Fergus Quill picks me up from Leeds station in his Nissan Micra – 152,000 miles on the clock, double bass expertly slotted between seats – and drives me to meet his band.
I’m expecting a handful of people, but for the next half an hour, members of Ferg’s Imaginary Big Band just keep arriving, until the tables outside Headingley’s Hyde Park Book Club overflow with musicians and instrument cases. When it starts to rain, they shuffle indoors, gather in the bar’s snug room and begin playing their noisy, joyful music.
Forty-one musicians play on FIBB’s second album, The New Atomic, though for gigs they usually operate at about 30. There was one early gig where they compromised on size. “Never again,” says saxophonist Bess Shooter.
Even with today’s svelte 10-piece, their principles shine through. “I’d say we’re pretty traditionalist,” Quill says, though in their hands, tradition sounds radical. In the snug, they play a tribute to late US trumpeter Jaimie Branch, and songs from their new album such as I Shall Not Be Moved, which brims with angry fire.
FIBB are rooted in the principles of revered bandleaders such as Duke Ellington and Count Basie: saxophones, trumpets and trombones backed by a rhythm section, playing imaginatively scored ensemble sections that expand out into individual solos. But FIBB are more in a lineage of big band dreamers, from Loose Tubes to Sun Ra to Charlie Haden’s Liberation Music Orchestra: queer-friendly, anti-fascist and sprawling, they’re quite different to the refined orchestras of the big band mainstream.
Their sound is rough and brazen, but not without playfulness. Take, for example, Play the Names, in which a discordant opening chord collapses into band members yelling out their names in frantic sequence. The voices come together, spelling out F-E-R-G (of course), before the messy instrumental chaos returns over a bustling funk figure.
To be in the band, Quill says, “you don’t have to be the strongest sight-reader, but you do have to have an independent musical voice”. Top improvisers play with people who don’t read music, who play with members who can’t even play instruments but join in wholeheartedly. “We embrace chaos, imperfection and all that,” pianist Nico Widdowson adds, “but we all want to be the best musicians that we can be.”
The New Atomic is the perfect vehicle for FIBB’s idiosyncratic blend of sincerity and whimsy. And, despite the many references – wailing New Orleans funeral marches, Bob Dylan covers, odes to Ellington, punk and Cold war-era musical anxiety – there’s a powerful G-force as this enormous unit swings altogether from idea to idea. You feel swept up by their sound.
The band isn’t yet 10 years old, but already its history is starting to resemble that of the Fall, another band with a talismanic frontman. “If it’s me and your nan on bongos, it’s Ferg’s Imaginary Big Band,” says Quill, who is the band’s bass player, main composer and leader, wrangling the chaos from the front of the ensemble.
The name began “as a figure of speech,” drummer Josh Ketch says; pub chats would regularly return back to Quill’s plans for a behemoth big band. Out of a music college Sun Ra project in 2018, gigs grew steadily, stymied only briefly by Covid. They’ve played at Ronnie Scott’s and Love Supreme festival, and, thanks to a convoy of nine-seater minibuses and one “wally car” (for those running late), they’ve also toured the UK.
Their continued existence is a testament to Leeds and its spaces: to the venues such as Book Club, the Brudenell or the Domino who put on their gigs, and others such as the Attic and Eiger Studios who make space for fortnightly Monday rehearsals (“I rarely pay over £30 for a rehearsal space,” Quill says). Could FIBB happen anywhere else in the UK? “It has to happen in a place where the rent is under £500 a month,” Quill replies. “Otherwise, I don’t think you could get people to commit to this thing, or have the time to do it.” It almost goes without saying that nobody makes any money from the band. But the musicians, librarians, charity workers, bar staff and teachers manage to make it work.
Back in the Micra, we whip through the back streets of Headingley and out of the window Quill points to some FIBB affiliates who couldn’t get time off work to meet up. He has always felt best living outside the strictures of a nine-to-five, and indeed other standard ways of being.
In his youth, first in Essex, later Saffron Walden, Quill was “in and out of mainstream education”. He loved music, but never got on with the UK’s graded exam system. An inspirational teacher gave him an early crash-course in jazz and his parents were also extremely supportive. “I was a neurodiverse kid with additional educational needs,” he says. “When it was decided that I was interested in music, they just laid out instruments in the house, and I went between them. I was always just allowed to play.”
Moving out of a Quaker boarding school to the local state sixth form, Quill found people playing “squeaky clean hardcore punk, so I did some of that”. He was drawn to outsiders – his favourite musician was early 20th-century American experimentalist Charles Ives – and teachers gave him more: Lou Reed, Charles Mingus and Frank Zappa.
He didn’t plan to go to music college: “I was making all right money being a magician at Freemason events, and then busking on the street.” But when friends moved away to university, he rang up music colleges. Stressing that he could double on electric and upright bass, Leeds College of Music accepted him after he recited the chords to Horace Silver’s Song for My Father down the phone. “I didn’t do an audition or anything,” he says. “I don’t think you could get away with that now.” At college, he quickly found Hamish Dixon, a constant in the FIBB universe, whose role in the band is simply “noise”. They’ve lived together for 11 years.
There’s a punkish energy to the FIBB, which involves a collective unlearning of things the jazz world has taught them. “When I was younger,” Shooter says, “there was so much in the scene about never doing anything for exposure, or for no money. Now, there’s a whole load of people like us, getting together to make stuff just because they want to.”
The day ends at the local Hollywood Bowl, a regular hangout. Quill recently turned 30, prompting some reflection on a chaotic past decade. “For a long time I was actually quite unhappy, quite ill, but was putting that to the side because I just had this drive to create things.” For a while, bowling was, he says, his only “outside” from an all-consuming musical life.
With time, balance has come, by embracing sociability, rejecting “a CV-driven career,” and realising his role as a caregiver to a band with ages spanning 30 years. “It’s great – now I’ve got kids in my band, I can try to have a well-rounded life,” he says. He’s moving into a housing co-op; he’ll continue to write this music; they’ll tour again soon. The big band dream continues.
