Going Places: Passenger

Singer-songwriter Mike Rosenberg and Andrew Phillips met by chance in 2002 backstage at a Free Burma benefit gig and immediately hit it off. They got on so well in fact that just a year later they formed Passenger, Brighton’s hottest new musical export. And with their debut album all set for release, they’re already attracting widespread attention and interest. Mike picks up the story:  

“I was only seventeen and up until that point had just played a bit around Brighton but that gig was a real leap up. I met Andrew backstage, it was great to meet professional musicians and hang out with them for one of the first times and we just hit it off musically and socially. It happened pretty organically. To start with it was just me and Andrew just working off my set of songs and as the relationship built up we started writing together, then started getting the band together”

As well as Alon Cohen on drums, the pair recruited Marcus O’Dair (bass) and Richard Brincklow (keyboards) who had previously collaborated with each other in a DJ Shadow covers band. A strange musical slant to bring to a predominantly acoustic catalogue of songs, but one that both Mike and Andrew (the bands driving force) were keen to embrace and absorb and it shows in their subtly electronic laced folk rock as Andrew explains:

“A lot of my ideas and a lot of Mike’s ideas were to get some beats into it and make it more electronic, the idea was to take it somewhere else to make it experimental. So over time we worked that into it and became more confident writing towards those kinds of sounds”

Just one of the latest flux of bands to explode out of the Brighton scene, the pair are in no doubt that their London-by-the-sea residency has helped mould and challenge their dynamic sound:

“The bar is really high in Brighton because there’re so many bands and not that many venues” Says Mike.

Andrew agrees:

“It stops you being in a bubble, it stops you thinking you’re great in some little place then going to a bigger place and thinking… we’re not actually as good as we thought we were” 

Mike may have been new to the music industry when the pair first met but Andrew was anything but. A successful film and television soundtrack composer with over ten years experience, Andrew has several awards and BAFTA nominations to his credit and isn’t quite ready to give up his other musical interests just yet:

“I’m running that in parallel, I’m working on something at the moment, a BBC1 film, I suppose I cherry pick the projects I really want to work on and I think that will feed back positively into what we do”

But he’s keen not to let his valuable knowledge overshadow the bands organic creativity:

“I think that’s something you’ve got to be really careful about. Sometimes it can be a help but I think sometimes you just have to button your lip. We both come up with ideas, its not just like we write a song and then I take the whole thing away and work on it in my tower, it’s a very open process of how we make the records”