Conceived in 2014 by Jarrod Gosling and Cecilia Fage, Cobalt Chapel’s emergence was momentarily slowed by the birth of Cecilia’s twins. Now, hot on the heels of their much feted live shows and with a new album out, they tell Greg Healey that they are, at last, ready to emerge from the shadows.
A love of psychedelia, old organs and a desire for something different all played a part in the gestation of Cobalt Chapel. Coming from Sheffield, Jarrod Gosling, the keyboard playing purveyor of psych and prog rock magnificence with I Monster and Regal Worm, understands the need for alternative sounds as a means of creating a new outlook. Describing Steel City as being “the synth capital, like the Dusseldorf of Britain,” Jarrod is all too aware of the ubiquity of squelchy analogue oscillations in his hometown’s music. “Everybody uses synths these days, they’re everywhere, and I wanted something different. With the organs it’s also the historical thing, the psychedelic, the sound of the era that it conjures up. A sixties and early seventies thing. And they have a very organic sound, particularly when you put them through effects,” says Jarrod of his decision to build Cobalt Chapel around the authentic textures of Hammond, Philicorda, and CL.
A chance conversation with his friend, the writer and actor Paul Putner, led to an introduction to Cecilia Fage, a longterm and key member of Matt Berry’s Maypoles. “At that point I wasn’t looking for another project and it came up as a chance thing, but when we got on the phone we just gassed for an hour and we found we had so many similar influences. That’s when we thought let’s try a track together and see how we go,” explains Cecilia.
The aforementioned influences are both potent and wide ranging, spanning Hammer Horror from the late 1960s and early 1970s, traditional English choral works, the album covers of Marcus Keef, early Curved Air and all manner of other psych and prog manifestations. With those influences in the creative mixer, alongside the distinctive instrumentation and Cecilia’s beautifully harmonised vocals, the end product on their eponymous debut album is powerful and unique and offers an all encompassing mode for exploring some interesting subject matter in a narrative and filmic way. Cecilia elaborates: “The song ‘Fruit Falls From the Apple Tree’ is a female perspective on the patriarchal society that we live in and on womankind, and the very idea, the religious idea, that woman was created from a part of man. The thinking was, what would it be like if this was reversed? It’s an imaginary perspective.”
The clever re-examination of established notions, particularly of womanhood, provides a key inspiration. This is especially so when set against the mood of Hammer Horror, as in the track ‘Horratia’. In this song, with its lyrics by Paul Putner, chant-like vocals and creaking effects laden Hammond, the bleak reality of the life of a fading Scream Queen star is deftly explored.
Recorded remotely, with files swapped over the internet, Cobalt Chapel is every inch the hi-tech project, but through Cecilia and Jarrod’s obsessional immersion in the sounds and aesthetics of the late 1960s and early 1970s a genuinely new take on psychedelia has been wrought. From: https://greghealeywords.wordpress.com/2017/07/29/cobalt-chapel-interview/
