We speak to cinematic soulsters The Milk about their superb and ambitious new album, Borderlands, which has been influenced by acts such as Brian Wilson, Paul McCartney, Miles Davis and Michael Kiwanuka.
This month, Essex four-piece The Milk – Rick Nunn (vocals, keys), Mitch Ayling (drums), Luke Ayling (bass), and Dan Le Gresley (guitar) – release their fourth album, Borderlands. The band met at school and bonded over a shared love of music, particularly a fondness for soul.
Borderlands, which features the Soul Choir and other guest musicians on trumpet, saxophone, flute, violin and viola, is The Milk’s most ambitious and fully realised record yet – a stunning set of cinematic soul songs that draws on influences old and new, including Brian Wilson, Paul McCartney, Miles Davis, Marvin Gaye, Kamasi Washington, Michael Kiwanuka and Thundercat.
Reviewing the record for this month’s issue of consumer magazine Hi-Fi+, I called it, ‘a melting pot of ‘60s and ‘70s-style soul, modern funk and jazz, and vintage film soundtracks.’
I added: ‘Like all the best records, this album takes you on an emotional journey and is designed to be listened to in one sitting – it’s a coherent piece of work that starts with the striking and filmic I Need Your Love and closes with the epic love song, I Saved My Best For You, with its silver screen strings.’
To get the full story behind the making of Borderlands, Say It With Garage Flowers went for a couple of beers with Nunn in an East London pub on a warm July evening.
“We’re very much into making a body of songs that has a beginning, a middle and an end – that’s how I listen to music at home,” he says. “I like the commitment of putting a record on and then having 40 or 45 minutes when I don’t need to make another decision.”
So, we settled in and listened to what he had to say…
Q&A
Borderlands was recorded over the last 12 months or so at your drummer Mitch Ayling’s Woods Lodge Studio in the Essex countryside, with the band playing every track live in the room together…
Rick Nunn: That’s something that we’re very attached to – it’s a bit of a dying art form. We work well as a rhythm section, and we have to try and capitalise on that – we love records that sound like they’ve been made by a group of musicians in a room. We went for a big, ‘70s wall of sound-type production, but we still wanted it to be anchored around a four-man rhythm section – that was important for us.
Did you have a definite idea of the kind of album you wanted to make – it’s a big and ambitious-sounding record…
Rick Nunn: We spent about a year arguing about the references and batting ideas around, and eventually we all gave in and said, ‘Let’s make something huge.’
People who like soul music will hopefully like it, but we also just wanted to make something that was a talking point in itself – even if it’s not your thing, it’s a big-sounding record.
‘We went for a big, ‘70s wall of sound-type production, but we still wanted it to be anchored around a four-man rhythm section – that was important for us’
Our studio is a lovely retreat – we’re lucky to have it and it means we’ve got total control of the process. Yeah, we could’ve made a stripped-back record, but we’ve done that before. We’ve got a unique space where we’ve got the option to make a huge-sounding record – the kind of record that if you were playing on the clock, it would cost a fucking fortune. Very few bands have got the resources or the budget to do that – to make that kind of high-production, mid-‘70s soul record.
The album was mastered on vintage analogue equipment by Lewis Durham (Kitty, Daisy & Lewis) at Durham Sound Studios in Camden, North London. Are you into vintage gear?
Rick Nunn: I think it can sometimes be a distraction. The reason the Snakepit [Motown studio in Detroit] sounds like the Snakepit is because the Motown band sounds like the Motown band… You can buy all those microphones if you want, but it’s a very small part of the sound – you can’t just chuck a load of dusty mics at a band…
Let’s talk about some of the tracks on the album. I Need Your Love is a song in two halves – the first half was inspired by a 4/8 bar cyclical brass hook from a jazz standard played by a big band tribute to Buddy Rich at Ronnie Scott’s. There’s a nod to the vintage cinema Pearl & Dean theme, and also a section from an old soul ballad of yours that had never been released…
Rick Nunn: We love a gear shift in a track. We were playing around with it… I’m a massive jazz fan, but we didn’t want to just make a jazz track. I think there are people that do that better than we do it. We were struggling with the chorus, and I had this straight-up soul record that the boys liked, but, as a standalone track, it wasn’t getting on the record, and then we brought it in, and we were like, ‘ah,’ so that was an interesting gear shift… It’s a kind of Frankenstein track…
I like the nod to the Pearl & Dean theme on it… It’s a great way to open the record…
Rick Nunn: Yeah – it’s track one on an album that we’re saying is a cinematic soul record… The curtains open…
I love the horns and there’s a great electric guitar solo on it too…
Rick Nunn: Dan, our guitarist, is insane – I just love the way he plays. It’s a difficult thing doing soul lead guitar – soul solos are not that common, but I think he makes it relevant.
Pangs of Love was inspired harmonically by Brian Wilson and Paul McCartney, but it also has a great, ‘70s-style, fuzz guitar sound that reminds me of The Isley Brothers…
Rick Nunn: Yeah, and we also reference Michael Kiwanuka, who uses a good, similar fuzz sound. So, we would often use on all those references you’ve talked about, but the most recent one would have been him. He uses that fuzz, one-note stuff…
Pangs of Love reminds me of Doves too… They’ve always had a soul influence…
Rick Nunn – Yeah. They had an album with the word ‘soul’ in it – Lost Souls, which was their first album. When I was 11 or 12 and I’d just started going to gigs, Doves seemed to be on every bill. They’re excellent, and in an era where there wasn’t a lot of soul references, they were introducing kids to a lot of soul stuff. I even like the trippier Doves stuff, like The Cedar Room.
A Time To Let Go on your new album is a personal song inspired by the death of your father…
Rick Nunn: Yeah – it’s about my old man. The boys knew my dad from when they were little boys… We don’t have to tell each other what we’re writing about. I can walk in with a song like that, and everyone goes, ‘okay…’ Or if Mitch walks in with a song that’s about a breakup, I know what he’s singing about, you know… So, I walked in with that song…
‘It’s something that feels beyond transcendent. Brian Wilson was a fucking genius at that stuff, and so is Kamasi Washington’
You wrote it on piano…
Rick Nunn: Yeah – it was a confessional piano song…
And then, inspired by Brian Wilson, you threw the kitchen sink at it, with a heavenly choir, brass and a soaring string arrangement…
Rick Nunn: It’s something that feels beyond transcendent. Brian Wilson was a fucking genius at that stuff, and so is Kamasi Washington – that kind of transcendent soul choir.
Morning Light is more reminiscent of your previous album, Cages – it’s spacious and stripped-back…
Rick Nunn: Yeah – it’s a lot more like the album we made previously, when we were signed to Wah Wah 45s – a lovely, small North London soul/jazz label. We made a more stripped-back, modern soul record, which I love, and I think that track probably leans more towards those times. But we do a bit where it gets quite big towards the end, with the last section. You want a little bit of a gear shift, even with the pace of a 10-track album.
When you’re making an album, do you think of it in terms of being a vinyl LP?
Rick Nunn: We’re very much into making a body of songs that has a beginning, a middle and an end – that’s how I listen to music at home. I like the commitment of putting a record on and then having 40 or 45 minutes when I don’t need to make another decision.
I think streaming and downloading took that away to a certain extent, but then the vinyl revival has brought it back… There are still some people who stream but don’t listen to an album from start to finish – they skip to different tracks…
Rick Nunn: The amount of people who love a song, but they don’t know who the fucking artist is because they’re just liking it and adding it to a playlist…
So, the middle track on Borderlands is called The Middle – I see what you did there – and it started off as an acoustic song that was demoed for your album Favourite Worry…
Rick Nunn: Yeah – our demo bank is fucking huge. It’s a collective creative project and it’s more about what ideas are best rather than whose ideas are best. We’re like old pirates – everything gets chucked in the middle and everyone gets an equal cut – there are no egos.
The title track has a big, symphonic soul sound – it soars…
Rick Nunn: It’s a weird song – when you play it on piano, it has a rolling rhythm…
Lyrically, was it inspired by Brexit and the EU?
Rick Nunn: I think that’s something we’ve projected onto it after the event – I don’t think that’s what we were talking about… It’s more about that Bruce Springsteen thing that he’s always saying – packing a car, driving out of town and heading for the sunset – what’s over the next hill? The last people to get out of town…. I love it, and I think it’s Mitch’s best achievement on the record in terms of the production and how it’s mixed – there’s an alarming number of musical elements going on in that track, but I can choose what I want to listen to on it. That’s testament to a well-mixed track.
Wanted Man is the jazziest track on the record – it was inspired by John Coltrane and Miles Davis…
Rick Nunn: Yeah – the boys let me get away with that one. There’s an early Miles Davis [soundtrack] album, Ascenseur pour l’échafaud – Lift to the Scaffold – which was the first time that he went to Paris – he was relatively young and he was taken aback by the egalitarian nature of Parisian culture – he embraced the intelligentsia, and he fell in love with the fact that as a black man, he could go there and be held in such high regard in terms of high society – and he was hanging out with some very cool academic people.
He fell in love with a Parisian woman, and then he was hanging out with a film director, and he was ask to improvise live to an Art Nouveau movie that was being shot at the time, and they gave him a Parisian rhythm section who he’d never met before.
I watched an interview with the drummer who said that Miles improvised live to the movie while it was being projected. I gave that direction to our trumpet player, Don, and said: ‘Can do you that?’ He said he knew it… Most of what you hear of Don is the first take, apart from a couple of little edits.
You’ve described the album as ‘cinematic soul’ – the final song, I Saved My Best For You, feels like a track that should be played over the end credits of a film. It starts with just a guitar and vocal, but then it shifts into something immense, with a big arrangement and an epic finale…
Rick Nunn: I’ve got a big, old school, semi-acoustic Gretsch – we did that live, as a single take, and then we recorded the whole back end as a separate thing. We’re massive fans of Vegas-era Elvis, and the band that was put together, so we were like, ‘let’s do that!’
We wanted to make it sound like fucking Casablanca! Unashamedly, we know what we’re doing, and we want people to know that – we’re not trying to pretend we’re not doing it…
It’s a love song too…
Rick Nunn: I only met my missus a few years ago, and it’s a message to her to say, ‘It’s been great, but I’ve saved the best stuff for you, and it’s gonna get even better because you’re here.’
Borderlands is released on September 19: vinyl, CD, digital download and streaming platforms: www.thisisthemilk.com.
September and October tour dates:
- September 19: 229, London.
- September 20: Ropetackle Arts Centre, Shoreham-by-Sea.
- September 26: Band On The Wall, Manchester.
- September 27: Subscription Rooms, Stroud.
- October 18: The Old Town Hall, Hemel Hempstead. Acoustic show.
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