6 saturday review Saturday December 4 2021 | the times
heavenly sounds Gabriels members Ryan Hope, Jacob Lusk (also below) and Ari Balouzian tour the UK next yearmusic
LA meets
Sunderland
in fine style
Ed Potton talks to the group Gabriels
about their diverse backgrounds and
making Elton John’s song of the year
JULIAN BROAD; MARILYN KINGWILLG
abriels are telling me
about their video call
with Elton John. Blown
away by the Los Ange-
les trio’s shiveringly
gorgeous, string-
soaked blend of soul,
jazz, gospel and electronica, he was speak-
ing to them live on his Apple radio show.
“It was 5am at my house in Burbank,”
says Ari Balouzian, who is joined in the
band by Sunderland-born Ryan Hope and
the astounding singer Jacob Lusk. “We’d
rented lights, had the iPad on a stand and
framed ourselves up. Then the FaceTime
comes up on Ryan’s phone.” They ended
up doing the interview peering into a
screen two inches wide.
Not that John gave a stuff. “You guys are
making the music that I love the most,” he
said. He called one of their songs, the
Motown-goes-celestial Love and Hate in a
Different Time, “one of the most seminal
records of the last ten years”, adding:
“Please keep making this music because
it’s so beautiful. When I come to LA, I’ll
buy you dinner. Jacob, that voice of yours
is something else, baby!”
Indeed it is — a gospel-trained marvel
with the unadorned soulfulness of Nina
Simone and the otherworldliness of
Anohni. Lusk’s falsetto is the centrepiece
of a sound that’s unlike anything else out
there, vintage, futuristic and timeless all at
once. The last group who did that were
Portishead, which is high praise. Gabriels’
live shows add to that a sense of mass eu-
phoria. Paul Weller is another fan and they
appeared on Later... with Jools Holland in
the summer before they had a record deal.
We are sitting on the band’s tour bus
before they play Oval Space in east
London. All in their early thirties, they are
an engaging trio. Balouzian, a wry Arme-
nian-American, is a classically trained film
composer; Hope, a jovial former DJ whose
northeastern tones are still thick despite
ten years in California directing commer-
cials and music videos for George Michael
and Sam Smith; Lusk, a former choirmas-
ter from Compton in LA, is a big character
in both senses. He returns from the sound
check in a vast sheepskin coat and sparkly
glasses, singing Sounds of Blackness’s
gospel-house classic Optimistic. Their
skills are thrillingly complementary —impromptu beauty when he sang Billie
Holiday’s Strange Fruit at a Black Lives
Matter protest in LA. Singing through a
megaphone, Lusk transfixed the huge
crowd, most of whom sat down on the
ground. “I think it’ll end up in museums,”
Hope says. “Of every image that I saw of
Black Lives Matter, I didn’t see anybody
sat down.”
Lusk’s conservative upbringing is still in
evidence — he doesn’t drink, calls me sir
and apologises when he swears. Yet Balou-
zian insists that he is the least judgmental
person he knows. Lusk embarks on
another rant/sermon. “If you like girls and
boys, or if you want to move to Brazil and
marry somebody that don’t know English,
what the f*** that got to do with me?” He
talks about doing a Broadway workshop
for a production of Edgar Allen Poe’s
Masque of the Red Death. “The character I
played was blue, neither male nor female.
And I was, like, ‘In the future maybe that’s
where we at?’ ”
His openmindedness even extends to
understanding Hope’s accent. The affec-
tion between the three of them is clear, as
is the creative chemistry. “What you’re
experiencing here is just a real moment of
how we write songs,” Hope says. Their lat-
est release is the Bloodline EP, whose title
track is a devastating ballad that sounds as
if it was recorded in a prewar jazz club in
Harlem. Next month they play their first
show in the US and they hope to
have their debut album done by
the spring. Then they return
here for a full-blown tour.
“You can send the
Queen a text and be, like,
‘Listen, you need to have
this band come perform at
the house,’ ” Lusk says.
Before Buckingham Pal-
ace, maybe they will play
Sunderland. “We’ve not played
there yet, but these two are hon-
orary Mackems,” Hope says. Where would
they play? “Steel’s working men’s club,” he
says without hesitation. “I worked in there
when I was 14; my mum met my dad in
there. It’s an iconic place.”
Steel’s must have witnessed some sights
in its time. But it will never have seen
anything like Gabriels.
Gabriels tour from March 31 to April 27Balouzian’s flair for composition, Hope’s
cinematic production, Lusk’s lungs.
“We were all doing pretty good in our
own separate careers,” Lusk says. “We
didn’t have to do this to eat.” Hope and Bal-
ouzian had been collaborating for some
time when they met the singer five years
ago. Lusk auditioned for an advert for a
health supplement they were working on
and made quite the impression.
“It was mind-blowing,” Hope says.
“I was being a little grand and I didn’t
really want to do the gig,” Lusk says.
“We were doing it for the f***ing
money,” Hope says. What they have in
common, he thinks, is that they are all
from working-class backgrounds.
Lusk had collaborated with the rapper
Nate Dogg and sung backing vocals for
Beck, St Vincent and Diana Ross. Did he
ever feel undervalued, given that his voice
is better than any of theirs? “No, it feels
more like I’m helping someone else maketheir dreams come true. I do want to be
a star, let me be clear. I wanna be like Be-
yoncé, I wanna make billions, I wanna win
five Grammys!” he bellows. “How-
ever, music is supposed to be
communal. It’s about when
you open your mouth — do
they connect with it?”
I tell them that my col-
league Lisa Verrico com-
pared their ecstatic recent
show to a cult meeting.
They guffaw. “I thought I
was in a cult when Jacob came
into that casting,” Hope says.
Growing up in the apostolic
church, Lusk has seen plenty of crowds
whipped into a fervour. He started singing
in church at four but secular music was off
limits, although his father, a music
producer, allowed him clandestine listens
of Missy Elliott and Britney Spears.
Soon, though, Lusk was spreading his
wings, finishing fifth in American Idol in- Last year he provided a moment of
‘Please keep making
this music because
it’s so beautiful,’
Elton John said
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