She has just completed her latest UK tour, but there is no rest for Jo Quail. After a slight mix-up about start times, it is great to catch up with one of the most talented musicians in modern music. It has been five years since I last spoke to Jo, and a lot of things have happened since that interview, which took place under the shadow of lockdown. Most impressively, her new album Notan was released a couple of weeks ago, and the cellist took the new songs out on the road.
It is pleasing to hear that the tour went well, although one would not be surprised at that. “The whole tour was lovely. Bristol was lovely as well,” Jo Quail says, in response to my regret that I was unable to get to the Jam Jar as I was on holiday.
“I didn’t know the venue at all,” Jo Quail says. “I met some great people there. There was a little youth club underneath the venue where they basically have a battle of the MC. The one young guy I was talking to, it was a grime night that night and before that, they had some kind of variation on hip hop. There was a big community thing going on there. So, it was great.”
A quick glance at the tour dates notes that some of the venues were new and maybe not the run-of-the-mill venues that many tours head to. “I’d like to pretend run-of-the-mill is the Royal Albert Hall,” Jo laughs, “but they’re all different. I mean, any venue, any space, any floor, anywhere where there is another person listening, you need to have a performer, an area to perform in, and an audience member, and then you’ve got a concert.
“But beyond that, it doesn’t matter whether your stage is. The Albert Hall or wherever…Omera in London. They’re all equal, and you walk to each stage in the same way with the same intention, regardless of how many people are or are not there. So that’s the way I see it.”
As I was thinking about what to chat to Jo about, I reflected on an in-depth discussion with Jo on the excellent In The Abyss podcast, where the presenters did a very deep dive into the making of Notan and the use of looping and other styles.
I suggest to Jo that I will take a different angle and look at some of the more human, mundane aspects. We start by exploring the respect that is afforded to Jo during her shows by the audience. Is this because of her music? “I don’t know if it’s because of the music,” she says. “I mean, this is the paradox, isn’t it? Again, because we are playing a concert, people buy a ticket, but people are also going out on nights to be entertained. So this is always something to be born in mind.
“For whatever reason, they are always extraordinarily respectful. I mean, even Core Festival. They were silent at Core Festival. I think perhaps, partly maybe because it’s a bit quieter than other things, although not always actually. But it could just be the type of music, because I’m A soloist as well, so perhaps there’s an intimacy there. I don’t know.”
If you follow social media, you will see that Jo Quail was saying how respectful and engaged everyone was. “It was amazing. It was amazing,” she reflects.
With a CV which is phenomenally impressive, just look at the places and who Jo Quail has played with. It appears that she rarely gets phased about entering the stage these days. She appears comfortable. “Yeah, I am. I mean, I feel lucky, blessed to say that.
“It hasn’t always been the case. Stages used to fill me with fear, and probably the first one of a run might faze me. I don’t know. It’s weird. I don’t feel fazed by what I’m about to do. But I do hope that I can give the best account of myself at that moment. That’s completely out of our hands, because you just don’t know.
“For example, in Nottingham at the Bodega, I finished with Kingfisher, which is a grand finale, and everything’s great. Anyway, rather than hitting the button switch on the series of effects and processes that lift the piece broader, I actually turned it all off. Things like that happen from now and then, and you just must go with it.”
That must have been a challenge. “I played Mandrel Cantus at the end,” Jo says. “So they asked for Adder Stone. So, what’s weird to me is when people in the audience ask for a track, and I’m like, how the hell do you know it? But Adder Stone has always been a popular one.
“Weird thing was, though, I had rehearsed it with Tom [Atherton – producer/ percussion colleague] the week before, it was in the set, we were fully ready. I was ready for it to be an encore, and I didn’t feel like doing an encore anywhere prior to Nottingham.
“Nottingham, I felt like it. So, I went to look for the patch. It just wasn’t there. So, it’s not a disaster, but what that means is basically the setting, the correct BPM, the correct bar lengths, and the correct processes…I use a compressor on the sound as it goes in, for example, because it just gives it a bit of a wider warmth.
“So, there’s nothing in there at all. It had just gone. So obviously that’s user error, but it was very funny. So, I found Mandrel Cantus, which was intact, and I just hacked through that one, having not rehearsed it at all. I should know it by now, but it doesn’t work like that, unfortunately.”
“This sounds a bit ego talking”
Jo Quail tells me that she always has a couple of back-ups. “I mean, this sounds a bit ego talking, probably, but it was a bit of a job to pick the set for this tour because I could easily play for three or four hours. Nobody wants that, but I could with the repertoire that I have now.
“And because in this tour I wanted to put obviously as much of Notan… I mean, all Notan went in, and even in Newcastle, I played First Rain because Mark Deeks was playing piano. He played First Rain beautifully. He’s such a beautiful player. I can’t describe it any other way. He’s such a skilled man. All my colleagues who supported this tour were brilliant.”
After a few days’ compression, Jo Quail’s diary is full, and she is soon off to support God Is An Astronaut in Europe. There’s much more, though! Hold tight, for I was tired just listening.
“This Wednesday, I fly to Rotterdam, and then I am recording with a symphony orchestra. I’m not playing. I orchestrated Notan for a symphony orchestra. That’s what came first. It’s an album called Ianus. Ianus and Notan share four pieces. So that’s what I’m doing next week.
“I can’t tell you when it’s going to be released because it’ll be one hell of a mixing job, but at some point next year it will be out. And if I can, obviously, it would be nice to perform it somewhere, but obviously, that’s quite a lot of moving parts to get that done. So, the orchestral recording is there.
“Then I come home for two days, and then I go out with God Is An Astronaut, which is the greatest privilege to be with them. And that will be my fourth tour of their Embers tour cycle. But that’s because I like to think they feel it works to have me as a support. But also, I played all over the album, so it kind of makes sense.”
Pivotal to a phenomenal album, Embers is a superb release and well worth a listen. Jo gets to play with the band as well. “I play four tracks at the end of the set,” she says. “Two or three to close the set, and then one encore. And it’s great. It’s really nice for me to be able to play cello with a band and with people who are so tightly organised in their presentation.
“It has a great fluidity it in the music because it’s very carefully put together in terms of performance, which means that the better the structure, the freer you can be in the places where you want to be free. And that’s what’s really exciting to me.
“So, I’m looking forward to that. And then, as you were just mentioning earlier, in November, I go to Holland again, and that’s the massive 100-piece orchestra. That’s a completely different project all on its own”.
Jo Quail is talking of a gala event featuring Maria Franz, Lucie Dehli, Lorenzo Esposito Fornasari, Tom Atherton and an 80-piece orchestra, where several pieces, including Invocation, Supplication, Causleen’s Wheel, The Breathing Hand and a brand-new commission, will be performed.
I admit I am exhausted just listening to this itinerary. However, at the end of the day, Jo is still a mum, and family life is there at the end of all tours and shows. She presents as incredibly grounded. “I slot in and out easily. I mean, we finished in London, finished in Omera, which was very, very nice.
“Then on the journey home, I was already thinking of a meal plan for this week and thinking what’s happening, who’s going where, and then thinking, how much time do I have to put stuff in the freezer before I go next? You know, and I love it. I love it for that.
“I don’t know if this is going to come out right, but I’m the same person here as I am touring and on a stage. I don’t have time for that. So basically, what you see is exactly what you get. That’s me. And for better or better… Yes, I’ll just stick a long frock on, but you can guarantee I’ve still got socks on with cats’ faces on them underneath it all, you know?”
We joke about Jo’s increased fame, to which she is very humble in her response. As a music teacher, does she get anything different in response from her students now? “No, my students are great,” she says. “I’m a tutor for ThinkSpace Education, which is an online university. The masters are awarded by the Arts University Bournemouth. So, a very nice set-up.
“I’m specifically involved in the professional media composition. So, this is for scoring to picture, this type of thing. But there’s also another great course there, which is like a contemporary music songwriting. It used to be songwriting and music production. So basically, I float through all these courses, orchestration as well.
“One of my students knew me because he interviewed me at Arctangent Festival before he was a student. Another one of my students knows me because I did a session for his band. But most of them don’t know me from a bar of soap, like most of the world. So, it’s very nice.
“I feel I’m able to be useful to them because, although they’re on a media composition, they’re composers, but they’re not limited to being media composers. My passion is to help them realise that they are composers in and out of media. What that means, therefore, is that they can have a showreel, they can have a website, they can put stuff on Bandcamp, they can self-release stuff, they could maybe write something for the three clarinet players that live over the road, and they could get it performed in a coffee shop.
“It’s basically facilitating people, helping people to realise that they can actually do these things. And that’s not really anything to do with an MA, that’s just to do with having travelled around the world for 20 years, you know?”
Would Jo call herself an enabler as much as anything else? “Yeah, that is my aim. I wouldn’t say, oh, I am this, that or the other, but my aim is to get everybody else to be the fullest and the most satisfied that they can be. So, however that works and whatever parameters that is, bearing in mind, it’s different for everyone.”
“Without that help, I would be utterly screwed.”
In a world where presence and a visual aspect are vital for artists, I wonder how Jo Quail can possibly cope with the social media side of her various projects. She is once again completely honest. “First of all, how I can deal with it is that I have help,” she says. “Without that help, I would be utterly screwed.
“I have people around me who force me to make the content. And Federico, my tour manager, he’s the one who said, ‘You have to do this. You know, you are a slave to this. While you’re on tour? You must do these things. You’ve got to do this, that and the other.’
“And I do them. I will only ever do things that have authenticity to them. For example, when people say, ‘Oh, you must make a post about this, that, or the other, or unboxing something,’ or whatever, if it doesn’t feel authentic to me, I won’t make the post. But if it does, then I will make it.
“And also, I don’t give a shit. So basically, I will do videos where I look like the back of a bus, and I’m knackered, and I’ve got half of yesterday’s makeup on my face. I don’t care, right? Honestly, I’m not interested in that. If that’s what matters to people, well, they can follow some of my more glamorous colleagues who take time and care always with these things.
“And I salute them for that. But unfortunately for me, I’m like, I’ve got a couple of minutes before I’ve got to do something else. So, I’ve got blah, blah, blah, blah on the camera. I have help from Kunal [Singhal], who some people might know as a promoter for Chaos Theory, but he is also an enabler. He also has a little business, or not little. He has a business where he helps some artists run their social media.
“So we meet regularly and we schedule everything that we need to say that has to go out. On a release campaign, that’s a very specific thing. And then the ad-hoc stuff, I might just put up stories here and there or share things. Also, I have John Helps from Robot Needs Home Collective.
“So, these are all people that I’d be grateful if you mentioned somewhere because these people are so supportive, they’re part of. I’m just the thing on the front end of the boat, but there’s a massive team of people behind.
“And also, I want to be realistic because I’m not superwoman. I can’t manage it all on my own. But I can generate all the content. I could do this, that, and the other if I’ve got people either suggesting strongly what needs to happen or then being really quite dramatic about it.
“I need that because really I want to spend the time actually playing the cello, and that’s the thing that usually has the least amount of time. So that’s the straight, honest answer.”
We talk about unboxing videos for a while, with me recounting one of a famous singer who clearly did not want to do the one he had to do, to comical effect. This leads to Jo telling me about Cosmic Ears, who supply her in-ears for her.
“The one unboxing that I absolutely loved was Cosmic Ears,” she says. “They make my in-ears for me. They sent me a set of their flagship, holy moly in-ears. And I’ll have to tell you what they are, because if you put this in the interview, we’re going to want to know.
“Cosmic Ears, the C8A’s are eight armatures per side. The unboxing for that was genuinely really exciting because I knew it was going to change everything. And also, I really, really liked them as people. They’re a small company. They’ve got some huge clients, but they’ve never wavered from their attention to each person. Whether you’re a little person in their scheme or a big person, you get the same from them. And I respect that so much.”
We move on to the reason for our conversation, the amazing Notan. I tell Jo that it’s an album that’s been on repeat since I received the review copy, and that in my job, having such grand music to accompany my day in the background is just a joy.
The magic of this album and Jo’s playing is that you can have it on as background, or you can immerse yourself completely in it. With the vinyl now on the turntable, there’s the chance to become even more engaged in the album.
“The reviews have all been, I’m humbled to say, they’ve all been very, very kind reviews, very supportive reviews,” says Jo. “And people themselves haven’t had the album for very long, because it’s only been out for a couple of weeks. But they have said similar things, which is quite an immersive experience.
“The only thing I set out to do, to be honest with you, is to try not to make the same album twice. That’s the only parameter, if possible, given that we’re using quite similar equipment all the way along. But this one, these pieces were very, very strange in their emergence. Each of them was very different. Each of them had a very distinct start point. And some of them took, like with Rex, years to flourish. Some of them, like First Rain, just there it was, like a river just flowed in.”
First Rain, as Jo said, came very quickly and must have been a punch the air moment when you think, right, I have got one. Does she view the album as one piece of work? “Yeah, I’m used to playing the Bach solo cello suites, where you’ve got six movements or you’ve got a suite with a prelude and then five dances effectively after.
“So, not likening that to the Bach Suites, God Almighty, but structurally is what I’m talking about. For me, it starts with the first note of Butterfly and ends with the last note of Kingfisher. That’s how I view concerts as well. It starts with my first note and ends with Wardruna’s last note or whatever. Not because I’m being big-headed, but I think that’s the arc of the experience of listening to either a concert or an album.
“But if people enjoy a track or something, then yes, hopefully that track will work in isolation as well. But I think if you put the record on, hopefully it should be an entire arc of a journey.”
This prompts us to divert into a discussion about where Jo’s music sits in the streaming world of 2025. But Jo is clear that first and foremost, she writes for herself. “Yes, I do. I do,” she tells me. “I never would presume to be able to guess what an audience might want. I’m not gifted in that way. Therefore, I write for myself.
“You know what’s funny, though? Simon Glacken, who does my PR, sent us an e-mail today saying, apparently, Notan is number 84 in the download charts at the moment, [cue both of us laughing quite a lot]. So that’s really funny because it’s like, so someone’s been downloading it, probably the same person multiple times.
“But yeah, I write for myself and to that end, it means that creating an album can take a very, very long time.”
Jo Quail – It Is A Compulsion
Jo Quail does not get someone saying she needs to write a song about heartache or any theme. She has a series of really strange sounds and then suddenly an overwhelming compulsion to play. “And it is a compulsion,” she says. “I cannot not do it. At that point, I feel in great despair, to be honest. Because at that point, I know that I’m beginning a new album, and I already know the enormous mountain that I’m going to be climbing.”
Jo talks of the song Kingfisher and how there was a part “like the guiding star of Bethlehem through the whole process. I know it’s coming, and I don’t know when that’s going to happen. I look forward to it. When I’m not writing, I feel anxious, and then when I begin to write, I feel elated.”
If you buy anything from Jo on Bandcamp, you will get the personal touch, and I have opportunity to thank her for some lovely personal touches that accompanied the recent copy of Notan on vinyl.
The vinyl provides the opportunity to explore the whole package in the artwork, it’s beautiful, just opening the gatefold and looking at the lovely piece of prose in the middle. And you’ve got beautiful artwork. Does Jo have the overall final say on how it looks?
“I commission every single album cover for a different artist,” she explains. “All of my albums are all different commissioned artists. So this one is Costin Chioreanu. I gave him a brief. He will also do the artwork for Ianus as well, but with this one, basically I just gave him a brief. I spoke to him a lot about it.
“But the reason I wanted to work with him is because of when I met him in a different capacity. He was at a concert I played in January. He made some art, and there’s a fluidity in his lines and a precision, but authenticity as well. And authority, that’s the word I’m looking for. There’s an authority in his lines that called so much to me.
“So, we talked and he said, What is this album? So, I told him. I said to him, I’ve done all sorts of things with Five Incantations or The Cartographer. This album is about now. It’s about where I am, who I am, where I live.
“So he took this idea. I also said to him that I keep in my mind, running through the fact that history stands in front of development. Partially, that’s because of what I see living where I do in London. I see the oak trees in front of the city. He was like, ‘Great, say no more.’
“Then he came back with the most powerful and moving interpretation. When I commission artists, I talk with them, I step away, and what they come up with is what we use. I didn’t say yellow. I didn’t say anything at all and there is this beautiful, beautiful, powerful piece of art.”
Wilmink Theatre Gala Concert
It would have been remiss of me not to return to the 100-piece orchestra she mentioned earlier. Jo Quail is keen to tell me the mouthwatering details.
“It’s a gala concert at the Wilmink Theatre and these are the people, this is the orchestra, some of the members who played at Dunk Festival last year with me. So, what we’re doing this time, we’re doing all of Invocation with Maria Franz from Heilung, all of Supplication with Lef from O.R.K.
“Lucie’s going to do Causleen’s Wheel, and they’ve commissioned me to write a piece of music to celebrate 700 years of the city of Enschede Day. So that’s basically the heart around which everything else beats. The 700 years Jos (Pijnappel) is conducting, who conducted The Cartographer, a very, very good friend of mine.
“He just said, basically, right, we’re going to do this. Who’s playing? And 100 people said, I’m playing. So, it’s a full, massive symphonic wind orchestra. I’ve got a lot of big boys on the low end. So, it’s very, very heavy. It’s going to be amazing.
“We’ve got fantastic lights. We’ve got Raymond doing front of house. It’s a little bit like a regroup of The Cartographer, just with a hell of a lot more people and an organ.”
In a venue that holds 800, this is going to be something very special indeed. And Jo Quail is clear that she’s lucked out with the Autumn touring schedule. Although she says ticket sales are a little slow, and smiling, she laughs that most people who have bought tickets appear to have come from the UK.
“Ticket sales always give you the heebie-jeebies a bit. But I can’t stress enough, it is a one-off, a once-in-a-lifetime experience, because I mean, luckily, Heilung are on a hiatus. I wouldn’t have been able to get Maria otherwise. Lucie’s very busy. Lef as well. I mean, everybody’s parked their touring schedule so we can put this concert on.”
It’s always a huge pleasure to chat with Jo Quail. She’s a genuine down-to-earth person and an incredibly talented and gifted musician. I’m still working out if I can get to the Netherlands in late November, and if I can, I would love to get there.
In the meantime, I will continue enjoying Notan at regular intervals. You might want to, too. Find out more at joquail.bandcamp.com/album/notan.
