When singer-songwriter Yoav Gerber was 24, friends surprised him by setting up his first gig, knowing that it would never otherwise happen.

“I’m late to the party, always,” smiles the musician from his home in a Jerusalem suburb. “I didn’t really consider myself a musician that had anything worth listening to.”

He spent the next month in “total stage fright”, “agonising” over every possible scenario that could play out. “Then you start the gig and you realise that this kind of pressure either makes you or breaks you.”

Fortunately, it was a success.

A solo career wasn’t Gerber’s plan, after all. He had been searching for like-minded musicians with whom he could form a band and recreate the rock ’n’ roll dream. “I pursued that for ever,” he says.

“Most people, especially by 24, have actual lives and they’ve ditched the teenager’s dreams, which I still have at the age of 42. I still want to be a rock star.”

He adds that it’s not just about finding committed people who are into the same music, but they also have to like you personally. “I’m probably faking a pleasant person so far, but most people would consider me a jerk,” he admits. That’s not him being self-deprecating?

“No, I wish it was. This is what people told me. I’m very opinionated. Even in Israel, I say the wrong thing at the wrong time, so you can imagine how it would go over in the UK.”

Nevertheless, sat barefoot on his makeshift-studio floor, a guitar beside him, and taking intermittent puffs on a roll-up, the beanie hat-wearing Gerber looks the part.
His musical journey really began when he was 11 and moved to Boston with his parents and three younger brothers. They lived there for four years, so he considers himself American-Israeli.

“When I got back, I always felt like I was catching up, because they were so far advanced with stuff like maths, compared to what we were doing in the States.”

Maki Supa 08

Gerber in the studio

While in Boston, he began guitar lessons and developed his love of the Beatles and REM, both of whom influenced his unwavering attention to melody and lyrics. It had been his father’s mission to get his children into the Beatles, “and that’s what I was trying to be at first,” says Gerber. “So the lyrics come from REM, the melodies from McCartney.”

After that debut gig, he started to take himself a little more seriously. When it came to making music, Gerber says he was “probably even harder to get along with”, and at 32 he decided to make an album without a band.

The result was the melodious, indie-rock record Friends of John’s, and he invested all of his money into recording the EP, and very little in promoting it, only to repeat the process with a new album a few years later.

“Hoping for a different result,” he says, regretfully. “So this time around, I’m doing it all opposite.”

After five years away, he is back recording with a band called Maki Supa. That hiatus began with the birth of his twin sons, right after he released the last album, and included the pandemic and a divorce. Maki Supa came about after the producer Shai Saadia challenged him to write some mainstream songs.

Gerber jumped at the challenge, and began writing pop songs for artists in Israel, and as he was recording their demos he rediscovered just how much he loved being in the studio. “Recording my songs was just an excuse to be in the studio more,” he says. “But they came up really well.”

Saadia became the collaborative link that Gerber had sought for so long. “I always said that I wasn’t going to let the fact that I don’t have a band stand in the way of my lifelong dream of having a band.”

Long considering himself “a student of songwriting”, Gerber has spent many hours mastering the songs of other bands. The one band he finds it impossible to emulate is Arctic Monkeys. “Their songwriting is so unique,” he says, adding, “I hate what they’re doing now.”

Gerber is certainly opinionated, especially when it comes to the state of today’s music. “I’m not impressed by most things happening in music today,” he has stated. Part of it, he says, is that good things are harder to find, “because we’re image first.

!These people putting their efforts into social media and knowing how to make themselves up and look cool is definitely working.

"Some of the stuff that’s making it to popular status is nothing that would even get a second look ten, 15 years ago. They can barely be qualified as music.”

Then he refers to someone in Israel who openly admits to not knowing any chords, offering a songwriting course.

“He doesn’t know how to play any musical instruments. But he’s going to teach you how to write a song! I find that just mind-boggling. And this is a generation that takes pride in not reading a book. How are you going to be writing profound, thoughtful lyrics like that?”

Another conundrum is the technology-fuelled demise of attention spans, which he’s heard is just 1.9 seconds on social media, the equivalent of a two-year-old’s. “Does it scare me as a musician?

"Hell yeah, I have no idea how to address it. We’re not going to be getting A Day In the Life again, nobody’s going to bother recording that.

“It’s sad, but once you win them over, they will listen.”

None of this changes Gerber’s steadfast commitment to his songwriting. “I am a man with a guitar,” he says.

“And I am a singer and songwriter first and foremost.” There is a flippant pragmatism to Gerber’s reasoning: Maki Supa is named after the Jamaican phrase meaning “stupid for no reason”, because he couldn’t think of anything better, and didn’t want to go with the obvious: his name. “I don’t like my name. Either part of it.” Meanwhile, the EP’s title, Noon to

Nine, was the session time in the studio allotted to recording.

His new pop tracks are a step in a new direction. What Kind of Day Has it Been, which takes its title from screenwriter Aaron Sorkin and is inspired by an earlier breakup (“I’ve had a few, unfortunately”), features EDM synthesisers.

There’s also a nod to REM in each of the three songs, especially the current single,

Inspirational Song #12. “I imagined that as a continuation of We are the Champions,” he says. “It’s just a string of clichés, which I find very helpful to scream out loud.” And

Somewhere in Bretagne, about a fleeting romance, got its name when the original “Britain” was autocorrected.

The mainstream tracks may have begun as another of Gerber’s songwriting challenges, but is he aiming for stardom?

“I want people to say ‘See that guy? He’s good at writing songs.’ Because I am, by the way.”