Musician and producer Matthew Herbert was born in Kent in 1972. He released his first album in 1995 and gained international acclaim with 2001’s Bodily Functions. He is also a composer of film music (including A Fantastic Woman, 2017), and opera, (The Crackle, Royal Opera House, 2014) and in 2013 co-created a play called The Hush. His Brexit Big Band will release an album, The State Between Us, on 29 March, the day the UK is due to leave the EU, with two live performances at London’s Royal Court theatre.
1. Architecture
Chai Wan Hong Kong Crematorium
I’m currently in Hong Kong with my family, and we went to see where my wife’s relatives and family are buried. It’s a very large municipal crematorium at the top of one of Hong Kong’s hills: it’s set right in the jungle, with the mist coming down. It’s an extraordinarily different bit of architecture to the kind we’re used to seeing – it’s like a hollow skyscraper, giant filing cabinet meets apartment block. Hong Kong is so loud, and you find yourself up in the clouds in this very densely vegetated area – it’s very peaceful.
2. Film
No (dir Pablo Larraín, 2012)
I made three films recently with Sebastián Lelio, so I’ve been learning more about Chile. I saw this recently – it’s a documentary-style fictional retelling of a referendum on whether General Pinochet should be allowed another eight years in office. You really get a sense of the terror of an oppressive militaristic state, and how its tendrils reach right across society. The film is about how the No campaign had fun with it. Fun is absent in modern political life, but it was this sort of spirit that in many ways helped get the right result.
3. Book
Bad Blood by Colm Toibin
For the new record, I commissioned someone to walk along the Northern Irish border and record people’s comments along the way – I didn’t realise Colm Toibin had done that for this book. After I’d done that I read the book, and it makes you realise quite how difficult history is. When you hear individuals’ stories or learn about all the people who disappeared, and the fracture through a society that something like that has caused, you feel people wouldn’t be so glib as to think it was a price worth paying for leaving the EU.
4. Restaurant
Stark, Broadstairs
This is a little old sandwich shop run by a chef called Ben, and his wife is front of house. You just get a few courses, you don’t get to choose. There’s something really joyful about having one person prepare something for you with care, and with attention and love. It’s just the two of them in the restaurant and [when I went] the food was absolutely fantastic. My favourite dish was probably a warm crab and carrot dish – it had lots of different textures, very unfussy but precisely executed, which reminded me of Japanese food.
5. Music
This is a label and music production facility based in Kampala in Uganda. It’s unashamedly excited about the music it puts out. It’s easy to get cynical about music these days because it’s everywhere all the time – there’s something interesting happening on Spotify, which is now about moods and playlists rather than artists. On Nyege Nyege, the music is really original and I don’t fully understand it – I have to work harder to see where it fits and learn about it. There’s something thrilling about hearing music from a different context, telling stories from different perspectives.
6. Art
Daisy Parris is a painter – I saw some of her work in Rochester recently in an exhibition, and have fallen in love with the rest of her work. Her paintings are largely abstract, but you’ll recognise certain imagery that tends not to be of people – they tend to be some kind of still life, but there’s a claustrophobia to them. One of the real challenges, I think, in art is to do something original with oil and canvas – it’s a bit like the piano. But she manages to do that – she puts shapes and colours together in ways that feel original, unique and unrecognisable.
