The musician, singer, songwriter, composer and producer talks about his past and present works and future releases
The talented and eclectic Cypress Grove plays vocals, guitar, bass guitar, keyboards and drums.
Let’s start from a short biography to “revise” his career that took effect with the first works in 1979.
Cypress Grove was born in London (U.K.) into a musical family. He was taught by his father, a professional jazz drummer, to play drums from a very early age, but by the time he turned sixteen, his passion became the guitar.
As his passion for the guitar developed, he became infatuated with pre-war acoustic blues. This led to an encounter in 1988 with Jeffrey Lee Pierce from The Gun Club who shared similar interests and which grew into a collaboration on an album of roots material, “Ramblin’ Jeffrey Lee and Cypress Grove with Willie Love” in 1992.
Cypress and Jeffrey went on to tour the album both with a band and as an acoustic duo.
In October 1994, Pierce and Grove were filmed for Henri-Jean Debon‘s “Hard Times Killin’ Floor Blues”.The film was eventually released in 2008.
To the great grief of all the ones who loved him, Pierce died of a brain haemorrhage in 1996.
Ten years after, in 2006, Cypress discovered a tape of them rehearsing songs that Jeffrey had written. These were works in progress, and while the quality was deemed too poor for release, Cypress invited a number of musicians to record the songs properly and help him complete them.
This series became known as “The Jeffrey Lee Pierce Session Project” an endeavour that has currently produced three albums: “We Are Only Riders” (2009); “The Journey Is Long” (2012); “Axels & Sockets” (2014).
Grove has recorded with a number of musicians including Nick Cave, Debbie Harry, Chris Stein, Mark Lanegan, Iggy Pop, Isobel Campbell, Thurston Moore, Warren Ellis, The Raveonettes, Crippled Black Phoenix, Mick Harvey, David Eugene Edwards, Hugo Race, Bertrand Cantat, Barry Adamson, Lydia Lunch, Jim Sclavunos, Mark Stewart and James Johnson.
In 2010 Cypress Grove and Lydia Lunch recorded “A Fistful of Desert Blues”. In 2017 they got together once again to record a covers album called “Under The Covers”.
Obviously, I’m only referring to a small part of Cypress Grove’s releases.
I had the chance to see him live in Milan in November 2017, in one of the gigs of “Under The Covers”. I had taken some pictures very close to the stage – I like to be in the front rows, whenever I can! – and then wrote an article about that gig.
Here I am, now, writing to him via email – in several stages – for an interview, wanting to know more about Cypress Grove.
Lucy Lo Russo – Punto e Linea Magazine: Hi Cypress, thanks for doing this interview. You are involved in many different art and musical projects. Let’s start from your collaboration with Lydia Lunch. I had the chance to see you during the Italian tour of “Under The Covers”. Are you two working on a new release?
Cypress Grove: Yes we have started working on new stuff. There is no clear indication yet as to which direction it will take, but I am really liking the way it is sounding already.
Lucy Lo Russo – Punto e Linea Magazine: I’m fascinated by the way in which musicians can work using Information Technology to develop an artistic result, although sometimes based far away from each other. If I’m not wrong Lydia lives in the U.S.A. and you in the U.K. How do you work with her at the creative process?
Cypress Grove: Yes, for a lot of the first album we did (“A Fistful Of Desert Blues”) we had to work in our separate locations. She would sing her ideas to me down the phone or send me a recording of an idea she had. But mostly I would come up with the music and send it to her and she would add the vocal. But since then we work differently. Whenever Lydia comes to London she stays with me so we can record stuff together in the same room and collaborate face to face.
Most of “The Jeffrey Lee Pierce Sessions Project” is recorded across three continents and would be impossible without digital technology. Luckily Nick Cave lives fairly close to London so I am able to physically go into the studio with him. It definitely has its advantages.
The only other time I have been able to get most of the musicians involved in a track together in the same room at the same time was when Mark Lanegan, Warren Ellis, Bertrand Cantat and Pascal Humbert all happened to be in Paris at the same time. That worked out really well!
For the Iggy Pop track I was able to get Jim Sclavunos (Bad Seeds drummer) and Thurston Moore into the studio together in London. The other parts were recorded in Florida, Melbourne, Brighton, Berlin, Nashville, Los Angeles and Bristol!
Lucy Lo Russo – Punto e Linea Magazine: Tell me something about “The Jeffrey Lee Pierce Sessions Project”. Three albums have already been released and I know you’re working on the fourth chapter….
Cypress Grove: It started when I discovered an old cassette of Jeffrey and me rehearsing songs for the “Ramblin’ Jeffrey Lee” album. Jeffrey would start a song and then abandon it and move onto something else. I had forgotten most of the songs but realised they were really good, so I thought it would be a good idea to get friends and admirers of Jeffrey to reconstruct them from the badly recorded cassette.
It was originally just going to be one album, but as word got round, friends and family came up with more material of Jeffrey’s that had never been released, so the project started to expand.
The fourth and final album is now nearing completion. This one has taken quite a long time as I have to work around everyone’s touring and recording commitments. But that is the nature of the project, you have to wait until people are available.
Lucy Lo Russo – Punto e Linea Magazine: Have you ever worked at a film soundtrack?
Cypress Grove: I am working on my first one now in fact. It is an Italian film called “Lucania”, directed by Gigi Roccati in collaboration with Rai Cinema. It is a magical realist drama filmed in the surrounding countryside of Matera. It is quite challenging to work to an actual, tangible, visual image on a screen, rather than a nebulous image inside my head. I am looking forward to doing more work with Gigi in the future.
Lucy Lo Russo – Punto e Linea Magazine: Do you plan to release a solo album?
Cypress Grove: Yes, that is definitely the plan. There are a number of songs under way. It is now just trying to find the time to finish them!
Lucy Lo Russo – Punto e Linea Magazine: I know it’s difficult to say and summarise, Cypress. What do you think the heritage that Jeffrey Lee Pierce left to Music is?
Cypress Grove: As Henry Rollins said, Jeffrey created a sound. But more than that, he created an environment in which that kind of musical approach could flourish and be developed by bands such as The Pixies, Nirvana and The White Stripes.
When The Gun Club started, most people’s musical references went back as far as The Stooges, New York Dolls, MC5 etc. Jeffrey’s musical references went back to the early 1900’s. The idea of doing a punk version of a blues song from 1936 would not have occurred to many people. That is true lateral thinking. He made a huge impact in a very short space of time.
Lucy Lo Russo – Punto e Linea Magazine: Can you depict Jeffrey Lee to let us know his personality?
Cypress Grove: Jeffrey was a visionary, and visionaries are usually pretty complicated people. He was a man of extremes – of polar opposites. He would either talk for 3 hours non-stop, or not talk at all. He would love or hate, laugh or cry. There was rarely any middle ground. When it came to music he was usually meticulous and obsessive – particularly when it came to old blues songs – he could study a fairly simple piece for weeks to get it exactly right.
Lucy Lo Russo – Punto e Linea Magazine: How was creating songs with Jeffrey Lee either in studio and on stage?
Cypress Grove: This was always an intense experience, unpredictable, and sometimes frustrating. When we were writing songs together, he would come up with an idea, and then I would spend a few days writing parts for it, and then he would decide he didn’t really like the song anymore, so would go on to a new one. I don’t think we ever actually finished one.
At the end of recording the “Ramblin’ Jeffrey Lee” album, he had a few song ideas he wanted to record. Unfortunately, the tape ran out halfway through recording the last song. This song later became “Lucky Jim”. But thankfully we had managed to record two verses and a chorus. Many years later, (once again, thanks to digital technology) I was able to stitch a complete song together from the recording, and Debbie Harry provided the vocal.
Lucy Lo Russo – Punto e Linea Magazine: You toured all over the world in your career: what is the weirdest place in which you happened to gig? What is the country that struck you the most and why? Where would you like to play live, that you haven’t been to yet?
Cypress Grove: We played a venue in East Berlin once that I think was an old police station or something, and had been converted into a punk/fetish club. The artist’s rooms were old prison cells with no windows and steel doors. They had been painted completely black, with death murals on the walls. We were supposed to stay there overnight. We decided to stay in a hotel instead!
The country I enjoy playing most is Italy. I have an Italian wife, and therefore many Italian relations. So, I understand the culture – and hand gestures. Plus, I know most of the swear words!
I have never played Australia. I would like to do that one day. Most of the musicians I admire are Australian or have a connection to it.
Lucy Lo Russo – Punto e Linea Magazine: What is the origin of your Stage-Name and why did you choose it?
Cypress Grove: For the “Ramblin’ Jeffrey Lee” album, Jeffrey wanted to make the whole thing look and sound as authentic as possible. So that meant we had to take on blues sounding names. Jeffrey said that Muddy Waters got his name from the song “Muddy Waters Blues” by Bumble Bee Slim (‘I’d rather drink muddy water, and sleep in a hollow log’).
So he said I should be Cypress Grove from the song “Cypress Grove Blues” by Skip James (‘I’d rather be buried in some cypress grove’). I think the circularity of the concept appealed to him – and to me.
I thank Cypress for the generosity of sharing his memories with us and for the time he dedicated to explain the many nuances of his work.
I’m very satisfied with everything Cypress Grove told me during our e-mail exchange. I think it unveiled a lot about his career and the way in which he makes music.
So I decide to come back to the Net again and take a look at a video I had previously watched at. It’s the video of “I won’t let you down” released in April 2018, directed by Eduardo Leiva and feauturing Suzie Stapleton.
I like the warmth of his deep voice, the hypnotic rhythm of the track as a whole, the guitar riff and I’m really longing to listen to more of Cypress Grove’s music.
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