Still Life: The Steadfast Journey Of Vaults

Blythe Pepino on London, art, and the creative process...

For a while there, Vaults were the biggest band you’d never heard of. The artful London trio managed to chalk up enormous online popularity without quite breaking through, amassing more than 20 million streams without even releasing their debut album.

But then John Lewis stepped in. Yep, that’s Vaults on the new festive ad, tackling Randy Crawford’s softly emotive hymn ‘One Day I’ll Fly Away’. As promotions go, it’s a master-stroke, pushing their music to the forefront of British life at exactly the right point, in one of the most high profile ad campaigns of the Christmas period.

Yet it’s also a mile away from their debut album. Supple, subtle, and electronic, it’s taken some three years, countless sessions, and Ben Vella successfully battling cancer to finally lay down.

“It’s hard to describe,” singer Blythe Pepino tells Clash. “It has been such a long journey. It’s amazing to feel like its actually going to be available to people as a whole thing.”

Out now, ‘Caught In Still Life’ is the distillation of three years of feverish creation, the end result of Vaults learning how to be Vaults. “I think any band needs to be able to trust themselves and each other and those two things are like a symbiotic relationship,” she says. “It’s taken time for that to happen and it’s not something you can force. You just have to have experiences with each other. You need to go on the road. You need to have shit things happen to you. You need to have really great things happen so you feel like the dogs bollocks for two weeks and then you have a comedown”.

“All of those things you learn about each other and how to get more unique things out of each other… which is a very tentative experience to begin with because everyone’s got their protective mechanisms. And then after a while you start understanding to trust each other.”

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Very much a group in every sense, Vaults work through the music together, face to face. “The process is Ben (Vella) writing most of the music,” she explains. “Then Barney (Freeman) does the production – it is very in house. Which is great because we don’t have people messing around with the sound too much. It’s all coming from us. Obviously I change the songs a lot when I sing them because I’m a female vocalist and I throw in my ideas into there. It’s very much a triangle. It’s very equal in terms of how much input there is.”

Building up an enormous bank of material Vaults have spread their wings across two EPs and a handful of singles. Making a full album, though, proved rather tricky – the three-piece were rather spoilt for choice. “Probably eight months ago we were playing through everything and then we had ideas about what it was going to be,” she explains. “It was almost there and then we had lots of little changes – some songs were taken out and extra songs being put in. There wasn’t really a moment where it happened or a specific method. One conversation leads to another conversation. It wasn’t very glamorous.”

Glamorous or not, it certainly worked. ‘Caught In Still Life’ feels remarkably fully formed, from the bedrock of ‘Lifespan’ to the exotic immediacy of ‘Premonitions’. It’s a record that has a stately, classic feel, but also one that feels innately modern, inherently 2016.

Largely constructed in two separate London studios, the record has a palpable sense of place running through it. “Each space carries with it a different path to the studio from where you live, you see different things on your way there, you meet different people around where you work and all those different things affect your mood as you come to the room to play. It would be crazy not to mention any of them.”

“Especially the coffee house,” she laughs. “We had a really great place where we drank coffee and ate amazing food there in Dalston and I think that made everyone very happy.”

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It’s very much a triangle. It’s very equal…

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The walk to work, the sights and sounds of London – there’s an inherently visual element to the Vaults project, one that manifests itself in those phenomenal (and phenomenally successful) videos. “It’s like a feedback loop in a sense,” Blythe says. “Vaults is the first time I’ve had experience making music videos with a budget, rather then 200 quid. So that process has really affected the way that I understand the music because I've been able to explore that with directors and other visual artists.”

“Creatively, the pieces of work feed back into the music because you’ve created a world for that song and the music video becomes the world for the song. All these worlds combine to create a galaxy of what you are doing and then you start existing in that galaxy to continue to write the music.”

Adrift in their own galaxy, Vaults are set to close the year by inviting fans to join their interstellar journey. ‘Caught In Still Life’ is out on record shelves now, with the group focussing on how to translate three years of their lives into a performance statement. “It’s going to take us sitting in a dark room, putting the album on and doing some visualisation,” the singer insists. “I think as well it’s going to take a lot of reviewing of everything we’ve learnt and all the different elements of the visuals that we’ve created so far. How can we bookend this into a performance.”

“I always find with shows you have to try and find a balance,” she muses. “You can’t do too much of anything and too little of anything.”

After three years, it seems like Vaults have finally found that balance.

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'Caught In Still Life' is out now.

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