RECURRING DREAMS

On his latest album, Heard Noises, Matt Berry takes a leap of faith musically and brings in a more reflective and, at times, confessional approach to lyric-writing. The actor-musician tells Prog about his mind-shift since entering his fifth decade and the very special gift he received from one of his musical heroes that's also played a role on the album package.

- Rob Hughes

Turning 50 last May was more than just an age thing for Matt Berry. His half-century milestone also happened to coincide with the end of his successful run in TV comedy-horror What We Do In The Shadows. Berry had been a central part of the series, playing pansexual vampire Laszlo Cravensworth, for more than five years.

"I turned 50 on the last day that I filmed anything for that show," he tells Prog. "So, that was a significant day for me. I hadn't done it consciously, but everything I'd been writing from the year before was all geared around that. When I look back, it's all pointing in that direction. I think certain things happen to you that force you to progress." This subconscious reassessment of life and work fed into what eventually became Berry's new album, Heard Noises. As did the recurring dreams.

"This obsession with nostalgia was creeping into my subconscious. I was having a repeated dream of basically seeing my younger self in the distance and working out whether I should run up to him or just let him get on with whatever he was doing. But it felt so real. I could see him and all my friends, exactly how we were about 10 years ago. And it kept happening, so I couldn't ignore that." One new song in particular feels like a direct result of that experience.

To Live For What Once Was finds Berry wrestling with notions of past and present, of living in the here and now as opposed to some idealised memory palace. 'No matter what I do I'm trapped' he sings, 'Like a man in a jail of his own.' Other pieces, such as Stay On The Ground, serve as a kind of self-support device, its protagonist negotiating a path through fear and bullshit until he can simply 'ignore the sound'.