Chad Valley
Getting at that spot between the club and your bed
Photo by Magnus Aske Blikeng
Don’t know what you’re doing September 13? Here’s your answer: You’re going to see Chad Valley. I could come up with an assortment of reasons and persuasions and whatnot, but the whole line of argument would come down to this: Dude’s fun, and fun is, well, fun.
Chad Valley is a place in Birmingham, England (featuring among other things “a fish pond and the Chad Vale Primary School” according to Wikipedia). It’s also the alter ego of Hugo Manuel (Jonquil), who occupies that sweet spot between the club and your bed.
No, seriously.
“I inhabit a space between the kind of music you want to listen to in a club and music that you want to listen to on headphones as you're going to bed,” he says. “So for that reason I find that I sometimes slip through the gaps, but I do believe that that is the best place to be. I would find it incredibly hard, not to mention boring, to try and stay in one genre or style.”
Chad Valley, the project, seems a paean to that idea. Manuel seems the type to take his music serious enough to ensure it’s not something easy to explain or distill. His influences include but are not limited to a lot of seemingly disparate artists and genres that he yokes together quite effectively.
“I had always been really into dance music, and since I was young have always tried to write house and techno stuff which I was and am still into. But I never really had enough passion for it I think, so it never went anywhere."
“Chad Valley was a concerted effort to blend what I knew about dance music with my more traditional song writing background. Also, I had just started listening to loads of Italo pop stuff like Mike Francis and Deodato, and wanted to challenge myself to write stuff like that. I don't think that's quite how it turned out, but hey ho.”
If Manuel seems to be having a lot of fun with/as Chad Valley, that’s because he is. I can’t be 100% sure, but there’s ample evidence that he finds this work freeing and not always in a grown-up, academic kind of way. Asked what kind of an artist he considers himself—as Chad Valley—to be, he says he thinks about it occasionally. Then he ends up at “Fuck it, I'll just do what feels right, and not put too much thought into it.”
He has, however, put some thought into playing Montreal, and why it’s an important place for him.
“All I can think of is that a bunch of bands like Godspeed, [Thee] Silver Mount Zion and all the Constellation records stuff was a huge, huge influence on me as an impressionable teenager, so thank you Montreal for that.”
Photo by Magnus Aske Blikeng
Photo by Magnus Aske Blikeng
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