Growing up, Matt Berry’s house was not a musical one. “No one played anything. Nobody,” he tells tQ over the phone. “My parents didn’t play records, they had no interest in them.” For a while the only tape his father owned was a compilation of bloopers from sport commentaries. “So it wasn’t like I inherited my father’s record collection,” he says. “There was none of that.”
Instead, during his teens in the late 1980s, he came to music as an autodidact. Disillusioned with the era’s glossy and immediate mainstream, his attention was instead drawn to music of a previous generation and an opposite temperament. “Nirvana hadn’t happened, and shit pop singles like ‘Pump Up The Jam’ were in the charts, so I got into longform pieces that lasted 20 minutes, without any vocals,” he says. So unusual was his obsession with Tubular Bells and Jean-Michel Jarre, he wasn’t even bullied. “At school they just didn’t know what the fuck to make of it,” he says.
It’s fitting that this should lay the foundations for a career that, from the outside at least, has seen Berry remain committed to idiosyncrasy. On the one hand he’s a household name for his work in popular sitcoms like The IT Crowd, The Mighty Boosh, Toast Of London, Garth Marenghi’s Darkplace and most recently What We Do In The Shadows, and a household voice thanks to the theatrical intonation (considerably softer in real life) that’s as omnipresent in radio jingles as it is in A-list streaming shows like Amazon’s blockbuster adaptation of the video game Fallout and Disney’s Star Wars spin-off The Book Of Boba Fett (he voices robots in both). On the other, his new LP Heard Noises (released later this month via Acid Jazz) is the 13th entry in a long, parallel music career, where his work has been defined by constant left-turns, eclectic instrumentation, exploratory instincts, a gift for melody and a rigorous approach to production.
For Berry, however, acting, comedy and music are just strings to the same bow. “I don’t want to sound like a wanker, but being an artist is all I do. It’s all expression of some sort. It doesn’t matter what the platform is, whether a song works or the timing of the joke, it’s all got to be stuff that I would find interesting.” His new record is no exception, leaping from pastoral pop to slinky Gainbourgian basslines to abstract psychedelic synth experiments to twisty 60s-inspired duets. You can detect many of its constituent ingredients in his Baker’s Dozen, a selection which, appropriately enough, twists in many a strange direction.
Matt Berry’s new album Heard Noises is released on 24 January via Acid Jazz. To begin reading his Baker’s Dozen, click ‘First Record’ below.
