Lost Horizons: ‘People really need music badly, and I think it’s just important to keep putting it out there’

Three years on from their first record as Lost Horizons, Simon Raymonde and Richie Thomas are back with a new double album boasting a large cast of guest vocalists.
Simon Raymonde and Richie Thomas of Lost Horizons.Simon Raymonde and Richie Thomas of Lost Horizons.
Simon Raymonde and Richie Thomas of Lost Horizons.

John Grant, Tim Smith of Midlake and Dana Margolin of Mercury Prize nominees Porridge Radio are among the singers to feature on In Quiet Moments, the first part of which is released digitally on Raymonde’s label, Bella Union, on December 4. The second part will follow in February, when the album gets a physical release.

Raymonde, who previously played bass in much-lauded dream pop band Cocteau Twins, said a follow-up had “always been in mind” after they released Ojala in 2017. “It was just a case of finding the space and the time and the inspiration to do it.”

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When in 2018 he lost his mother, making music again “was like a default position of dealing with your grief”. “I was throwing myself into that again, that was the start of the process.”

The process of choosing singers was guided by the music itself. “The initial germs of these pieces are improvised. By the time you’ve added layers of other bits and considered where you wanted to take the track you’ve got very intimate with that piece of music, you’ve listened to it thousands of times.

“A process is always happening as you’re building it up but then when you get to a point where you’re happy with it, at that point do you start to think, whose voice would work with it from the singers I know or have been listening to or people I’ve already worked with. It’s always the music which informs the direction you take.”

The American singer John Grant, who features on the song Cordelia, has gone on to considerable success since being discovered by Raymonde back in 1996 when he was then a member of the band The Czars. The pair have become close friends over the years. “I love John and his work,” Raymonde says. “You can’t work with someone for that long and not be mates and care about each other in ways more than just a business relationship. But it was the music that informed the decision to ask him.

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“With my knowledge of what John’s doing at any moment in time I know whether it’s a good time to send him something. I was self-conscious about asking him because I know he’s always busy writing and collaborating. I sent him the track and said, ‘I think it’s got your name on it’ and luckily he agreed with me.”

By contrast, Tim Smith took time to find his way into Grey Tower. “He’s a great thinker,” says Raymonde. “He changed quite a bit of it. On the track he did for the first album he asked me to send him all the parts separately; he rearranged the song so it suited his vocal better. I think he did that a little bit with this too.

“He got the verse and he wasn’t quite getting on with the chorus so I said, ‘Do what you need to do’. It might have taken him two or three weeks to get there but as I said to everybody, there’s no deadline, so people were able to feel ‘he’s not going to be banging the door down asking where it is’.”

Raymonde had come across the music of Porridge Radio a couple of years earlier, and attempted to sign the band to his label. “It didn’t quite work out, unfortunately, I didn’t offer enough,” he chuckles. Nonetheless he says he “got on well” with singer Dana Margolin when they met at the Great Escape festival in Brighton and thought of her when he was demo-ing the songs One For Regret. “I started it at home with a drum machine...and the minute I put the bass and the guitars on, I thought, ‘That’s one for her’.”

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The album’s title “presented itself” during this most introspective of years, says Raymonde. “I discovered this singer from Portland, an 80-year-old man called Ural Thomas. I’ve been blown away by his music in the last year or two and had been talking to his folks about doing something with him on Bella Union. I was working away on this track and I thought, ‘Wouldn’t it be incredible to have his voice on this, that would just blow my mind, I wonder if he would be interested’. I didn’t know him well enough to know if it would be okay to ask; anyway, he was into it and his band members helped him get his vocal done in their studio in Portland, and I was blown away by the whole thing. I thought it would be more of a Gil Scott Heron vibe where he didn’t need to sing on it, it would be of a spoken word kind of thing. He ad libbed that whole section, and it was wonderful. That track had been worked on prior to the lockdown, in January/February, it was more of a coincidence. I was looking for a title (for the album) and I was looking through the lyric and thought, ‘There it is right there’.”

Raymonde decided to split the album’s release in two for practical reasons. “I never intended to have 16 tracks on this LP, nor did I intend to have 15 on the last. I know what Duncan (Jordan, Bella Union’s press officer) is going to say when I present him with a 16-track album – ‘What the hell are you doing? Do you not want anyone to review it?’ I understand people don’t have the time to sit down for an hour and a bit to listen to a record, but I’m not making it for journalists; I’m making it for myself and anyone else who might want to hear it.

“I was thinking of ten tracks the whole way through and was having such fun with it by the time I actually stopped and looked at how many I had with vocals, I was like ‘Blimey’. I had the blinkers on working away, trying to do as many things as possible. I actually had 18 tracks but I had to lose two because they weren’t really quite finished enough.

“I thought this is not a band where you put a new album out and you know roughly what it’s going to sound like. This record is actually quite varied and eclectic in styles, and I was really conscious that the average album campaign is two singles, album and that’s it.

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“I thought that was never going to work for this record, people would not understand it, because how are you going to go from the Porridge Radio track to let’s say the John Grant track and go, ‘I can work this out’? I think a much longer drip feed policy was more useful to allow people to not be freaked out by the fact that it was a double, but also get a handle on what sort of record this is. It’s got 16 singers on it and that’s unusual, so that’s how we came up with idea of splitting it in two.”

In what has been a tough year for the music industry, Raymonde felt it important that Bella Union carried on with its planned schedule of releases. “All of those new bands that came out of nowhere and put records out, like Drab City, I felt awful for them. All that expectation you have in the year or year-and-a-half leading up to your debut release, you get the artwork and some videos done and you start booking some shows, and it’s pretty terrible (to cancel them), but it’s terrible for everyone. I don’t want to over egg it, but it was a grim year for all of the music industry, I would say – the related people like the tour managers, the roadies and the guitar techs and the rehearsal rooms. The knock-on effect has really been bad.

“For the label it’s been tough but we just decided the best policy was just to keep on going putting records out as if there was nothing wrong at all, because people really need music badly, and I think it’s just important to keep putting it out there for them. That was thinking at the beginning of this. People were saying, ‘We need to push the record back’ and I said, ‘I don’t know about that, this could last six months’, I didn’t honestly know it would last 10 months, so that was the policy and I think it’s probably been justified, and we’ll do the same next year, just carry on. We’ve got a big year coming up and hopefully the new year will bring some positivity to everybody.”

Raymonde is full of admiration for The Charlatans’ singer Tim Burgess, who as well as running Twitter Listening Parties has also released two solo records this year on Bella Union.

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“He’s been an incredible ambassador for music,” he says. “If there was still a Man of the Year award I would give it to Tim Burgess. He’s such a humble, genuine music fan and such a lovely person to work with, he’s so positive and always looking on the bright side of things, and I think that has been really beautiful to have to counterbalance other stuff going on, always knowing you’ve got Tim there.”

Despite feeling some reluctance to tour the new album after losing “a load of money” on Lost Horizons’ 2017 dates, Raymonde reveals he has booked at least one show in 2021. “It was brilliant ending up at the Queen Elizabeth Hall show with all the guest but I thought, ‘God, I can’t do that again’. But that’s just musicians, they’re always moaning, but then of course you just go and do it.

“We have actually booked a show at Scala (in London) in October. I think that’s far enough away for me to prepare myself and get the band together. I don’t know if it will be as big a band as last time, I want to slim it down but that’s not easy because you need to have a range of singers if you’re going to perform an album like that where you’ve got all these different voices. So whether it’s just a small band and as many singers as possible I don’t know yet, I haven’t really thought it through that far.”

In Quiet Moments part one is available digitally on Friday December 4.

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