It’s about midday on a Thursday and Mica Levi is lusting after a Wetherspoon’s breakfast – and maybe a pint. The 28-year-old leftfield singer-songwriter, film soundtrack composer, electronic experimentalist and Micachu And The Shapes frontwoman is talking about what we’ve loosely dubbed “pub smell”: the comforting, musty scent that hangs in boozers, a full eight years into the smoking ban. Mica and her bandmates Raisa Khan and Marc Pell are due to play a one-off show in New York in mid-September to promote their latest album, and Mica is remembering how Manhattan bars don’t quite compare to the fuggy familiarity of a good old English pub.
“Yeah, they just have bars don’t they?” she asks, pulling a face, “and there’s no light in there.” It feels as though they’ve got to let more beer soak into a wood-panelled bar-top surface for a few years before it gets up to pub-smell standard, I offer.
“Sort of makes you think: why don’t you just stop cleaning the floors?” quiet keyboardist Khan jokingly, while chatty drummer Pell – who often chips in to fill the gaps left by Levi’s reticence – laughs.
“To be honest, when you’re on tour,” Levi says, “that sort of smell tends to just happen without the pubs. Among yourselves, you can create your own pub smell. With enough spilled beers … that’s not hard to recreate.” All three laugh. A band who’ve shared a tourbus for near-on a decade probably know this all too well.
We’re perched on a couple of benches on the top floor of a disused multistorey car park in Peckham, at the start of a busy press day of interviews and photo shoots that caps off with a sold-out gig. In the background, several empty parking spaces over, a cluster of children giggle and dash about during a summer holiday workshop. Mica, Raisa and Marc, on the other hand, are leaning towards me, hunching away from the wind whipping over the car park’s makeshift garden – complete with roughly hewn seats, a smattering of flowering plants and a few rustic-looking pebble pits.
The Shapes are here to talk about how they made their shambolic-sounding, wildly energetic third album, Good Sad Happy Bad. Unlike their previous releases it didn’t arise from rehearsals, or even a sense that it was time to knuckle down and write new material. Funnily enough, in what’s clearly becoming a bit of a trend, it all started over a couple of beers.
“We didn’t go into the studio thinking: ‘Yeah, we’re going to make an album over the next three weeks,’” says Levi. “It just happened that way. We all met up at the pub and thought: ‘Why don’t we have a play?’ So we did.”
Levi talks about turning the usual recording process on its head with the casual ease of someone who’s used to doing things her own way, regardless of what convention may dictate. As a result, Good Sad… holds on to the rough edges that have always defined both Mica’s voice and the band’s playfully genre-bending music, even if they’ve swapped the glitchy-pop production of 2009’s debut Jewellery and its 2012 follow-up Never for the scuzzier grit of DIY rock.
It wasn’t a deep yearning to revamp the 21st-century skiffle scene, that drove Levi though; she’s just restless. The daughter of musicians, she started playing the violin at an age when most of us hadn’t yet learned to write our full names. From there, she attended Watford’s Purcell music school before launching into an electronic music and composition course at London’s Guildhall.
Somewhere between dropping out of music college, teaming up with experimental producer Matthew Herbert and collaborating with the London Sinfonietta, Levi also found time to gain a reputation as a quirky singer who played vacuum cleaners onstage and fiddled with a curious collection of homemade instruments. It was then that she received an unexpected phone call from Jonathan Glazer, the director of Sexy Beast as well as numerous music promos for bands such as Massive Attack and Radiohead.
Glazer wanted her to craft the score for his first film in nine years, the creepily erotic Scarlett Johansson alien flick Under the Skin. What she produced was eerie at points, terrifying at others, reminiscent of the works of Krzysztof Penderecki, whose music scored both The Shining and The Exorcist. Levi’s work won her the European film award for best composer in December 2014, and a Bafta nomination a month later. Not bad for a first attempt.
Mica Levi has good claim to be one of the most original artists working in the UK today. She’s gentle, reserved, and I get the feeling she’s making music not for fame or recognition, but because it’s what she loves. Most recently, for example, she could be seen operating the decks for her friend Tirzah’s club PAs, or as an artist-in-residence at Doug Aitken’s sprawling Station To Station project at the Barbican Centre.
“I seem to just get myself into this stuff by chance,” Levi says when we next meet in the very rehearsal studio where the band careened through Good Bad… “I guess, for me to do Under the Skin, they were taking a risk and they chanced it. If you just work hard, then stuff seems to…” she falters. “I don’t know… people have called me up on the phone a lot more since that’s happened. But hopefully that will peter out,” she adds, drily.
For all her self-deprecation, Levi is actually extremely self-assured. You’d have to be to go from a classical background to making skewed art-pop, fusing elements of ambient electronic music with heavily treated guitars and unhinged drum patterns that sound like they were pounded out when Pell was high on adrenaline. How does Levi reconcile all those influences tussling to be heard in the band’s songs? “People are adaptable,” she says. “You don’t have to do just one thing. That’s the same reason why you probably rate a couple of country songs, a couple of punk songs, and might like something from a split genre: because they all have something in them.”
Sure, people can enjoy lots of musical styles. And Micachu And The Shapes definitely seem to keep one frayed trouser leg in the world of pop – hooks, earworm choruses – with the other buried knee-deep in the mess of deconstructed noise and clashing, discordant melodies. But there’s the sense that she’s making music that won’t ever cross over into the mainstream, often deemed as bewildering and avant garde by music critics.
She’s exasperated when I ask what she thinks about the way her band are consistently presented as a confounding anomaly. “We’re just trying to kick out a bit,” she says, pausing. “But to me, none of the things that we do are really that different. That’s like saying: ‘I can’t believe someone can get drunk in the night, and dance on a table, then in the day work in customer services,’” and she laughs, before turning serious again. “Maybe it’s just down to people’s artistic integrity. That there’s integrity in committing to a style. I respect that in other people, but that’s not how I am.”
Levi only opens up about authenticity when I prod, offering up the notion that “people smell a fake if you put something out there that you don’t rate”, before letting her voice trail off. Though she’s polite and wry, you can tell she’d rather be making music than talking about it.
Later, standing guitar in hand in a Peckham car park on the same level as her crowd, Levi is almost unrecognisable. Gone are the sentences that collapse in mumbles, or her reluctance to hold my eye. She’s roaring and squawking into the microphone, strumming her guitar furiously during the jerky, angular song Relaxing. Her crooked half-smile’s been replaced with a snarl. She looks relaxed. “Could you not just come a bit closer?” she asks at one point. “It’s nicer like that.” The audience – made up of a mixture of fans, friends and fellow musicians – shuffles forward diligently.
Poetry prize-winning spoken-word artist Kate Tempest is here, swigging red wine and dancing near the front. So is Sam Potter, formerly of mid-2000s indie act Late Of The Pier. We crane our necks to catch sight of Levi as she croaks through a set of songs that are evidently unlikely to top the charts. But that isn’t the point. Levi is an artist in the simplest meaning of the word. That means she makes music because it feels right or fulfilling, as naive as that may sound. And she doesn’t answer to anyone but herself. Given all that she’s accomplished in the past few years, why did she want to return to the Shapes? Why not strike out as Mica Levi, award-winning, high-brow composer and orchestral arranger for good?
“I just needed to make a fortune again,” she deadpans. “No, we just… I dunno … it just happened. There wasn’t much of a plan to it, to be honest. I don’t like things that are too safe or careful. If people are too self-aware, if they’re covering their tracks too much, then there’s no sacrifice being made. If you’re going to have the audacity to make something and give it to people, you want to be generous. Otherwise, why should people care?”
Some combination of deep musical knowledge, technical skill and the freedom to constantly mangle pop into new shapes seems to account for Levi’s generosity. For those who enjoy it, her music isn’t wilfully leftfield, it’s truly exciting. As ever, she downplays her abilities. “I just go with something that sounds decent. It might be a bit distorted or raw sometimes, but to me that’s just how it’s dressed up,” she says, pausing for so long I wonder if she’s ever going to start again. “Everyone does stuff, everyone makes stuff. If you’re going to make something, you should try and be wild.” Another pause: “But, I don’t know, everyone’s different, aren’t they?”
Good Sad Happy Bad is out now on Rough Trade
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