start Me up
Critics say his playing is reminiscent of Martino, Metheny and Benson, and his new album is possibly his most adventurous yet…
After graduating from the Liverpool Institute for Performing Arts in 2000, Matt Chandler relocated to London and formed a band called PEST with some old friends. Together they released some white labels and were signed by Ninja Tune Records, going on to release two albums and a handful of EPs with tours around Europe. “I got working for a singersongwriter called Helen Boulding,” he tells us. “Her management secured a support slot for Ronan Keating’s arena tour, so the first tour that I ever did properly was playing in all the arenas around the UK, which was really nice. When we recorded her album, we used the producer Youth and he really liked my playing, so he then went on to book me for quite a few international artists. The last thing I did for him was Poly Styrene’s posthumous album.”
Meanwhile PEST was touring places such as Turkey and all over Benelux, France and Japan. “The last session work I did was for a guy called Ozark Henry,” Matt continues. “We did a tour of Germany supporting Roxette, and that was a lot of fun. Once again, we played big arenas and places like the Heineken Music Hall in Amsterdam and the Lotto Arena in Belgium.”
Matt released his first solo album, After Midnight, in 2009 and the second, It Goes Like This, featuring saxophonist Tony Kofi, a couple of years later. “Nothing really happened with that album,” he says. “It was reviewed and we applied for gigs, but nothing really came about at all. I’ve done gigs with singers and the odd quartet gig, but it’s only been in the last year or so that I’ve begun to focus on writing material and working on the new album, Astrometrics.”
So what gear does he use currently? “The guitar that I’ve used for years is a Gibson ES-175, but there are a couple of tracks where I’ve used an Aria Pro TA-60. I had a guitar built for me by Jon Case – a J3 Florentine Cutaway Thinline – and it’s essentially the same as a 135, but it’s thinner and it has a solid centre block. The amp is a Fender Deluxe 40-watt and sometimes I use a Sessionette 75, which I got for 90 quid from a pawn shop in Lewisham and it’s wonderful! Pedals are an Electro-Harmonix HOG and that comes with the expression pedal and the footswitch – it’s incredibly over-engineered and takes up most of the space on the pedalboard,” he laughs. “I use a Tube Screamer, an Electro-Harmonix Superego with a [Donner] Tutti Love that cost me £19.95 from Amazon – and I’ve got a Boss DD-3 delay, but I’ve just upgraded it to a Strymon TimeLine.”
Future plans include a tour in the second half of this year or early 2018. [DM]