Introducing: Blue Balloon

22 June 2012, 14:50 | Written by Chris Jones

(Tracks)

With support slots for Stornoway and First Aid Kit already under his belt, singer-songwriter Blue Balloon impressed further with intimate debut album Hearts Are Pretty Heavy, released last month on Marketstall Records. The artist formerly known as Robert Rorison has a penchant for Prince and esteem for the East Coast MCs but now he’s found his own voice, making music as personal as it comes. We catch up with Rob ahead of his Shoreditch show this weekend to talk false starts, songs that break hearts and his days playing acoustic cowboy R&B.

Congratulations on your debut album. Self-penned, solo and a long time coming: how does it feel to see these songs fledge?

Robert: It feels like I’ve fully come in from the cold, the warmth and affection that has been lavished upon the album has shot right through me. I mean basically it was a studio project that I made on my lonesome with little more than an acoustic guitar, a reverb pedal and some drum samples. I set out to make a thing that people could have and that thing is now a beautiful little disk that anyone can place in their record collection. The bonus for me is that it has allowed me to begin playing live shows with some of my favourite musicians and that has given the songs a whole new lease of life.

  A lot of your songwriting seems strikingly personal. Was making this record a cathartic process?

It is a personal record and it was also difficult to make but that was mainly in the recording process. I was punishing myself by doing full song length takes of each track for every part of the record and not cutting them up because I felt like that was cheating in some way, it was madness really. I dumped numerous re-recorded versions of the same songs that had taken days to put together and restarted the entire album at least three times. It made recording a very long and arduous process and I’ll never make an album like that again, it felt like self-flagellation really. I think any sense of catharsis came when I gave it to Mark (Estall) to be mixed, his work on it functioned as a means of purifying all that I had been through in the recording process, I have a lot to be thankful to him for.

 The balloon theme recurs on Hearts are Pretty Heavy. There’s an innocent fragility to balloons (and a blue one – famously – facilitated Winnie the Pooh’s cloud disguise). How did you come by your nom de plume? 

Well all the literary references to blue balloons eluded me during my childhood but balloons and in particular blue ones just became this recurring presence in my lyrics. When Marketstall Records signed me I was just using my own name but just before getting the album mastered I died on my arse one night at a local dive that puts on a weekly music night, it culminated in me playing a 10 minute jam of a Prince song with a very short and partially blind bongo player and I thought “OK, that is it, Robert is dead”. Blue balloons were on my mind because at the time I was making the balloon sculpture that is on the front cover of the album so I just told Marketstall that this was now a Blue Balloon record – nobody told me it was a crap name so I grabbed a hold of it and got carried away.

 How long have you been writing and performing?

I started taking it seriously about 6 years ago, up to that point I was playing silly cover versions to make my friends giggle but little else. Then it came time to write some songs to be put at the mercy of an audience and so I went looking for one.

  You’ve described your songwriting process as ‘filling lyric-shaped holes in the world’. Do you settle on a tune and fill in the blanks, or do the phrases and couplets come first?

Phrases, lyrical ideas always come first and there is no song without a first line that I really fall in love with. I’m keen not to leave people waiting for an interesting lyric so I like to get in there straight away and then its just a case of hanging on from there. Because there is nobody around to edit my writing I tend to be harsh on myself, I get bored quite quickly with my own stuff and there are always more words than I need for a song so maybe it’s more the case that I am filling in music shaped holes in the lyrics that I write. To be honest I tend not to think about it too much if the words are beautiful enough there is a always a spare chord lying around to go with them.

You’ve just joined the twitterverse (@BlueBalloonRob). Having fun so far? Are you worried about frittering away precious lyrical fragments?! 

I got banned from Twitter within about a day of using it. I still don’t know what I did wrong and they didn’t tell me but I had to apologise to Twitter, seriously they made me apologise and agree to play nice or I wouldn’t be allowed back on the site. So relations between me and twitter are a little frosty at the moment, I await to see if we are going to get along.

 There seems to be a nod to Squeeze in ‘Beijing Bricks’, which is a very good thing, but your broader influences are rather eclectic. Who were your hip hop heroes?

Mid-nineties New York superstars really, Wu-Tang’s 36 Chambers and B.I.G’s Ready To Die were where it started for me. It was a world that was dangerous and completely compelling and the hardcore music friends I had at the time listened exclusively to hip-hop. I listen back to Ready to Die now and it is so bleak, I mean you have a couple of radio friendly smooth and sexy tracks with painfully obvious samples but the majority of that album is about killing, crime, drugs and there is that incredible suicide track at the end. The subject matter is brutal but it’s his verbal dexterity and amazing attention to lyrical detail that make it comfortably one of the best things I have ever heard. You can go back to albums like that if you can bear it and discover lyrical brilliance on every listen.

Who would you be proud to hear covering your songs?

I don’t know about covering but I quite like the idea of being sampled in a ‘you made it a hot line, I made it a hot song’ kind of way.

Tell us about ‘Ode to the Big Smoke’ – are you London born & bred? Do you think your physical environment filters through into the music that you make? 

Yeah I am London bred if not born, I moved to South East London when I was very young. ‘Ode to the Big Smoke’ doesn’t really refer to London in a cockney knees up type of way, the song is more about being lonely in an imposing and overwhelming place that also happens to be home. There are landmark references specific to London but the mood of the song really tries to capture the throbbing pulse of a relentlessly active city so in that sense the environment in which I wrote the song is a huge part of what makes it what it is.

Affection and despair often walk hand in hand in your lyrics. Is Hearts Are Pretty Heavy a sorrowful album or is there a hidden message of hope and joy?

I don’t think I have hidden any joy or hope, I think it is all there to be heard on the record. Some of the lyrics are quite despairing but they walk the line with more than just the sum of their sadness. I like the idea that people can go back and discover more in the lyrics than what the mood of the music at any given time is able to give them, some songs are just sad songs, others can break your heart one day but given time and repeated listens can begin to fill you with joy, meanings change as the listener changes and grows and I don’t see my songs any differently.

What are your plans for the rest of 2012? Are you touring? 

Playing as many shows as possible with good promoters in lovely venues. We have a show on home-turf so to speak on Sunday 24 June at the Strongroom Bar on Curtain Road in Shoreditch where I have been doing a residency for the last year or so. I get to pick the bill and have basically been left in charge of putting on the show for the last Sunday of every month. It’s a rare opportunity to do exactly what I want to do with other bands and singers that I really like.

 Last one – tell us about your Will Smith phase…

Oh that was in the open mic days, rooms full of rowdy people who tended to view the person over in the corner pouring all his emotions into a dodgy PA system as a disturbance to their valuable drinking time. I had to get their attention somehow so I created this alter-ego called Bertiefett he was a Stetson and Duster wearing cowboy who liked to sing hip-hop & bump n grind R’n’B covers on the acoustic guitar. He had a pretty awesome set that included Prince songs, ‘Pony’ by Ginuwine and would often finish with a full on ho-down version of ‘The Fresh Prince of Bel Air’. It was quite a silly phase, but it was fun, it’s always got to be fun.