Natural Magick by Kula Shaker

It’s the first record we’ve made with the original lineup (with Jay Darlington) since ‘Peasants, Pigs and Astronauts’ and it’s been a very wonderful, and strange experience to see the band become reborn. We were touring the double album ‘1st Congregational Church and Free Hugs’, which I can say quite quickly now, and our keyboard player, Henry couldn’t do a tour in North America – and there was just nobody really that we could imagine playing

So we started playing and all of that magic and all of that chemistry just picked up where we left off in 1999 and the music just sounded great. So we thought “let’s make a record quick. Let’s do it. Let’s get this, let’s get lightning in a bottle”. We could have called the album that I guess.

So 1999 was the last time we were put an album together collectively, how did we find doing it again in 2023 ?

Well, it’s a completely different planet. It’s funny because when the band started playing again after our break, the music business was falling like the Twin Towers in terms of it was over and streaming had arrived and nobody knew what the hell was going on. Record companies were being swallowed up by corporations, the smaller labels and independent labels were all just being gobbled up and everything was in free fall. And now we’ve ended up with this landscape built around the internet and people, it’s not just music, the whole of the culture has become more fractured. So as a band, well you can’t get on TV, I mean who’s watching TV? So it’s up to you to define yourself now and you have to have faith that your people are out there, but it is not enough to just write a song and play music. You’ve got the find a way to communicate beyond the music itself. And that’s a challenge for a lot of musicians because they’re quite introvert.

About my favorite track of the album. Yeah, it is a bit like favourite child. You can’t really do it. But I love ‘Natural Magik’ because it’s a little bit fresh, a little bit different. That track started by accident, I was listening to Can and one of the tracks I just looped the beginning of the track, , and I got a four five second loop and it was that and it just sounded like that groove. And so if you listen back to now, it doesn’t quite sound like that, but it was an interesting starting point for the song. And I love ‘Happy Birthday’.

This record was made because something happened that was unexpected, which was Jay. And that excitement that came from us all playing together was like, “we’ve got to do this and we’ve got to do it now”. So I think that you can plan to a certain extent with music but there also has to be an aspect of seizing the occasion and sometimes the way forward appears to you and that’s when inspiration strikes. We’re still enjoying play music and people are still enjoying listening to it.

P/S: Thank you all loyal fans for supporting us !

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