Harmony-driven sounds of ZeRVas and Pepper

Sounding both familiar and new, UK duo Zervas & Pepper play the Róisín Dubh on Friday, January 24. The band formed in 2006 when Paul Zervas and Kathryn Pepper met at a songwriters’ night in Cardiff and decided to start playing music together.

“It was a meeting of influences, we just loved the same bands,” Paul recalls. “The kind of bands we were listening to were West Coast California singer/songwriters of the late sixties, early seventies. Stuff like Crosby, Stills & Nash, Neil Young, Joni Mitchell, James Taylor. In the early days, we would do half originals and half covers.”

Paul and Kathryn soon had enough material to play a whole set of originals, and this year they released their second album, Lifebringer.

“Most of it was recorded in our home studio,” says Kathryn. “We found we could work through the night that way and we didn’t have to adhere to a studio’s timekeeping. The drums and the bass were recorded in a studio called Music Box in Cardiff and the rest was in the house.”

Given that they can work into the night, is there ever a situation where one of them leaves the other in the studio and comes back to a reworked song?

“There is a lot of that!” laughs Kathryn. “I tend to leave Paul to it sometimes. He will sit up through the night trying to find the right way to take a track. And also, we love bringing in session players because they’ll take the song in a new direction. We love to bring their skill in.”

“When you’re in a studio environment, you’ll pay per day or per session and you tend to commit to stuff a little bit too quickly, because there’s money hanging over your head,” Paul adds. “When we do it at home, we’ve got a bit more freedom, we can go back and listen to the tracks, have a debate about what we should change and what we should keep. It’s a lot easier.”

It’s New Year’s Eve when Kathryn and Paul take the call for the interview. As they look back over 2013, what were the highlights for Zervas and Pepper?

For more, read this week’s Connacht Tribune