By Paul Taylor | Wed, 18 August, 2010

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I Am Kloot

The bookies place I Am Kloot’s album Sky At Night at 10 to 1 to take the Mercury Prize – shorter odds than Paul Weller and Dizzee Rascal, but an outsider compared with favourites The XX.

So has John Bramwell, the band’s front man, got a piece of this action betting on himself, or even on one of his rivals?

“No, until I go on tour, I’m going to be a bit skint,” he chuckles.

Life hasn’t changed much yet for Bramwell and bandmates Pete Jobson and Andy Hargreaves. They had a glimpse of Mercury hoo-ha at the ceremony announcing the nominations, but otherwise they are getting on with rehearsing for a tour just as they have done since 1999.

But they saw what happened when Elbow – another time-served set of local musicians – were suddenly given Mercury Prize-winning profile with the success of The Seldom Seen Kid in 2008. There were gigs with the Hallé, sell-out arena shows and, for a time, no TV show was complete without a bit of Elbow burbling in the background

“There are some things worth winning, and I think this is worth winning,” says Bramwell, aged 45, who grew up in Gee Cross, Hyde, and now lives in Chorlton.

“To be nominated is very flattering. The main thing we’ve always wanted to do is communicate, and we’ve been in the band for 10 years, trying to communicate something through music that you can’t communicate through conversation.

“Along the way, there have been some milestones. Getting a John Peel session was a really big thrill, getting asked to play at Glastonbury, same thing, and our first European tour.”

Bramwell describes Sky At Night as their “gentlest and most spacious” record, its nocturnal theme evoked by arrangements with near-orchestral ambition.

Producing the album were Elbow’s Guy Garvey and Craig Potter, but it wasn’t a case of Garvey and Potter sprinkling some magic Mercury dust over Kloot’s songs. In fact, it was in the gaps between Garvey and Potter’s spells in the studio that Sky At Night was fleshed out into the impressive work it became.

“The album is more elaborate musically because Elbow were very busy last year, so we had four or five days a months to record,” says Bramwell. “So we kept the recordings in the studio and we did not hear them for a few weeks, so it kept everything fresh. In the meantime, I came up with extra melodies and hooks for these songs. I have never recorded like this before.”

Bramwell loathes it when journalists use expressions such as  “Manchester’s worst-kept secret” about him.

“It makes it sound like I’ve never played anywhere but Manchester,” he huffs.

But it is true to say that while he is, to a healthy minority, a veteran craftsman of song,  I Am Kloot are – just like Elbow pre-2008 – hardly a household name.

“I want as many people to hear us as possible – always have,” Bramwell says. “That’s not to say that I’ve changed what we do in order to make that happen. I think that’s the problem (laughs) because in lots of ways we don’t really do pop music.”

Bramwell has been performing since the age of 11, when he first banged out the odd song at a pub near his dad’s home in South Wales. By 16, he was busking on Hyde market, and, after fronting a band called The Ignition in the 1980s, he was performing as singer-songwriter Johnny Dangerously and also working as a TV presenter. 

In the 1990s, he formed The Mouth, with Bryan Glancy, the singer-songwriter posthumously honoured in the title of Elbow’s The Seldom Seen Kid.

Like Elbow, I Am Kloot don’t fit any Manchester music stereotypes, and Bramwell states: “We’re not part of anything.” But he does recognise the creative buzz around this city.

“Pete Jobson, the bass player in I Am Kloot, moved to Manchester from Northumberland just to find people who were forming bands,” he says. “So there is this atmosphere of self-fulfilling prophecy about the place, and long may that continue.”

I Am Kloot’s next performance in the city will be at Manchester Cathedral, when the trio’s line-up will be fleshed out with violin, viola, cello, trumpet, keyboards and sax, and the natural reverb of the building will work its magic on their songs.

Before then, we’ll know whether I Am Kloot have won the Barclaycard Mercury prize. And perhaps there will be news on talk of a collaboration between I Am Kloot and one of their keenest fans, Radcliffe-born film director Danny Boyle.

“There’s always a chance we’re doing something together, but it’s finding time to sort that out,” says Bramwell. “Time and again, you hear things might be happening and then they are not, but, fingers crossed...”

I Am Kloot perform at Manchester Cathedral on December 3, 2010. Sky At Night is out now on the Shepherd Moon label. The winner of the Barclaycard Mercury Prize is announced on September 7, 2010.

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