Talking to: LYLE!
There’s some exciting stuff going on in the queer music scene at the moment in Bristol. Making his way up through the ranks with trumpet in tow, a stack of live performances already under his belt and with the release of his debut EP ‘Songs for Player 2’ earlier in March, is Alt-Pop/Jazz-Funk producer and songwriter Lyle Anderton. By night he transforms into LYLE!, and he is definitely here and definitely has something to say.
But first, to his music. If you love Thundercat, if you love quirky, poppy, jazz funk with a deeper message, provided with a burst of glitter and humour, you are going to love LYLE! Built on a strong foundation of tight musicianship and addictive jazz-funk hooks, LYLE! is able to strap the listener in and take us on a pop journey with the added delight of not quite knowing what is going to happen next. ‘Songs for Player 2’ speaks the universal language of the lovelorn and the heartbroken after a breakup, but with an unexpected lightness and joy, it leaves us all ready to put away the tissues and Ben and Jerry’s and go forth with LYLE! into a brighter, sweeter future.
Firstly, tell us all about LYLE!, where are you based, and what is your music in your own words?
My name’s Lyle and that’s LYLE! when you are referring to the stage persona. I make this sort of weird, genre bending music, we settled on alt pop jazz funk, which was the least amount of genres that we could use! It's kind of my weird cauldron pot of musical influences being served as a bizarre grog for the masses. I am Bristol based and absolutely in love with this city; it has 100% made me who I am.
The music comes from my upbringing, which was a lot of ambient electronica that my parents played to me, I really enjoyed a lot of big band jazz in school, that was in a school band I really liked playing in, and then kind of bringing that together. I really loved hip hop as well, when I was around fifteen I really got into Tyler the Creator, Frank Ocean, and Domo Genesis. I was really into it, it's weird looking back, I was in a really white area, listening to this music that I didn’t understand where it came from. I suppose the earliest exposure I had to hip hop was Gorrillaz; my parents were really into them at the time so it was always on in the car and what have you. I think that Del the Funky Homosapien, I was listening to that when I was like, seven, so I suppose it does make sense because hip-hop was always just there.
Where did you grow up?
Bournemouth, on the south coast. It’s a lovely place, I can’t really knock it now, but it is definitely somewhere that young people feel they want to escape.
What brought you to Bristol?
I did a Fine Art BA, my mum was a mature art student and my dad was an art collector, so it was definitely something that was in the family. I did my foundation in Bournemouth but I definitely didn't want to stay in Bournemouth. I took Bristol on a whim really, but don't regret it for a second.
How did you cross over from being an art student to making music?
My musical upbringing was very lacklustre. It was a combination of me not feeling very motivated to study music and looking back now I can see there were a lot of failings from the people who were teaching me and the kind of environment they created. I am working as a music teacher now and one of the things that really informs my teaching is thinking back to how little enthusiasm I had for playing the trumpet when I was a child and a young teenager.
What I found was that all of my peers were accelerating past me at school, they were all better than me, so it was really discouraging and it really felt like they could just do it and I couldn’t. To try and take that context and compare it to professional musicianship, it felt like an alien world. But then as soon as I moved to Bristol and started going to smaller venues, and seeing unsigned bands, you know, the lifeblood of any music scene, it very quickly dawned on me how achievable everything was, and how I was able to draw that line between here is how you start and here’s how you get to the moon,.
I am a bit egotistical, I do love to be on stage, I do love to perform, and I started thinking “well, thank god I have been playing the trumpet for ten years, even though I have been doing it half-arsed!” It was at that moment I was very grateful for the time I spent playing my instruments. I think that is quite common, I remember reading an interview with one of the members of Daft Punk, and he studied classical music, took piano lessons when he was a young child, and when he hit twenty and started making all his amazing music, he said that in the moment he completely hated his parents for it, but now he completely loved them because they pushed him to do something that at the time maybe wasn't pleasurable, but paid off massively.
So when I was studying my art undergrad there were loads of opportunities to really experiment, you know, the fine art course massively influenced how comfortable I feel doing quite weird things, and that definitely informs the LYLE! live experience.
So, as LYLE!, you obviously sing, but do you write and produce your own stuff and play your own instruments as well?
I started learning trumpet when I was nine, when I was eighteen I stopped doing trumpet lessons, then when I was nineteen I completely put it down for a year. When I was in Bristol I was so enthused and motivated and started it again; I loved to improvise but I had no idea what I was doing, I was content to randomly play notes and just really let it happen in the moment and not worry about it. But what I found was that as my tastes started to elevate I found I actually wanted to play, to know what I was doing, so I started jazz piano lessons [with pianist] Henry Binning. Whenever I see him play I have feelings of complete ecstasy but at the same time just want to give up playing music forever! So I was getting lessons from him and that has been the real basis from which I have been able to understand and have faculty with my fingers.
When I was nineteen I wasn’t playing trumpet but I was going to Motion lots, and as well as my brother being a producer and a DJ that started encouraging me to make music on Ableton (an electronic music software program). Very quickly I found I was enjoying making more lyrical and more harmonic stuff, I wasn’t very content with the form of making electronic music. As I stopped partying so much I was getting less and less patient with my music, so I was starting to pivot towards pop, jazz and funk.
I sing, I play keys, I play trumpet, I write it all myself. The process so far has been that I pretty much make the whole thing and then I get my band members and collaborators in to re-record in a new way the various things they have got. Like, my piano playing is good but my piano player Tom is better, my bass playing is good but my bass player Monty is better, my programme drums aren't very good but my drummer Ollie does an amazing job. So it’s quite a long process to get to the point where people are allowed to hear it, but it's great.
When did you start performing out as LYLE!?
I did some stuff at university, we did some fundraisers, one or two gigs, there are quite a few musicians and weirdos on the course, but it wasn't actually until late 2018, one of my friends on the Bristol music scene Sam was putting on a jam night at Corner 77, that was on Stokes Croft, it was only around for around eight months. He had a house band, a kind of jazz-prog band, and the idea was each month he would have a guest feature to bring their music and play it with the band, so this was perfect for me because at the time I didn’t really have a band. That was wild because it was eight tunes, I wrote out all the sheet music, we had two rehearsals, but that was the first real gig; it was finally LYLE! unleashed on the world!
My next gig was at The Gallimaufry in early 2019; that was a solo set, so I was doing mostly solo shows that year which was really useful. I would definitely say to anyone, if you are the person writing the music you need to definitely be in a place where you can do solo gigs without a band; it provides so much flexibility.
What has been your favourite gig so far?
Probably just before lock down happened, in January 2020, I did my first headline show at the Golden Lion. I really had to pull together lots of covers and new music, and that was lovely because I had such an amazing response from everyone. It was a great opportunity to craft a whole live show that was really on brand. Part of the LYLE! aesthetic isn't just the music, it's the joyful experience that comes; I fancy myself as a bit of a comedian on stage. I often joke that the music and the recording is just a front so I can get up on stage without having to face the audience as an actual comedian!
If you are met with silence you can just get the trumpet out?!
Yes! So my biggest comedy influence is Stewart Lee. If I’m met with silence I will take the Stewart Lee high road approach that the audience is in the wrong because they aren’t appreciating me!
Who are your musical heroes?
In terms of big international artists, the ones I always pick out are Thundercat and Louis Cole, they are the two most obvious ones. They embody so much of how I see my live performances; they are often spontaneous, often very lighthearted and they have real deviant brains, a sense of comedy, and drama as well. They are both really talented, their abilities as improvising musicians allows them to be really relaxed. If you're not as stressed about the placement of every single note it becomes a lot easier.
A really memorable experience I had as an audience member was seeing the band Feelgood Experiment, they are a Bristol jazz group, and they were playing a song that they had only just written, they had maybe rehearsed it once or twice. And the energy on stage, the pure, unadulterated energy as they were constantly nervously looking around, really not sure if everyone was going to play the song, like it was this rickety building that was going to collapse any second; that raw, nervous energy, I think that is so exciting to watch. I think there is nothing worse than watching a band that doesn't look particularly interested in what they are playing; that is a tragedy.
So, moving on to your EP, it's out on Friday. What's it about? What brought those particular songs together?
These are all my older songs I wrote going through a breakup. It is a story as old as time and it's something that almost every single person out there can understand and appreciate. I had these songs, they came to me in moments of real sadness. I think there are some moments of really strong emotional resonance that can occur when you feel a certain way, you know, I was sitting in my bedroom with a piano and singing. That really sort of says how you are feeling and really paints that picture. As soon as a song has captured that, giving me that real feeling when the blood rushes to my head and my lips are quivering, that is it, that song has to be released, there is no compromising, I can never throw it away. I had five or six songs to pick from that I had really been working on, it kind of made sense that the three breakup songs would be together on one EP.
In terms of the influences these ones are especially video game-y, quite big, epic. A lot of them I was writing just after a big project I finished in uni based on the Rise and Fall of Ziggy Stardust, and that is definitely this really big, epic album of music. These songs have a very similar, big magnanimous air of operatic quality, I feel like that anyway.
What is going to be the first single?
The single Mountains came out last April! The EP was originally coming out in May last year, I had an EP release show booked in at the Gallimaufry, and then the pandemic happened. Basically my working plan was to have April and May working non stop every day to the point where I might break down and never recover in order to meet that deadline. So when the pandemic happened I lost a lot of motivation, but also, like I think a lot of people did, when that first lock down happened there was a real pause, when all the people who had been working so tirelessly thought “I can have a break and I won’t feel like I am being left behind”, it was almost like a big armistice.
Very quickly I was in a position where I felt like I could relax, so in the face of having this opportunity for having unadulterated relaxation and time out, it didn’t make sense to work mancially on getting the EP finished, so I thought I would take my time and ensure it was finished to the best of my abilities. I am really excited to have the EP out, it's one thing to have the single out, but a single on its own, it can feel like you haven’t really established the consistent themes in your music.
Following the EP I have got some plans. I have got some mates who are going to do some remixes, and then trying to pile on into this next release which will be another EP. I have no idea when that will come out, maybe by the end of the year? But I think I will probably have a single or two out by the end of the year. The new songs are interesting, because I am going from songs about a personal breakup, to songs that aren’t about me, that are about difficult topics, things like queer identity, grief and death, dealing with dementia, so I am very excited to show that development. I feel like this next EP is going to be a lot more interesting in terms of the story it tells.
What’s important to you?
Black Trans Lives Matter. Considering a lot of my creative process is when I feel I have problems I am struggling to process, there is a lot there that is difficult to process. Because it's very important that we continue keeping that urgency in our heads, keeping any sense of momentum going that we can. Particularly with Black trans lives, there have been regressions recently in certain LGBT laws and rights, and it is getting more concerning, not less concerning. It is important to me to make sure I use my platform to keep people fighting for what is important.
My big recommendation is to follow a person on Instagram called Alok V Menon, who is this amazing non binary author, performer and speaker, and incredibly beautiful gender queer person, who is constantly creating educational content to try and keep people informed and on top of all the misinformation and historical falsehoods. They do an amazing job and the more people who just spend time reading through the stuff they say the more people will be well equipped to educate others.
I want to big up my mates over at PHAT as well, Poland Has a Task, they are doing bloody amazing work. I am really close with a lot of the artists on the album they have coming out. I would urge people to put money that is all going to fight for the all-important women’s and LGBT rights in Poland.
When are people going to be able to come and see you live?
You know what, I just got a date this morning! I have a headline show, an EP launch at Crofters Rights on 3rd July! It’s going to be epic; it’s going to be the full LYLE! experience! It's going to be laughing, crying, more laughing; it's going to be great!