Artist Detailed Info: The Glue Ensemble

Founded in a hospital ward following a day’s drinking with Frank Black, the Glue Ensemble epitomise a mix of the astonishing, the poetic and the painfully mundane. School friends, self taught instrumentalists and song writers, Zee Ahmad and Ben Blaine had been in bands together for the best part of a decade but by the time Zee was hospitalised they had talked themselves off the stage and behind the scenes.

Ben is an award winning filmmaker who, working with his brother Chris, had helped document London’s burgeoning and raucous New X music scene. Zee not only produced their videos but managed many of the bands. However not only did the passing of that Deptford moment see Zee fall out of love with music and bored of its industry but the fading of all that hopeful cacophony coincided with the death of Ben’s father.

"at winter was the first of our now seemingly regular heavy snow falls. Against this bleak back drop they wrote “So# & Low” in a house prone to flooding. "is song not only captured the fragility of the moment but also saw them forge a new sound with instruments neither had previously played. Piano and the banjo soon became key elements of what the Glue Ensemble was to be. “Soft & Low” was also the song that encouraged cellist CJ Lodge to give up her oath of never again working with singers.

Ben and Zee had also started working with French violinist and viola player Lyllou Christine, their instant rapport cemented when she created the icy and terrifying riff to “The Devil In The Garden” a song that would later turn into a live favourite.

Keen to avoid the petty personality politics of band life, the intention behind the Glue Ensemble was always that its line-up would remain fluid, its membership unfixed. In principle this still holds true but even though Lucille is currently back in Paris whilst the others still live around London, the sound of the Ensemble remains shaped by these four personalities who, despite death, snow and global economic meltdown, have somehow found themselves stuck together.

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