Making tracks

Musician David Havard and Vitsœ’s Matthew Palmer discuss the harmonious relationship between music, design and a shelving system

David Havard makes up one-third of Bristol-based indie electronic trio Elder Island, together with fellow band-members Katy Sargent and Luke Thornton. He lives in the creative core of the city of Bristol, on what is essentially a river island. This historic English port-city is famously artistic, known for a music scene that spawned Portishead and Massive Attack – and an underground counter-culture from which graffiti-artist Banksy emerged.

Matthew Palmer, a member of Vitsœ’s planning team, has worked with David Havard over the course of the past four years, planning and evolving his shelving needs for the weighty demands of his life in the music industry. After much remote communication, punctuated by David visiting Vitsœ’s Leamington shop, it seemed like the right moment for Matthew to take the opportunity to visit David at his home and studio, where he has installed and tweaked his shelving system six times over the course of their planner/customer relationship.

On finding his way to David’s recently-built apartment, Matthew opened the conversation with: “On Google street-view this is still a building site!”

David: Yes, it will be. They’re still building the last one on the corner – we haven’t got the official road yet. It was the site of an old prison. So, there’s literally a bit out there where they used to do the hangings … which they’ve now turned into a nice feature, a lit-up archway. But yeah, it’s where they used to hang people.

I first moved here in 2007. I met [bandmate] Katy here at university, and then Luke – who I’ve known since we were kids – moved here halfway through the second year. There’s something about Bristol, when you drive in from [Brunel’s] suspension bridge, there’s just something visually about this place. And it was the right time because it was still quite a gritty city at that point.

Matthew: It’s still got its grittiness.

D: Definitely, it’s still got it, but it has developed a lot in the last ten years. It’s grown quite quickly – in a good way as well. It’s still got the same essence, but it’s expanded a lot more.

M: When we last met, at our Leamington shop, you mentioned that you’d previously worked restoring historic buildings – and you’ve self-designed the band’s artwork and lighting – clearly your creative interests reach far beyond music alone.

D: At school I actually studied fine art, photography, those sorts of subjects. Music was always the thing that was just passion and fun – I’d get home from school and play bass guitar.

At university, I studied graphic design, Katy studied fine art and Luke studied photography. So, we’ve always had that creative input. When we were starting out, we weren’t trying to be musicians. We were just being creatives. We were making music alongside other, different artwork. It wasn’t necessarily that the band was ever going to be the focal point until it progressed a little bit and we started to put out the first few songs.

M: The objects in the sleeve artwork of your first album ‘Omnitone’ bear a striking resemblance to Dieter Rams’s designs for Braun.

D: Yes, massively Dieter Rams inspired…

M: You’ve even included a description of each one of them.

D: We developed the product idea, a whole fake facade for them and just made some absolute jargon about each one. It’s gibberish. It’s all great gibberish. But it’s believable.

I was getting really into the old Hi-Fi’s around then, repairing them, and looking at those old manuals and the styling. I wanted to develop a little product system, and finding all the old-school Braun was very much on-point. It’s the aesthetic to start, purely that captivating style – timeless design and the colour range, all the simplicity. But then when you dig into it, the function and form and the design side – I hadn’t really realised the impact that he’d [Rams] had either.

M: Did any of it resonate with your approach to music?

D: Yes, always trying to take the approach of longevity and wanting things to be made not just for the short-term. And not to release music super quickly just because you can – or something that’s more throwaway – but to put the rigours through it to the point of, “I can listen to this a hundred times and not be bored of it”.

M: Is the Rams approach a shared interest with the rest of the band?

D: We’re all into it. I’m the nerdiest one about it. But Katy’s big on it as well. It was doing all the research into the album artwork that led into discovering the 606 system, and finding that the more I looked into it, the more I was thinking: every detail about it works so well.

And then you realise that you see it everywhere. Like all the lockdown video-chats everyone was doing on TV, it’s just in everyone’s backgrounds, “oh there’s another system, oh there’s another one…”

It’s just so natural. I’ve probably seen this so many times in my life without even realising I’ve seen it. So many spaces. It is one of those things that kind of disappears, even with mine – which is quite a large system – but still the focus really isn’t the system it’s what you’re doing on it.

M: Yours now looks very different from the original configuration we first planned together.

D: I have reconfigured it so many times. I did another order at the start of the year, didn’t I? To add the extra desk and to be able to expand along the wall.

The desk and speakers were more central originally. I wanted to monitor playbacks on here or do some DJ-ing over there, but the speed and ability to move around wasn’t efficient.

Whereas now, from moving that over to that side, it just feels a lot more fluid. I can sit here and everything feels much more in its right place.

I’m willing to spend lots of time – not on the music-making aspect – but all the setting-up and adjusting, I enjoy that part of the process which then allows you to write and create efficiently.

M: I like the promotional poster you have at the centre of your system. Did you create that?

D: Didn’t design that one myself. We played a show, I think it was the second time we went, in San Francisco. And there’s a venue called The Fillmore, which is quite a big venue. It’s where Grateful Dead and Hendrix played in the early days. It’s like a poster museum from that period, they’ve just got posters and posters and posters going around the whole venue. And if you sell enough tickets, they’ll make you a custom poster for the night. When we arrived, there was this pile – it was quite a lot, “Oh wow, yeah, this is great. This feels really good.”

M: And do they keep one there as well?

D: One will go up on the wall somewhere, if they can find space. Ours is right in a top corner somewhere.

M: And what’s this equipment on the shelves?

D: A combination of analogue synthesizers, digital drum machines and sequencers – all the components that go into the live performance rig.

[David opens a 606 cabinet drawer…]

M: That’s a surprise, not the normal use of a drawer! Is it all wired in?

D: It’s actual working kit: a Syntakt drum machine. It fits perfectly, it was: “this is asking for it’!

M: I feel there’s a strong DIY ethic runs throughout Elder Island. You self-build everything from synthesisers and guitar effects-pedals to lighting rigs for your tours. Have you had any training in this area?

D: Not really. During the final year at university, we were given a personal project. I was very music-led by that point, so I made working a record player out of a cardboard box and just figured out the basic electronics. And the buzz I got off that, and the concept of making something work using electricity was, “Oh my god, this is amazing.” It set me off on that path.

After I graduated, I was a postman for a year and I worked intensely to make enough money to spend the following year teaching myself electronics and the inner workings of all this stuff.

And once you know how it works – coming from a design background – you realise the rest is just user-interface, literally the graphical layout. When you can get past that it all becomes so much easier. And that’s why I’m always drawn to anything which visually stimulates, not just sounds great – it needs to look good as well.

The conversation continued over lunch at a harbour-side cafe, followed by a visit to Elder Island’s music studio where David kindly showed Matthew around the equipment, mixing desks and electronics workshop at the back of the studio.

For Matthew, it was rewarding to experience how enthusiastic and passionate David is about his work and witness his creative ability. David’s enjoyment and understanding of how things are made, how they work – the nuts and bolts of something – is infectious. Back in Leamington Spa, a copy of the band’s ‘Omnitone Collection’ and ‘Elder Island EP’ now sit proudly on a shelf in Vitsœ’s shop.

Elder Island