18 July 2005Pascal Wyse
'Music sounds so wrong at the moment," says Matthew Herbert, sitting outside a pub near his London studio. People who hear his new album, Plat du Jour, may well agree with him. One of the tracks features the sound of Herbert driving a Chieftain tank over a re-creation of the meal Nigella Lawson prepared for Bush and Blair, when the US president came over to thank Tony for his support over Iraq. Plat du Jour also features 80,000 chicks, 3,255 people biting into apples, and a track made from "one crystal of beet sugar and a coke can".
What's eating Herbert is the things music has stopped representing. "There would be no sense, if you were to look back in 100 years' time, that there is a war going on, or that we had one of the most incompetent and disgusting people running the world. I mean, what would punk have done?"
Since he started composing, producing and remixing music in the mid-1990s, Herbert has recorded his politics. Early on, as Dr Rockit, he attacked corporate excess by sampling the sounds of McDonald's and Gap products - literally stamping angrily all over them.
"I guess it started with Naomi Klein," he says. "Then I discovered John Pilger and Noam Chomsky, people that weren't afraid to talk in terms of morality, and had passion. It's not about free market economics or choices, things are how they are because someone has decided they should be like that.
"After being involved with music for about five years, I realised I had power. What I pointed my microphone at I was drawing people's attention to. Like a war photographer. I wanted to listen to Ikea flat-packed tables collapsing." He looks up dreamily: "Or the sound of Tony Blair resigning."
A combination of touring and an encounter with Joanna Blythman's book The Food We Eat got Herbert obsessed with what he calls "the international language of food". Plat du Jour is a document of that - a musical take on the politics of pleasure. For Herbert, those politics are constantly cloaked. "This is crucial to why I wanted to do food on the album. Not only is it life and death, but within it is total deception. The British Farm Standard, for instance [a sticker featuring a tractor made up of red, white and blue letters] enrages me. It doesn't mean the food is made in Britain. It can come from any farm in the world, but meets a standard that would be required from a British farm. I bet 80-90% of people would expect that to mean it comes from a British farm."
Herbert has hardly touched his drink. No wonder - a minute later he has deconstructed it as a glass of sheer misery: oranges from a poor country; lemonade from a questionable corporation; ice cubes possibly housing flouride and chlorine. "There are consequences to all these things we feel we have a right to."
Herbert is confident that even if the music gets slated, there is a strong backbone to the project. "I tried to align myself with meaningful authorities. The coffee track was constructed - philosophically and physically - with an author called Anthony Wild, who's written an incredible book called Black Gold: the Dark History of Coffee. Before he wrote it he worked in the coffee trade. He's lost friends through this book."
Herbert's research for the album also included a trip down the London sewers with his microphone. "It was like Ghostbusters. Late one night I got a call on my mobile. 'We're on,' said a man." He gave Herbert a location, turned up there in a van, gave Herbert a special suit and snuck him down a manhole in the early hours of the morning. "All to record the sound of your shit, you see?" I am stuck, just for a second, with the image of a singing poo.
Other subjects on the album include diet hype and the last meals of death row prisoners. And for two tracks - The Final Meal of Stacey Lawton and Hidden Sugars - Herbert collaborated with Heston Blumenthal, chef and proprietor of the Fat Duck in Bray. On a website set up for the CD (www.platdujour.co.uk), all the "ingredients" and details of research are listed, along with notes such as: "All the melodies, basslines and chords are made from a can of coke", and "Ricetec patent no. 5663484: this is the patent number in which Ricetec, a Texas agribusiness firm, attempts to patent basmati rice, a plant neither created by Ricetec nor indigenous to America". The ingredient list for the track Celebrity comes to nearly 1,300 words.
Was anyone wary of him nosing around with a microphone? "This underlines the impotence of the record, and its power. If I had gone in with a camera I would be in trouble, but no one is suspicious of sound. It has not been used in a politically motivated way - at least, not on a scale that's going to have any impact on a chicken farmer in Wiltshire."
Herbert wants to intrigue people enough to find out what lies beneath both the music and our diets, but he is also adamant the album is "music, not documentary". This should reassure people who think they are in for an austere lecture in sound, because Plat du Jour celebrates food as much as it scrutinises its roots, and is constantly playful. Herbert is witty without resorting to slapstick, and arranges what some would call "non-musical" sounds in a musical way.
He also exercises serious discipline in the treatment of sounds. His list of Dogma-style rules for his productions begins: "1. The use of sounds that exist already is not allowed (subject to article 2). In particular: No drum machines. All keyboard sounds must be edited in some way: no factory presets.
"2. Only sounds that are generated at the start of the compositional process or taken from the artist's own previously unused archive are available for sampling."
The list goes on. It calls to mind the questions a shopper would ask of a good butcher. Herbert wants to know where everything comes from, how it is treated and what it gets fed - no mad cow disease in his musical food chain. "I'm definitely chopping it up," he laughs.
Herbert tours around the world - which implies an environmental hypocrisy. I'm gearing up to challenge him on this when he spookily pre-empts me: "I'm stopping flying on environmental grounds, which is going to cut 40% of my income. It is incredibly empowering to take a decision like that. We shouldn't be allowed to freely fly to Australia, we should struggle to get there, because it has real consequences. My point in Plat du Jour is that things don't exist in isolation."
· Plat du Jour is out today on Accidental Records.
