Can you explain your band name to us?
Yeo means a little river or stream in an old South West dialect. At the time I was moving around a lot and kept driving past a sign for Blind Yeo on the M5. I saw it many times and eventually it just stuck.
Can you give us an insight into the Cornish underground scene?
The Cornish underground scene is incredibly diverse at the moment. There’s a big electronic scene with some amazing local producers. At The Cornish Bank we have an electronic open mic where you can get 15 or so producers turning up in one night to perform. Oh Mr. James is one of the local standouts, and the ESC nights are brilliant. Aphex Twin has been known to turn up to those, so there’s a real buzz around them.
There’s also loads of great garage and psych stuff happening. Kernow Beat, Heavenly Bodies, Glen and Love Fortress are all part of this world of scuzzy, 60s-influenced garage rock and psychedelia.
Then the folk scene is really strong. Daisy Rickman is making beautiful ethereal music down in West Penwith, and Isaac Ockenden is in Falmouth. There’s an amazing folk night every Monday at The Cornish Bank which has become a real meeting point for that community.
And then you’ve got the younger punk and experimental scene. Fally Events are a really grassroots promoter putting on loads of young, heavy and diverse bands. Ducks are great, and Rrizts are probably my favourite Cornish band at the moment.
It’s quite hard to describe Cornwall as having one particular “sound”, because the interesting thing is how many different little scenes are happening alongside each other. This is just such a small snapshot too there’s so much more!
What’s your fantasy gig to perform at?
Through The Cornish Bank we’ve been lucky enough to put on shows at the Minack Theatre in Cornwall. We had Dry Cleaning there, and also Ustad Noor Bakhsh, this incredible musician from Balochistan in Pakistan.
The Minack is carved into the cliffs right above the Atlantic, and when you’re there you feel this incredible connection between music, landscape and nature. That’s probably the feeling I’d want from a fantasy Blind Yeo gig rather than it being about playing some famous venue.
If I could take that feeling somewhere else, I think I’d want us to play out in the desert in Morocco. Somewhere connected to a community, with the sun setting and people gathered around. I can’t picture the exact venue. Maybe that’s why it remains a fantasy, but I can picture the feeling of it.
What’s the band’s pre-gig ritual?
We get into a little circle and everybody starts making very subconscious, deep, weird noises.
Squeaking, growling, humming, skipping, droning, whatever comes out. I think subconsciously we’re trying to get rid of any anxiety or self-consciousness because we’re about to go on stage and get really quite stupid. So I suppose it’s basically a pre-gig exorcism.
How do you weave your influences into your music?
I think you eventually get to a point as a musician where you realise the real power of influences comes through absorption rather than consciously trying to sound like something. A lot of the music we love, particularly North and West African music, but also psychedelia, electronic music and krautrock, has this relationship with repetition, trance and dance.
A lot of our guitar parts have actually come from me dancing while I’m playing and trying to lose myself in the groove. That connection between music and movement is really important to us. There are loads of influences in Blind Yeo, and I’m sure people can hear some of them, but hopefully they’ve been absorbed for long enough that when they come back out they’ve become something of our own.
What’s your favourite song of yours to play live?
At the moment I really love playing Memory to the Soil from the album. It’s a glitchy electronic song, but it originally came into existence during a gig, just a gig jam, off the cuff. It was the solstice, of all clichés, and it basically started as this vocal mantra about worms. Because Blind Yeo has this constantly changing group of musicians, that song has become particularly fun. It has the least structure of anything we play. Before a tour I’ll basically say: this is the one where we can do whatever we want. We can play it in a different key, change the groove, change the style, whatever feels right that night. We improvise within lots of our songs, but Memory to the Soil gives us the most freedom. It can become something completely different every time we play it.
How did your new album, The Lemoine Point, come to be?
The album really came together across two very different recording sessions. The first was two days in this huge studio on a disused airfield. That was very much about capturing the band playing together, the bigger, more live and expansive side of the record. Then we did another session with our producer in his garage studio at home, which was almost the complete opposite environment. That became home to a lot of the more stripped-down, electronic and intimate material. I think having those two completely different spaces ended up becoming part of the character of the album.
How do you think the unusual quirk of recording on a disused airfield may have influenced the latest album?
One of the best things about that studio was simply the scale and shape of it.
The main room was absolutely massive and hexagonal. We could all have our own area and enough separation to record properly, but everybody could still see everybody else across the room.
That’s really important for us because we like to record live. You could make eye contact, communicate, react to somebody changing something and actually feel like you were playing together rather than everybody being isolated in little boxes.
At one point we even made a song up there in the studio while we were recording. It gave us that old-fashioned experience you read about with bands like The Beatles, people actually creating the music together in the recording room rather than arriving with every detail already decided.
The space gave us separation sonically, but not separation as people. For a band that relies so much on improvisation and reacting to each other, that was kind of perfect.
Would you say the setting gave you permission to experiment in ways a conventional studio might not have?
Definitely. I think the size and openness of the place gave us permission to treat recording more like playing live. We weren’t all shut away from each other. We could see what everybody was doing and react in real time.
Because of that, improvisation could actually become part of the recording process rather than something we had to capture afterwards. We could follow each other, change direction and let things happen without necessarily knowing where they were going.
For us, that’s probably the ideal way to make music. The studio became somewhere to actually discover the songs, rather than just somewhere to record versions of songs we’d already completely finished.