Discover CURA

I had the pleasure of meeting Ben Charlton when we were just eight years old, awkwardly tagging along with our families (who were friends) to their dinner parties. Given the opportunity to write on and learn about creatives, he immediately popped into my head; with flashbacks to his miniature concerts in our parents’ gardens, I decided to get in touch. 

Ben explained that during the pandemic, he formed a Bristol-based band with friends, George Thomas and Rosie Patton. Individually, they all enjoy very different music. However, the point of their project is to create music borderless in genre, breaking down stereotypes of what sounds should, well, sound like. Kindly, they agreed to speak with me about their music (of course), inspirations, and aspirations. From there, I discovered CURA.

Tell us a bit about yourselves; who are the members of CURA?

Ben: I’m on vocals, keys and guitar. I started playing music when I was knee high to a grass hopper, jamming out Jimi Hendrix’s ‘Wild Thing’ to anyone else who would listen… and from there I’ve gotten slightly better. I also front man a band called CHARLSTONRAY, an electronic three-piece band, yet CURA is the real outlet for all the jazz I want to create.

George: I’m on all things low-frequency. Unfortunately, I drew the short straw and had to play bass. I’ve always been into music, since forming bands in primary school. From then, I’ve been in London as a graphics designer and music is my passion project. I’m really into my 90s Boom-Bap production, in fact my other project ‘Kid Moe’ is exactly that: Dilla-esque beats and samples.

Rosie: I’m on vocals and all things saxy. Growing up in the lovely Bournemouth I’d always played in the coolest gig in town - Big Band - until I went to study at an art foundation. Unfortunately, art was not the one for me. I left to pursue music in Bath, where I met the lovely boys Ben and George and the rest is history. I’m also the frontwoman of my other band Jealous Tina, an indie/jazz group; on the side, I’m also a DJ for Radio Bath. 

What is the story behind how you formed as a band?

Ben: Myself and George have known each other since the days of Exeter College and played in various projects since we met. One of our bands - CHARLSTONRAY - needed a live sax player and we decided to get someone in to play session sax with us. That just so happened to be Rosie. We all hit it off immediately and when the three of us arrived at a rehearsal early, we decided we could play a song to kill some time. 

We quickly realised that we all had a shared love of soul and jazz. We decided ‘Stronger Than Me’ by Amy Winehouse was a song we all knew, and when Rosie started singing it was gorgeous. We knew then that the three of us together were something special and we needed more of that feeling. Things just took off from there; it was just based around fun. We all just enjoyed our time together and then the music came from that. I feel like that’s exactly how it should be when it’s right with music, the songs will literally fall out of you without need for identity or construction, and that’s definitely what our first three singles have been about. 

How did starting out in a pandemic affect the way you made music?

George: In some respects, it's been really easy. In this day and age, it’s so easy to send bits and bobs to each other and work remotely. We’d all just send ideas back and forth and slowly just build songs up from demos. I think we rode the momentum and didn’t really focus on the drawbacks of everything being remote. 

Now it's different. I think as time has gone on we’ve realised the importance of being in the same room and conceiving ideas together, otherwise, we’d come up with three different songs which sound like they’re from three different bands. The real magic is when we’re all in the same room; it just allows us to have full ownership of the direction that the tracks will go in, and I think that’s worth its weight in gold.

Now that we are (somewhat) returning to a pre-COVID life, do you think your creative process will change?

Rosie: We still use all the technology that helped during the lockdown, but now when we’ve got a new idea, we quickly try to get in the same room and flesh things out together. Our creativity really comes from each other and the process of sharing musical references. It’s just so much better being in the same room. 

More than anything else we’re realising how hard it is to reproduce some of our stuff live. We get all excited when we are producing but tend to forget there’s only three of us. This leads to a bit of a headache rehearsal before a gig, when everyone expects you to play the song you’ve just released. It’s all well and good making some crazy beat but that crazy beat is going to be hellish to try and replicate on stage!

You identify yourselves as borderless when it comes to genre, why is that?

Ben: As a society, we just ingest so much music in our daily lives. Our tastes are so varied but CURA is a place where our musical influences come together. We all have a love of neo-soul, jazz, hip hop and that is very evident in our music. I think that’s the beauty of the music industry today, as opposed to 50 years ago; anyone can really make anything, and nobody will blink an eye. Anyone who has access to a laptop and a YouTube tutorial can make an overnight hit on garage band; it leads us to a place where there is no stigma in merging different genres of music, such as jazz and boom-bap. 

That being said, we are impacted a lot by artists in those lanes and we keep our influences wide. If you just shop in one area, things start to sound derivative and like carbon copies of your influences. It’s in the mixing of sounds and ideas where you find the coolest stuff; here, you discover the musical footprint that makes your sound unique.

Individually, you all love different kinds of music. Is that ever problematic when it comes to production?

George: It’s never really a problem. I think we see the positives in lots of music, even if it’s not something we’d all necessarily listen to. The music we make all comes very naturally and we don’t often disagree on that. While Ben and I are more inclined towards the hip hop end of things, it never ends up as a detriment to the group. It just means we each have different songs which are our favourites in the repertoire. I think that’s nice! 

We probably have more disagreements when it comes to production because there are so many different ways to approach the same things, and it’s often difficult to try and get someone to hear the idea you’re proposing before it has been produced. But, even when it comes to practical production stuff, I love our ability to find references and sell our ideas to the other members. Everyone is so open and if someone’s got an idea, we just want to hear it!

What keeps you inspired?

Rosie: Good question. I think inspiration is something that naturally comes in peaks and troughs, especially in the modern world; all you have to do is look down at a smartphone to see someone else doing ‘better’ than you, at what you’re trying to create. Yet, I think the key to inspiration is staying true to what makes you enjoy music. Take the pressure off the creation and just do it for the love of it. When you truly do that, your best work will flow, and the ideas will manifest. It’s the same with the context in which you put yourself; I love to be engaged musically, writing with others, going to gigs, stimulating myself with visual art… I feel that kickstarts me mentally and then comes to my own ideas and creations.

What would you tell others who are aspiring to form a band?

Ben: Just get into it and don’t overthink it, approach it as a bit of fun. As long as you're having fun and scratching that creative itch then it’s worth it. Whatever comes next is a bonus. A word of advice from us - make sure you can play it live before you release the single!

What is in CURA’s future?

George: Getting out into the world again, after the year we’ve all had, we are so excited to just go out and perform. We just played our first gig back and we’re just hungry for more. We’re desperate to show strangers our music and get that thrill of being on stage again. We’re sat on loads of new music and have started to collaborate outside just the three of us. 

Tell us a bit about your new music. Does it resemble what you have done in the past, and when should we expect to hear it?

Rosie: We’ve been trying to widen our net and work with some contemporaries we really rate. There are a few songs down the line that we’re really excited about, one featuring a rapper called Brotherman. It’s very different to our last singles, Brotherman is such a great lyricist and poet, and his spoken word rapping sits so nicely over our jazz harmony and hip hop drums. We heard his music on a Sam Wills track to which I instantly looked him up on Spotify as I couldn’t believe we’d not heard him before, he instantly became one of our favourite British rappers. 

We feel like this could be the watershed track in which takes the band and project to another level. It feels like everything we’re working on is stretching us and we’re really excited to see where we can take our sound and ideas. It’s now in its final touches and it’ll be ready for the world at the end of September. 

At this point in the project though, we just want to push ourselves, ask the questions about how we can make the ‘CURA’ sound which people want to tune into. Everything we’re writing feels like a natural progression from what’s come before and one step closer to being what we want to be sonically. It’s an exciting time and we just hope that others are as engaged and excited by what we create as we are. 

You can listen to CURA on Spotify or on Youtube, as well as find them on Instagram.