Based in Brighton on the south coast of England, the British-Maltese musician, soundtrack composer and record label boss James Vella has deep personal and cultural connections to Malta. Besides his own eclectic output as a recording artist, mostly under the alias A Lily, and running his own highly respected left-field label, Phantom Limb, Vella regularly helps curate music, film and literary festivals in Malta. He also co-founded a small Malta-based record label, which promotes Maltese music internationally, and is currently working with Alex Camilleri, director of Malta’s official Academy Awards submission film Luzzu (2021). Vella’s acclaimed new album Saru l-Qamar is an inspired love letter to this tiny island nation’s unique Semitic language, a rich fusion of Arabic, Italian and English. Hauntingly beautiful and lightly experimental, it weaves exquisite musical mosaics around fragments taken from a recently digitised archive of antique audio messages sent from Maltese exiles to their families back home.
You have strong family roots in Malta, how often do you come back to visit?
“I used to spend about a month a year in Malta, primarily with family, but also a big group of friends and colleagues and connections that I spend as much time as I can with. Now, less regularly, but I am still really closely attached both emotionally and logistically. There’s a music festival there called Rock The South that I helped to program, that falls in the spring every year. I also helped to set up a record label, Kewn records, and I’m still involved in that. The name translates to sort of… being, being in space and time.”
Your new album Saru l-Qamar is rooted in the Maltese language, are you a fluent speaker?
“I try to keep it at a good level. I speak Maltese at home with my daughter, and that is necessary, without practice it does fade quickly, especially as so much of my day-to-day life is in England. There is not a great well of Maltese language to draw on if you’re in England. And so it is an effort to keep it, to keep it at a good service level, especially as Malta is so so amenable to the English language, it is easy just to slip into English, and stick there and fail to notice. But it’s a really important part of the project. The project wouldn’t have existed without the Maltese language.”
The album grew out of an unusual cultural archiving foundation in Malta, Magna Ziem. How did their work come to shape yours?
“They had this program a few years ago where they offered families free digitisation of their analogue formats in trade for keeping a copy in the archive. So a lot of these families had not heard their relatives voices for decades because they were stored on like, reel to reel tapes, antiquated, outdated formats. And so Magna Ziem’s digitisation process opened a lot of doors to access, free access for people. It is tied in with contemporary cultural explorations as well. They also have exhibitions and talks. And my record is not the first time they’ve worked with musicians. They also work with film-makers, poets, photographers… likewise there are a lot of artists and creatives within the within the foundation itself.”
Living in Britain, do you feel part of a wider Maltese cultural diaspora community?
“Something very common to Malta is, it’s a small place, without a great deal of cultural resources, so you find that Maltese creatives often leave. I have some mates who play in a guitar band called Genn, who are doing fairly well in the UK touring circuit. They made that decision themselves, to get out of Malta, make themselves more available to Europe and the UK. A lot of Maltese friends in England have made similar moves, which I guess you could call a diaspora. But you could also call it a search in pursuit of cultural support, which is difficult to come by in a really small country like Malta. But diaspora is really common thing, and was especially common in the 1960s, 1970s, 1980s. I don’t know if you’ve spent much time with the political history of Malta, but in that period there was a really contested premiership in power under the Prime Minister, Dominic Mintoff. He was ostensibly a leftist, but an authoritarian. That’s the reason my family left, because he really discouraged and, in a lot of cases, crushed educational pursuits. My dad and his brother were at medical school and were forced out, and so had to move to England”
You have composed short film scores, and occasionally work as a musical supervisor for film-makers. Do you have connections to the Maltese film industry?
“You’re aware of Alex Camilleri and Luzzu, right? Alex is a Maltese film-maker. This actually relates back to the question you asked earlier about cultural diaspora. Alex is a film-maker who was educated in New Jersey, and he has created what I would describe as Malta’s finest film export, a full-length feature named Luzzu. It is named after the traditional fishing blue, yellow and red boats that you’ll see out on the harbours. It’s in the Maltese language as well. Alex is a real talent and has a very bright future in film ahead of him. And I’m really fortunate to be music supervising on his subsequent film, which I don’t think has been announced yet, but I believe it’s a 2026 release.”
How important are events like Mediterrane Film Festival, and the Maltese culture industry in general, in promoting art and artists from Malta?
“It is a really small country without access to a great deal of cultural support or cultural infrastructure. And so sometimes it’s quite difficult for those voices to be heard, especially outside. But I think the quality and the talent is there. enough for it to deserve a platform, but also to be slowly finding its own platform. Because of films like Luzzu, because of really high-grade creative projects, and you could probably include Mediterrane Film Festival in that list as well. It’s an opportunity for non-Maltese to be able to appreciate the environment that has created Maltese culture right now.”