What are you up to?
I've got some meetings today so I have to venture out into the outside world. I've got a little bicycle so life is always easy. I hate the tube, and I love pottering around on my bike.
Who have been your musical influences?
My musical influences? Jeff Buckley, he has always been one. Patti Smith, she has always been more as a female icon, someone who I just love everything that she represents a great poet and a fantastic performer. Billie Holiday, and then there's the rock 'n' roll AC/DC streak. There's female singers that I just absolutely love like PJ Harvey is fantastic, Regina Spektor, Shindai (Shoniwa) from the Noisettes, they are just all amazing singers.
There's music for every side of your personality though, so sometimes I like listening to jazz, and big bands, or old school blue grass. That's the beauty of music, whether it's Creedence Clearwater, or ZZ Top, The Band, or Janis Joplin, there's a range of music to enjoy.
What made you decide to become a singer/songwriter?
I think it's something I've always done, I've always sung and I've always written. Even as a little kid I've always been a musical creature. My family has always been really musical, there's always been Beatles records, and pianos, and people singing badly in my house.
I think I started really writing when I was 14, and it's just been going ever since. I think I got to a stage where, I don't think you make an executive decision to be a musician, you just realise that's what you are and you can't not do it. It's too much fun, there's so many different aspects of it that make it such a wonderful thing to do.
Every once in a while you find things really hard, and you wonder can I not do this? And it's just a weird thing that it's something that I don't know how not to do. It just continually evolves and inspires, and working with different creative people is an amazing thing.
Coming up with a tiny idea, like a guitar riff, bass line, or a little melody, and how that seed of a thought grows and develops, and suddenly you've got this little song.
You said that your childhood was very musical. What was the first musical instrument you ever had, and how many instruments can you play?
The piano. I can play a few instruments, my main instrument is the guitar, I really like playing the drums, but I'm awful at it. I tried learning the cello because I love the cello but I haven't mastered that. Then there's the glockenspiel and the melodica, and I can just about play those. I've been learning the banjo, and the lap steel, I really like the lap steel. I play the bass, if there's any instrument that come my way, I like to give it a go and see what noise I can get out of it.
Which song from your repertoire would you say sums you up best?
'Black Seagull' because instrumentally it has every aspect of me in it. It's got the really delicate acoustic sounding side to it, and then a jazzy bit, and the weird quirkiness and then it ends in this three minute prog epic.
It's also my favourite song to play, and I wrote it when I first moved to London, and I didn't know how to survive as a musician, and you go through that hard stuff of no one wanting to listen to you, and you're trying to etch your little mark, and get people involved. The song became about this little journey of working out how to navigate that route, and finding a place. It always reminds me of where I've come from, and where I've wanted to be, and getting to where I wanted to be. Also, playing it live if exciting, I love all the guitar riffs. Jay (Hart) who plays guitar with me, and is the most amazing guitarist, lets rip in the first minute and a half of the song, I can just see his grin and him just immersed in it, and having so much fun. Music is just about having fun.
I was watching Festival Express last night, it's a rockumentray about The Band, Grateful Dead, and Janis Joplin on a train, across Canada, and the sense of fun they were having on this week long road trip by the best musicians of that time, makes me think 'I wanna be there.'
Where does the black seagull image come from?
Half my family come from Australia, I'm half Australian, and I'm a complete little hippie I love being by the sea, and I love being out in the big old world, and running around with bare feet makes me really happy (laughs). Maybe it's harking to that, I don't know. I'm doing this thing at the moment, where I want people to send in their images. I've posted the lyrics up online, and the track as well, and if people want to send in photos, we can use the visuals.
I'm organising a festival in June, when the album comes out, and one of the things I'm wanting to do is put together some backing visuals to the track 'Black Seagulls' we usually have backing visuals to our tracks. It's going really well I've got about 25 photos now from people all around the world sending in images.
There's this one lady in Los Angeles and she used to take photos of Patti Smith back in the seventies, and I approached her at the end of last year because there's this amazing photo that she took of Patti in '76, and it's her just hugging her guitar. To me it just completely summed up what it's like to be a musician, drenched in sweat and hugging a guitar, just a wonderful image. She agreed to let me use the photo in the book for the album. She sent me six photos and now of birds, and Mulholland Drive, and she put together a whole little sequence of bird flying which is so beautiful.
Can you explain the Libellus book idea?
'Libellus' has Beshlie Mckevlie artwork with it, it's just a book a 50 page hardback, the size of a 7. Basically each song has got one of Beshlie's paintings, and then the lyrics intertwined into that painting, and then the song has got a bit of prose, maybe the story behind the writing of the track, or a poem that inspired me at the time, there's Rimbauld, and a quote from Siddhatta, and little things that inspired me when writing songs, or writing lyrics. It's a really personal account of this album, which came from nothing.
I'm not signed to a label I set up my own, every part of it has been a really big stepping stone for me to make it happen. Finishing the album it just wasn't enough to have it in a plastic CD, and I wanted to pull all those different elements together.
Do you think you'll repeat the process with future albums?
I don't know, I love the idea of being as creative as possible with it, it makes it really interesting, and that's the beauty of running your own label, and being an independent artist, you've got the freedom to experiment with these things. It keeps me really inspired to do that.
The first single I ever released on a 7 with a download code inside the booklet with the record. You typed the code into a website, and it downloaded the song into the computer, if you didn't have a record player. Then you got an email which allowed you to send the track to anybody for free, and it just went all around the world, which was really cool. From 400 pieces of vinyl thousands of people ended up downloading the track, and it's still going.
I don't know what will happen with the next album I just started writing again. I've been so immersed in producing this record, and managing it, and trying to convince people here, there, and everywhere to finance it. When I write, I write really intensely, working the same hours as someone in a job, that's the only way I can write. I go into my own little world, and find it really hard to be really practical, and switch off from being creative. I've only just got a whole new bunch of songs, that may or may not make it onto the record, but I hope to start recording at the end of this year.
What made you decide to set up your own record label?
I had an album's worth of songs I wanted to record, and that's the only way it would be. I'm not a Duffy, or an Adele, I'm not a top 10 mainstream artist, I'm a left field quirky little creature, and not manufactured in any sense of the word. There weren't record companies jumping up and down and saying they want to sign me. So, I thought, 'this is what I want to do, how am I going to do it?' And I had to take a huge leap of faith, and it's only in the last few months I've had a little team of people working for me, as part of the record label, for the PR side of things. Suddenly there's this whole group of people who really believe in what I do, and that support is really importing, because it can be a bit daunting, a bit lonely, and a bit scary. It was just a case of, whatever happens whether it sells thousands and thousands of copies, or whether it doesn't, I did it.
I made the record the record that I wanted to make, and I'm really proud of it, there are things about it that frustrate me and I would have liked to have done differently, but I stand behind it.
The next record is going to be a live record, that's a big compromise that I had to make on this one. I'd never done that before I'd never not recorded live. The band I was playing with at the time was really fractured, I didn't find the right players until I'd actually finished this record. Now I've got my band. I've actually been writing with the band, and that's an amazing thing, to be playing with people who know you so well and know your music so well.
So is the current line-up a permanent one?
Yes, which is a great feeling.
You play quite a few festivals, which one did you enjoy the most?
Latitude. Latitude was amazing, they've just got it right. I loved that. They've got this woodland site that's beautifully lit, inside there they've got this stage, the Sunrise Stage, right in this woodland. It's a beautiful natural amphitheatre of a stage, and we played in there. Which for me was just perfect, I was like a little pixie in the wood. The bands were great too, I saw Sigur Ros which completely blew my mind, I think they're just brilliant. I'd heard them on record, but they're one of those band's that you have to see live.
That's the funny thing with records because when you listen to the old sixties and seventies records, because they were recorded live the original energy that you're listening to is pretty much what they sounded like. Where as nowadays everything is so processed and over produced to the point where it's a little bit too sanitised I think. So, you listen to a record, and you miss the sort of energy you feel when you see a band live.
For me, the songs of Sigur Ros where really beautiful, we were there watching them together as a band, and just all listening, and we were nearly in tears. Jay turned around half way through, and said, This is biblical. Really amazing.
We had a real Spinal Tap moment there, which tends to happen at a lot of my gigs, there's always some really stupid gormless thing that I do, or Jay, or one of us does. At Latitude, I have an old Ford Transit campervan, we loaded the kit up and off we went to find our stage. We drove out of the festival and drove off around, and somehow ended up outside the festival lost, then somehow got back in, and then ended up on the wrong side of the festival. We had to park the van, and take a boat across this lake, load up all our stuff, and then find the stage. It was such a ridiculous palaver, we missed our sound check, it was really comical. Then, I managed to call the sound engineer special needs, which he luckily thought was really funny because he was really hung over, had been up all night, and hadn't gone to bed, but it could have been really bad.
Any festival plans for this year?
We're just negotiating them now, but I think we have four or five that we're sorting out at the moment. But I've just started working with booking agents, so it's not me dealing with it for once.
You don't tend to do covers but what would you pick if you had to?
I did one, a Beth Gibbon cover for a radio show a couple of week's ago because they asked me to do a cover, and what my favourite one was. Every once in a while I get a song in my head, I'll just launch into it. I did a Shirley Bassey cover at the Bassey gig. We did a really unknown one, because I wasn't going to bust out with 'Goldfinger', or 'Diamonds Are Forever' that would have been suicide. We did a track called 'The Living Tree' which I knew she really, really loved.
We did it and then, two people I'd met at the beginning of the night, two crazy ladies from a band called Never The Bride and it transpired that they not only run Shirley's label but had written the song. That was a real fun thing.
I would secretly love to do, 'Shoot To Thrill' by AC/DC, hell yeah, or 'La Grange' by ZZ Top, I would love to be on my knees rockin' out a little guitar solo there.
I look forward to seeing that in the future, before I go, you're quite literary can you recommend a good book?
'Jonathan Strange and Mr. Norrell' (by Susanna Clarke) it's wonderful book about magic, a proper good yarn. I've just read 'Peony In Love' (by Lisa See) about Chinese history, a Chinese love story. I really enjoyed it, I found it beautiful. I''m currently reading 'Hitchhikers Guide To The Galaxy' (by Douglas Adams) which is brilliant, it really makes me laugh. It's so good. I also enjoyed 'The Vanishing' by Tim Krabbé which was great, really dark but great. Wiat a minute I'll look on my bookshelf. Is that cheating? Well you've got my four.
Well, thanks for taking the time to chat to me, is there anything else our readers should know?
The new single, 'Time Away' is out now, and the band play on the 19th March, and then the big festival and album launch in June, at Cafe de Paris.
article by: Scott Williams
published: 03/03/2009 13:04
FUTURE GIGS
sorry, we currently have no gigs listed for this act.