apart, Rhodes wasn’t the only one keeping busy. Despite the fact that he was quite devastated by the break up (“he was so used to being ‘Andy from Lamb’ that when Lamb split he didn’t know who he was, in a way”), Barlow travelled, became a father and worked on his own solo project as well as producing other records. Following a string of ‘one off’ reunion shows in 2009, Barlow offered to assist Rhodes with the recording of her latest solo album, One Good Thing, at his home studio. “It became obvious that he was quite a changed man in a lot of ways,” she says. “That was a really positive process and part of the deal was that I agreed that I would sing on one or two songs for his Lowb project. That led to us working on Strong The Root, which of course became one of the songs on 5 and the process of working on that – it was almost like Lamb came into the room without us even planning it.”

Not long after, the pair had a fateful phone conversation which Rhodes remembers was the catalyst to the band’s reformation. “He was like ‘you know Lou, I really miss Lamb. Give me one good reason why we shouldn’t make another album’,” she explains. “And I tried to think of a reason, but I couldn’t. Then we decided we’d get back into the studio and see how it went and of course we had Strong The Root anyway, because it really did feel like a Lamb song. So that was the beginning, really.”

The break from Lamb inspired a renewed vigour for working with Barlow, though not all the songwriting came easy to Rhodes. The lyrics booklet for 5 details her constant struggle with writer’s block. “The whole album was overcoming that, really,” she says. “My history as a songwriter has been mostly writing love songs and I came to a point that I was so disillusioned with love that it wasn’t my muse anymore and failing that I didn’t know what to write about. A lot of the songs was me sitting there going ‘oh I don’t know what to write’ and Andy going ‘well... get on with it!’” she laughs. “He doesn’t mess around, you know. He doesn’t indulge my struggles at all. It was really interesting for me to challenge myself beyond my comfort zone and I really like the result.”

On the subject of the future, Rhodes isn’t one to peer too deep into the crystal ball. “I would like there to be more Lamb albums,” she says, “[but] I’d also like to do another solo album before too long. What I’ve learnt is that I love Lamb for what Lamb is; the amazing programmed stuff and the sub-bass and the power behind it and all of that but I love making acoustic music as well, so it’s really good to feed both of those needs. I don’t know what the future holds – it’s all open and I think that’s the way I like it, I like to not necessarily have the next few years charted out and just let it happen.”

Lamb currently don’t have any plans to tour Oz (they were just here in February) but Rhodes says “I don’t think you can keep us away for long.” In the meantime, enjoy their excellent new release 5, which is available from all good record stores.

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Have a listen to one of 5's many standouts, Build a Fire.