INTERVIEW: Bannerman

Richard Setford is Bannerman. A project conceived in the basement bedroom of a Western Springs flat in 2005 and focused on intensely visual and lyrically ambiguous songwriting. Bannerman is playing Mighty Mighty in Wellington on Thursday (23 September) and Whammy Bar in Auckland on Saturday (25 September).

This is our interview with the man himself.

Tell us about your time in One Million Dollars.

All good practice for Bannerman. Played a bunch of shows over six or seven years and produced three albums and got my voice working well. Also got to play some cool events and it set me up in the music industry - like meeting other musos and administrators and the like. But I wanted to move out of that style of music and concentrate on the Bannerman sound - which is more reflective, imaginative and dark. I couldn't do that in a 10 piece soul funk band, although a couple of songs on Soup Kitchen hint at where I wanted to end up. Still collaborate with some of the players; in fact Cass Mitchell (bass) and Finn Scholes (trumpet) are in the Bannerman live band.

You play guitar and vocals in Batucada Sound Machine. Is it fun playing with them?

Mostly yeah, especially when we get to travel overseas - which is becoming a regular thing. As much as Bannerman is a more personal project, I still like to have musicians around me. Not keen on ever being a singer/songwriter. So BSM fits the bill and I get to play crazy styles of music and learn alot about rhythms from South America and Africa and I sing in Portuguese and Spanish. It's a university. I'm also in The Brood, which is another thing altogether - punk/noise music. In a really small way there's a bleeding of the Bannerman aesthetic into both bands and vice versa.  Helps the songwriting to have so many projects of different styles.

Batucada Sound Machine are touring New Zealand in October are you looking forward to that?

Absolutely. It's mostly in the South Island which will be good, cause we don't get there enough. Christchurch, Timaru and Queenstown. I need to take the Bannerman band down there soon too.

Are you looking forward to playing Auckland & Wellington next week?

Hell yeah! It's been way too long since our last gig. We've only actually played two shows and only one of those was with the full band so this is the beginning. You know, the songs we'll be playing were all written and recorded around 2008 - so I am itching to get as many people into the music on the album as possible, right now. Cause I've got a whole bunch of tunes that we need to start playing. There's already two tracks in the set that aren't off the album. I wish we could afford to do more shows. A plug here for the bands we're playing with, The Living Diamonds in Wellington and Great North in Auckland.

Your new album The Dusty Dream Hole is out soon. Was it fun putting the album together?

Out last Monday - bam! On this album the tracks are all pretty different but they each have a really strong atmosphere. I'm big on creating music that is concerned with imagery, so the studio is a fun place to be. Matching a mood with an instrument is what it's all about for me. We got all the drum tracks done first - 24 songs. Then I had ten days of overdubs at a friends studio and a few musos came in to help. Brass and strings and that's where I met Flip Grater who is now in Auckland and part of the band. I ended up finishing 14 tracks, so there's another album out there waiting to be done.

What's your favourite track from the new album?

At the moment it's The Becoming cause the live interpretation is awesome - a real dark creeper of a song that builds and builds with big, swirly organs and I get to be a bit mad vocally.

What are your plans for the future?

I just want to play heaps and show this band off and get in the studio with them. Then try and maintain a momentum of steady releases.

What's your favourite ice cream flavour?

French Vanilla

For more info check out Bannerman on MySpace.