We Spoke To Chad Valley

Chad Valley’s Hugo Manuel has finally released his debut full length Young Hunger two years after he first graced our presence with his ambitious music, but what exactly took so long? We caught up with him on tour with Passion Pit to delve into “A&R vultures”, Tears For Fears and why Paris isn’t as cool as it should be when the locals start brandishing knives…

Noisey: Hey Hugo! How has the first leg of supporting Passion Pit on tour been going? Party poppers and good vibes all around?

Chad Valley: There's been a great vibe, yeah. It’s really good to go on a tour where the three bands really work well together - it makes a huge difference actually to have a kind of musical kinship, this doesn't happen often enough on these kind of big tours. So often bands are chosen by the agent or management or whatever just to please some fraction of the industry rather than with the night itself at the forefront of their minds. Party poppers have been a big player, naturally.

How's it been playing to larger audiences in such conventional environments?

It’s always a slight challenge, but one that I always relish. There is a huge difference between playing a Chad Valley headline gig in front of 150 people to playing in front of 2500 Passion Pit fans. You have to really sell yourself to the crowd. They haven’t paid to see you and to a lot of the crowd, the supports are just something that happens before the real show begins but most of the shows have been a success, whetting people’s appetites for the rest of the night and hopefully making an impact of sorts.

You're also about to embarking off on your own string of headline dates, are there any specific cities or venues you're particularly excited to play?

Obviously the Oxford and London shows are gonna be a whole lot of fun. Those are the only places where I’ve actually done headline shows in the UK before, so I can at least know what to expect somewhat but all the others are going to be new to Chad Valley, so I expect lots of surprises. We've done Brighton and Liverpool already and those have been lovely, having toured for much of the last 6 years on support tours as Chad or with Jonquil I know most cities in the UK pretty well and have friends in most of them. I am looking forward to going to an awesome Persian restaurant I went to in Edinburgh last time I was there and I am looking forward to seeing my boys Foals in Sheffield as they are playing down the road on the same night!

Speaking of fellow Oxford bands, we noticed that others such as Trophy Wife and Pet Moon are also part of the Blessing Force community - but what exactly is it all about? Are you a cult or a collective?

Blessing Force is a collective of musicians and artists in Oxford making life for ourselves and others in the city more enjoyable. Oxford is a very small city but it’s always had a great music scene, weirdly, and we have a very strong group of friends here who are all making music or art in a multitude of different sorts. We decided to put a name to this group of friends to solidify something that had grown up naturally. Nearly all of the Blessing Force bands share some kind of ancestry or even share members, so it’s very much a family affair.

You also took over Paris venues for one night only last weekend, which sounds pretty fucking awesome if you ask me- how did that go?

It was a very memorable night indeed. There were a lot of people there so it was rather humbling actually… to see people in Paris excited about a bunch of mates in Oxford making music together. The line-up was great too; Solid Gold Dragons, Jonquil, Trophy Wife and myself. Every member of each band has played music with each other at some point, so that felt nice, keeping it in the family and the night was eventful though, to say the least.

I lost my voice completely by the end , Jamie from Solid Gold got his bag (with his passport in) stolen from outside the venue and Duncan got beaten up by a bouncer later on in the evening and then got a knife pulled on him. Rumour has it that he pushed the guy away and then ran for as long as he can remember- he's not quite sure though.

WOAH, take a chill pill, Paris! Since working under Jonquil and releasing a third record with no signs of slowing down, what led you to pursue an individual project such as Chad Valley? Does it ever get difficult to balance the two?

Well I am doing this as a full time job now, so I feel like I have all the time in the world to manage two projects and even more. I used to do Jonquil by itself for years while holding down a full time job and I didn't find it hard to do the two simultaneously, so Chad Valley I guess started when I would get home from Jonquil practice in the evenings and would want to let off some steam.

Sweet. As a listener, the lyrics of Young Hunger seem more emotionally loaded, was that a conscious move?

That’s spot on! I made a conscious decision to make a personal heartfelt album this time around and for it to deal with the classic themes that most good pop music deals with. It’s all about girls and love and relationships, whereas with my earlier stuff it was more just making a kind of mood and the lyrics were something of an afterthought to be honest.

I drew upon my own experiences to some extent but mostly I would think about situations, predicaments and write from a third person perspective- and that is actually a really exciting way to write. I like to push myself in directions I am not familiar or comfortable with.

Why was the gap so long between that release and this full length? We’ve missed you!

I had had album deal offers when I only had four Chad Valley tracks and those were for me very embryonic things that I knew I could better in the future, so what I did was release everything I recorded as I went along. The first EP was the first four tracks I recorded and then when it came to the next release, I didn't feel like I had come to a point that I was satisfied with to release an album.

I wanted the debut album to be a big splash and a more considered thing that I just wasn't ready for with Equatorial Ultravox. So that was kind of like clearing out all the stuff I had been making over the previous year- a spring clean, if you like, so I could start completely afresh with my debut album- that was very important for me.

Anow, now this record features a lot of kinda underground artists such as Glasser and Twin Shadow collaborating on tracks too- how did these come about?

When I first started Chad Valley I had a fair amount of heat from the usual industry A&R vultures who would come and buy me dinner and tell me how they could make me rich and successful and all that. One of these particularly idiotic A&R guys pitched his idea of my debut album to me, which was fairly ridiculous but he did have this idea of an album of collaborations with all sorts of people from other bands and such, like a hip-hop album would be. The A&R guys came and went but this idea stuck with me and I carried it all the way to creating this album. So I just called upon favours from friends of mine, like Twin Shadow and Active Child who I knew from supporting them on tours and then old friends like Totally Enormous Extinct Dinosaurs or Jack from Fixers.

Finally, aside from tonsss of 80s electronica, what else were you listening to when making Young Hunger?

A lot of British stuff like Sade, Tears for Fears and Prefab Sprout were hugely influential and also stuff like New Edition and Janet Jackson's late-80s stuff. I'm a huge fan of that 3 or 4 year period of music. I feel like there was such a strong song-writing emphasis coupled with this fantastic unique production that went out of style as quickly as it was pioneered. Goddamn grunge ruined everything…

Don’t be blaming the rockers, now and thanks for talking to us Hugo!

Check out the exclusive video for "Tell All Your Friends" which we premiered on Noisey last week HERE