Hot Press meets Wild Belle

A brave man indeed that sits his bandmates down one day and let’s them know that, actually, he’d rather be playing with his little sister. When Natalie Bergman began singing with her brother Elliott’s well-established act Nomo, it was a conversation that was soon on the cards. “It was a little challenging,” confides Chicago-born Elliott from a street corner in Brussels. “We were actually in the studio with Nomo. It’d been too long since we’d done our last record and we were gearing up for the next. Natalie had done one song with us before. We thought it could be a good direction, maybe the new stuff could work with her vocals. The further we got, the band really wasn’t into it. We were trying to play shows and it wasn’t working out live. It was too different. So we.... kinda sent the band home!”

For the 32-year-old, throwing his lot in with his younger sibling now seems like a wise move. Natalie, a music obsessive, already had skeletons of reggaefied songs ready to be fully fleshed out. They took to
the studio.
“We were just experimenting, trying to make songs that excited us. We basically made a whole record and went, ‘Well okay, I guess this is a new band called Wild Belle! Let’s see what people think.’”
So far, so hype-inducing. They’ve been sitting on said debut for a year (“feeling like our mouth was shut” he sighs), looking for a label. Columbia Records on board, Isles slipped out to much excitement in March. Clearly blessed in the gene department – Natalie is making the fashion world swoon – thankfully that heritage ain’t just cosmetic. They come from good creative stock. Their late mother was “a jack of all trades” writing for a living and painting. One of her college pieces adorns the sleeve of Isles. It was also a musical household.
“I started on the clarinet,” Elliot recalls. “When I got to high school, my grandmother gave me her saxophone. My grandma’s pretty cool – there was lipstick on the reeds she gave me! But there was music happening all the time. Our mom played a lot of jazz standards like Gershwin and Cole Porter when I was very small. She also played guitar in open D tuning and knew every Joni Mitchell song. She loved dancing so Michael Jackson and Prince were always on the turntable.”
So he’d perfected his moon walk by the age of eight?
“Haha! We had lessons... well, not lessons, but there was definitely a lot of dancing.”
Around that time, Natalie arrived on the scene. Pretty quickly as the pair grew, she was matching her brother on the ‘music obsessive’ front.
“Natalie was probably the only 10-year-old not doing her homework and checking out Pharaoh Sanders records instead! She had this little portable record player that I got for here. There’s this Studio One Women compilation that she just fell in love with so she’d sit up in her room listening to that. Then she headed off down the reggae path a little faster than I did. She has a pretty extensive collection, so there’s a really nice exchange there.”
The songs take shape in different ways, but a lot start from the rhythm up, with a little kalimba loop or drum machine. As for the sound? Think of Haim’s pop hooks laced over the kind of high life beats built to scare off the Chicago cold. “We have to infuse the blues with a little tropical weather to cope I think!” laughs Elliot. “There’s some wishful thinking in terms of the production.”
In the main, the lyrics and melodic ideas begin with Natalie. It is a record detailing the trials and tribulations of young love. In the second half, an Elliot vocal pops up on ‘When It’s Over’. Dealing with an old relationship, lines like “he’s no good for you, I told you so” inevitably sound like a lecture from a
big brother.
“Haha! that’s the brotherly response to all of the jerks. I do realise it can come across that way.”
Was it ever difficult for Natalie baring her soul in song to him?
“We had to quickly get over any discomfort in that department. There’s not really any room for that!”
Wise words. Much wisdom has come from Chris Frantz and Tina Weymouth, the couple famed for Talking Heads and Tom Tom Club. With Wild Belle based in Brooklyn, they’ve run into the pair and even recorded with them.
“They’re just the most generous, wonderful people you could ever meet,” gushes Elliot. “They always have amazing stories and sage rock advice. They’ve become our ‘rock and roll aunt and uncle’!”
It seems to confirm Wild Belle as the coolest darn ‘family affair’ since Sly stepped up to the microphone.

Isles is out now on Columbia Records.