The Vintage Caravan: Savouring The Moment
The stickerbombed labyrinth of Camden Town’s The Underworld has lent a roof and a stage to many faces of music royalty in their rise to stardom. The years gone by have seen FOO FIGHTERS, SEPULTURA, and RADIOHEAD (to name a few) grace the evening bill, but tonight, on a biting autumn evening, Iceland’s THE VINTAGE CARAVAN would join the ranks. We sat with lead guitarist/vocalist Oskar Logi Ágústsson and bassist Alexander Örn Númason backstage in a scene fitting for the modern rockstar lifestyle – sipping coffee and dissecting how, after a delightful Korean BBQ, British food is often best when it isn’t actually British. We won’t argue with that.
Considering the casual atmosphere and the healthy buzz of operations unfolding around us, you’d never guess the show almost didn’t happen – originally booked for The Camden Assembly, cancelled and moved to a beer festival, then moved yet again to the depths of The Underworld. In a sense, the feeling of things happening by sheer “happenstance” perfectly embodies the band’s latest triumph Portals, their sixth LP in almost two decades and the very subject of discussion for tonight’s show. Born proudly out of sheer circumstance, Ágústsson happily admits with a laugh. “I have no idea how this album makes any sense. It was put together super quickly, with Alexander writing in his corner and me writing in mine. Sooner or later, we had 25 songs to learn and record – it was just a case of which ones made sense for the album!”
Even one of the album’s crown jewels, a vocal feature from genre-titan OPETH frontman Mikael Åkerfeldt, was unearthed by sheer incidence as Númason explains. “We got really lucky with Portals, actually – we didn’t have that much time to really think things through or develop a running monologue, but this all translated into the spontaneity of the album. With Mikael, it started as an idea we were simply throwing around. We didn’t hear back for a while, so we recorded a version with Oskar’s vocals and then, when we came to mastering the album, suddenly he came back like ‘right, what do you need?’.”
Portals, then, more so than any other project the band has released thus far, is THE VINTAGE CARAVAN in its most uninhibited formation. Even in the finer details of production, as the duo explain, the record is as true to life as you can experience without having your ear canal ruptured in person, as the unsuspecting Camden crowd would soon learn. Not only featuring the band’s first live-action album cover – a departure from their catalogue of kaleidoscopic canvases – but also their first dabble into tape recordings, introducing new dimensions of purity as the band was forced into the ‘one-take’ mentality of a live performance. “We’ve always battled trying to capture the ‘live’ essence of the band on tape,” Ágústsson begins, “and while we’ve chased it album after album, I think we’ve never been closer on Portals, and doing it on tape was a huge part of that! Suddenly, we felt as though we were playing live and had to treat the recordings as such, as we wouldn’t be overdubbing with a wall of guitars as we’ve done previously.”
“Here, we wanted to let the performance simply speak for itself. Plus, there is definitely the element of nerves. Considering the solos are all recorded live, you know you ‘have’ to pull it off. If we fucked up, we would have had to splice not only from the guitar tape, but the bass and the drums from a completely different take to ensure it fitted. It really brought the organic feel to those performances.”
While Portals may stand isolated as a musical time capsule for the trio, it’d be remiss to ignore the voyage that preceded it. With almost 20 years of legacy behind them, THE VINTAGE CARAVAN has maintained an astonishing work ethic from their formative teenage years, growing exponentially as musicians and equally as people – with some turning into “not so fresh fathers” as Ágústsson muses. Yet besides the deserved pride and accolades, does the band feel truly understood? Not entirely.
“People often still try to lump us into a box yanno?” Númason starts, “like ‘oh you’re a prog band’ or ‘oh you’re a 60s band, you’re this, you’re that!’, and I feel people can miss the mark by essentially listening to us with a filter on so that they can feel reassured that we fit into one of these boxes. For us, however, experimentation is the name of the game moving forward, this is album number six, and while we could have just stayed happily in our ‘zone’, we felt it now was the time for a change, to mix things up.”
“There’s so many different things we could do, so many avenues we could explore, but if we’re afraid about ‘misrepresenting’ ourselves based on what people expect us to be, well, that’s simply not something I’d rather think about – we need to do what feels good for us.”
Only an hour later, THE VINTAGE CARAVAN delivered on that ethos without a stutter. An earth-shattering performance that belied the band’s folksy apparel, which left even the well-worn grounds of The Underworld without answer. The only appropriate response, happily provided by that night’s pundits, was an unbridled riot, soundtracked by a fleet of the band’s new earworms and flanked by fan-favourites. There were no missteps, no hesitations, no second-guessing, just a pristine notch in the fabric of time that will forever exist within that moment. For a show that almost didn’t happen, it’s a damn good job it did.
Portals is out now via Napalm Records. View this interview, alongside dozens of other killer bands, in glorious print magazine fashion in DS125 here:
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