‘Singing about being miserable doesn’t interest me. What I’m interested in is passion.’ – Jo Swan
Slinky, sexy and slightly mysterious, Ilya have pioneered a new genre of epic easy listening they like to call desert noir – a place where Ennio Morricone meets film noir, where Nino Rota’s Godfather soundtracks mingle with polkas and waltzes, where Jacques Brel is fused with Scott Walker, James Bond, Ipanema style and Curtis Mayfield’s basslines – and something completely fresh and new somehow emerges from the gaps in between.
‘Each song is like a little theatre production,’ says Jo, whose sensuous, smoky voice powers Ilya’s songs, each one of them an instant classic. The lyrics are poetic, ambiguous, and little is what it first seems in Ilya’s larger than life world: a song full of drug imagery turns out to be about the soul-cleansing power of music; another track is clearly about the end of a love affair, but you’re never quite sure whether the woman singing about it is mad, sad or glad. ‘There’s a lot of humour in the lyrics,’ continues Jo. ‘But you can also read them in lots of different ways. It’s setting a scene, and when I’m singing them it’s like I’m embodying a personality – I’m aware of all the atmosphere and all the feelings that go with the mood of each song.’
All from the Clifton area of Bristol, Jo, her partner Nick Pullin and Dan Brown are the names behind Ilya’s 21st century torch songs. Before she’d even reached her teens Jo was testing out that voice, hanging out in local bus stops singing Beatles songs with her two best friends. Later the three friends sang in a band with Nick on guitar. The band didn’t last but Nick and Jo did, moving in together and continuing to make music together.
Their earliest demo tapes were filled all noir influences, sound effects, radio disturbance. ‘They were these funny little old-fashioned, weird, slightly surreal songs,’ they recall. ‘But then we went off on a tangent because we kept bringing other people in to work with us and the sound got dissipated from the thing we really loved.’
A little later, Bristol was to become well-known for this kind of effortless mixing of genres, for its experiments with texture and sound, but although Nick and Jo were well-known on the city’s live circuit, they were never really part of the any scene. They were never particularly ambitious – they just made music for the sheer joy of it. ‘It was natural. We’ve always enjoyed doing the music, and success wasn’t really anything to do with it. You can’t stop.’
And then Dan came along. A guitarist who had fallen in love with programmed beats and become a bit of a studio whiz, they called him in to help produce some demos. He was living in Leeds at the time, but soon after they asked him to come back home to Bristol. ‘We knew he was the missing link!’ declares Jo, while Dan says he too had found what he’d been looking for: ‘I just loved their songs. I knew I had to work with them.’
But it still took another four years for it all to come together. While working on their music at home, they earned money by playing at weddings and functions. The idea was to cover sophisticated jazz standards like ‘The Man I Love’ and Summertime’, but inevitably as the drink flowed someone would stagger up to them and call for something harder or faster. So they’d add a heavy dub bassline to the songs, a few drum’n’bass beats, or whatever else happened to come to mind. It kept the crowd moving, it kept them amused, and somewhere along the line they began to realise that they were onto something. ‘It all got mixed up,’ says Dan, ‘and it began to sound really interesting.’
They started taking the same approach with their own songs, deconstructing them, playing with them until, experimenting with no barriers. The resulting mixture of genres, eras and styles sounds so fresh because it was so unforced. ‘It was very organic, the references are integrated rather than just pasted on,’ says Nick. ‘We just did whatever felt right for the song.’
All of the tracks on their debut EP and album were recorded in Jo and Nick’s tiny house and Dan’s even smaller flat in Clifton, and such a lavish, orchestral big sound could only have been made here and now, when the technology has finally caught up with their musical ambitions. ‘We’ve got a panoramic, lush sound, and we wouldn’t have been able to do that on our budget 5-10 years ago,’ explains Dan. It gave them the freedom to do exactly as they wanted, and as a result Ilya sound like everything and yet nothing you’ve ever heard before.
So it’s been a long time coming, this music. It’s been fermenting, quietly in a Bristol suburb for years, but now it’s finally ready to move out into the world. When it comes to quality, we all know that you just can’t rush these things. But now Ilya are ready. And it’s been worth the wait.
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