Ex-Basement Jaxx sound engineer Reuben Hollebon finds his place as a songwriter and performer

“There was a small studio in an old Norfolk village hall that my friends bands were using,” Hollebon tells me, talking about how he came to navigate such projects. “After going along with one of them I pushed and pressed at a studio owner to let me join with the music making well aware I had no idea what I was doing… my speakers at home were probably out of phase. He relented, I thought I’d be the tea boy but fair play to Richard, he let on the Harrison MR7 console on the first day."

"We’d record a new band in the morning, track vocals and send them away with two or three tracks by the evening, still some days straight to tape. It’s music making method with vitality and enthusiasm, everyone’s dreaming and there’s no ceiling to it. Via a stint in Yorkshire I ended up in London studios largely engineering for the composer Nitin Sawhney, hence the orchestral sessions, but on a fair few records, remixes and soundtracks.”

While some are content being a credit on the CD, geeking out over equipment and shyly tucking themselves away in broom cupboards forever more, Hollebon used his experience to support the production of his own recordings. From the offset there was a kind of leveled-up bedroom production to the sessions, and an immediate control to the finished articles that turned the process into an obsessive mission to perfect his songs. “I was probably 18 when I picked up a guitar. Performing wasn’t natural, though songs scratched their way out in a hurry,” he says of his experience with becoming a recording artist in his own right, reaching and struggling to write his first 100 songs.

"Being aware that songwriting takes much practice and a lot of what I’d done wasn’t good yet, it took a while playing a lot of small clubs to learn about the songs and the performance.”

Norfolk and England bleached their way into the music, irremovably so, but you’d be wrong to think they’re describable as “folk” in any newish use of the term. Click play, you’ll hear. This is not a singer/songwriter. That term has connotations of coffee shops, Ben Howard and sticky teenagers. This is music built from a childhood of beat, jazz, and some post punk. If we’re opening the record collection for access points, start with Father John Misty, Elbow, Talking Heads, and move into Marc Bolan, CAN and Jon Hopkins.

"Faces" was an opportunity to work with people he admires greatly, such as producers Craigie Dodds and Charlie Hugall. He’d written the song out then went “at it in the studio,” playing the bass, acoustic, and electric guitars, made the harmonic pads, while they played the drums. Hollebon did a vocal take, doubled it, once more, and that was it: “There was no need for drops, so much energy, originally over cooked the bass but we pulled it back in and the record was finished.”

Hollebon tells me the track is about, “the looseness of self, the different people I am throughout the day, or life make up the whole, and the more challenging, nay dangerous ones are often more exciting.”

Trip hop forms a pulse in Reuben’s sound, particularly Lamb and Massive Attack, at least that’s the influence, along with big beat, grunge and a bit of the Brit scene. A lot of his writing is geared towards solo performance on a guitar so there isn’t a lot of space, though he often performs with more musicians on stage to fulfill the desired effect. “In the next record”, he promises, “the space and snare drum may make a larger appearance.”

Now with the release of new track "Haystacks", Hollebon is continuing to write the story that puts him somewhere between knowing what the fuck he’s doing and satisfying his own criticisms. “Achieving a good record feels wantingly unreachable... ain’t that great”, he ends the conversation. With material this complex and entirely self-motivated there certainly seems no future chapters which couldn’t be written into existence.

Reuben Hollebon plays St Pancras Old Church on 19 November