Members of REM, Screaming Trees, Queens of The Stone Age to launch Drink The Sea supergroup UK tour in Portsmouth

​Between the core band members they have been part of and central to numerous rock movements from the 1980s onwards, through alternative, grunge, desert rock and more.

Peter Buck, as guitarist with multi-platinum rock gods REM is the best known, but the others also carry a fine pedigree.

Barrett Martin was drummer with The Screaming Trees and Mad Season, but is also an ethnomusicologist and Grammy Award-winning producer who has worked on more than 200 albums as a producer and performer.

Multi-instrumentalist Alain Johannes was part of the cult band Eleven, but his virtuosic skills have been tapped by numerous artists including Chris Cornell, PJ Harvey, Queens Of The Stone Age, Them Crooked Vultures, and many more.

And Duke Garwood is a revered British singer-songwriter and guitarist who has made multiple solo albums as well as being a favourite collaborator of acclaimed Screaming Trees and solo artist Mark Lanegan.

For the live band they have also brought on board Lisette Garcia, a Mexican-American percussionist who has played on multiple albums from around the world, and bassist Abbey Blackwell who has previously played with Alvvays and La Luz.

The day The News talks with Martin and Johannes over Zoom, the pair are in the former’s studio in Olympia, Washington State. There’s a platinum disc for the Singles soundtrack – Screaming Trees’ Nearly Lost You features on this snapshot of the early ’90s Seattle scene – on the wall behind them, and a Grammy on the shelf as well as a couple of other gold discs I can’t make out.

Olympia is about an hour’s drive from Seattle where Drink The Sea will – sort of – make their live debut that evening.

Garwood is unable to join them due to the timings around his new US visa, but the rest of the band will be playing to about 100 people in a tiny theatre to test out their set – minus the songs Duke sings. Key to the shows they’ll be touring are short films to accompany each song, created by film-maker Tad Fettig.

As Barrett explains: “I've known Tad for about 25 years. We met in New Mexico, and the first project we worked on was in the Peruvian Amazon rainforest. We did a documentary film – I have this ongoing series called Singing Earth, where we go around the world and interview musicians and do a recording session.

“So Tad was with us when we were making this album. He was with us in Iceland and Brazil and Chile and Spain. I think he only missed a couple places.

“But he was always filming all the time. He used to be a filmmaker for PBS, which is like our BBC. So he has a million hours of footage from around the world. He just made these really beautiful videos.

“He would send sketches and we'd be like, okay, this part's cool, maybe not that… But we didn't micromanage him. We let him do what he wanted to do and he intuitively kind of knew what to do anyway.”

The band are playing seven dates in Spain – starting on November 28, then one in Paris, France, before starting their UK tour in Portsmouth at The Wedgewood Rooms on December 11.

As Barrett alludes to, this project has been global in scope. It began back in 2022 with Barrett and Alain jamming in the studio in Olympia.

Alain explains: “I came to visit Barrett about three years ago in his other studio, but also in Olympia. And we just kind of jammed for a couple of days, he had a really cool spot to record.

“He had the pianos and the vibraphone, and upright bass and his drum set, and I brought a cigar box (guitar) and he had an electric. We just kind of jammed for two days. A couple of those became the seeds of songs on the albums, like Tuareg Asteroid, for example.

“Basically, then we started pulling in all our buddies, like Peter and Duke and Lisette.”

It eventually grew, depending on who was there at the time, to encompass sessions in Reykjavík in Iceland, Sao Paulo in Brazil, Alain’s native Santiago in Chile, Joshua Tree in the US again, then back to Olympia and finally, mixing in Barcelona, Spain.

As Alain puts it: “Next thing you know, travel here, travel there, record something, go to Rancho (De La Luna, Joshua Tree), and then we suddenly have 22 songs!”

The resulting tracks are Drink The Sea I and II – released online a fortnight apart last month, but essentially a double album. The albums sound very different from the bands that made their respective members’ names. They take in a wide variety of influences and sounds – they are deeply layered and textured, full of atmosphere, but also packed with hooks.

"Barrett and I have such a history as fans and listeners of world music,” explains Alain, “and we also like instruments. We have these palettes available to us, which sometimes we can utilise in our other bands, if they let us! For example, like in Queens of the Stone Age, all the cool hooky vibraphone and all that stuff, that's all Barrett.

"We already have this kind of ability. And I think bringing Peter and Duke, especially Duke, with this kind of gothic blues thing. It just naturally happened. We didn't really plan it. We didn't really go: it's got to be like this.”

"We didn't really know which combination would work, but it all worked!” says Barrett with a laugh.

When talking about how they sequenced the 22 songs into two related albums, Alain talks of them as siblings, while Barrett harks back to the process in The Screaming Trees when he’d work on it with Lanegan.

"You want your songs to accelerate in the beginning and then you kind of settle in, and then you end the album, with this sort of elegant, expansive thing.

" There's really some truth to that. It's like the whole thing is a story and stories are kind of like that.

"One other thing that Al said when we were mixing it, he turned around, because me and Duke were sitting behind him, making comments, and he said to us: ‘You know, this really is as good as anything we did in our other bands.’

It’s a bold statement, but it has a ring of truth from these hugely experienced musicians.

“It's just, we're older and wiser and we've done all that stuff. So now we can kind of just do the record we want to make right now.

"You always feel that way as the person that created it, but you hope that the listener also can hear the evolution of your lifetime in the music.”

The common thread for all the members, though, is a friendship with the late Mark Lanegan who died suddenly in 2022 aged 57. All of the quartet had worked with him extensively.

Barrett reveals that Lanegan and Buck had worked together on material at the latter’s Seattle home that has never seen the light of day. The pair had written a song together – Black Book of Fear – for a second Mad Season album, which was shelved. The song was ultimately put on the 2013 deluxe of Mad Season’s debut, Above.

Mad Season also featured Barrett on drums, and he elaborates: “We recorded a whole bunch of songs, I think we recorded 18 or 19 basic tracks for a second album that never got finished.

“Peter wrote that song and Mark finished it when we did the deluxe edition. But Mark and Peter wrote a bunch of songs that were going to be an album that never got recorded. Mark would go to Peter's house in Seattle because Mark was living with me at the time. We'd go and sit with Peter and they would just write songs and that stuff never even got recorded.”

Barrett teases: “That's a cool story, you hear about people working together and then, what happened to it? I don't know...”

"I definitely could feel his presence,” says Alain of Lanegan during the Drink The Sea sessions. “Mark and I, from (Mark’s 2004 album) Bubblegum on, I worked on all the records and then Duke would always be a part of those records.

“We were getting ready to start a new solo record in Portugal in July of '22, when he passed away. He's been such a big part of all of of our lives and our shared DNA in many ways.

“His presence is very strong, I think, in the record. In the way that, Natasha, my wife (and bandmate in Eleven) that passed away and Chris Cornell, they're part of me now. Everything I do has them in it, because when you work with people that are kind of your musical soulmates, that ends up being this kind of like exchange of ectoplasm or whatever the hell it is, and then you can't help it.

“Mark was a huge fan of Duke's, as an artist and as a writer and singer. Duke starts singing and I get chills. If Mark was here, he'd definitely be all over this stuff, you know.”

When we speak, they’re looking forward to stretching the band out in the live arena.

The first time the band will have all been together is in Bilbao, Spain, for rehearsals before the tour kicks off.

“A lot of the stuff was never actually performed at once,” says Alain, “something like Tuareg Asteroid, I still haven't quite gotten the hang of it!

"We did the vocals in my place in Santiago, and then when I finally grabbed the guitar and tried to sing and play at the same time, I was like, oh, okay, well, oh, you know...” he chuckles.

"We discovered some of these things that I never actually sang and played at the same time, so it's beautiful too, now we're starting to get a sense of where it could go now that we're opening up the songs.

"There's the album version, and then it comes alive a certain way. And live, then you find a new world that is possible, especially after we get a few weeks of gigging under our belt, I'm really looking forward to that part, which is where we grow into what we are becoming.”

As to what they’re becoming – the project would appear to have legs, as they’re already working on new material.

Barrett says they’ve been recording songs in his studio for it.

"Just speaking for myself, I don't have a million things going on right now,” he says before listing what sounds like a busy schedule, “I mean, I'm working on another book and I'll probably make another experimental solo record, and I'll produce people and things like that. But this is the only band I'm in.

“So I'm in this for as long as it goes, you know.”

“As long as we'll have us!” says Alain on how long they can make it work.

“I’ve got a good feeling about it. We're certainly still inspired. We recorded a bunch of stuff here at Barrett's studio since we've been rehearsing, on the days in between.

“We’ve got a whole bunch of little seedlings moving, which is great.”

Drink The Sea play at The Wedgewood Rooms, Southsea on Thursday, December 11. Doors 7.30pm. Tickets £25. Go to: wedgewood-rooms.co.uk.

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