Hi Tom. For those who have never heard your music, how would you describe yourself?

Well, I’ve been described as a cross between Leonard Cohen and Anthony and the Johnsons, which isn’t a bad thing. If I can be a successful as either of them, that would be great.

Not at all. I try and write different music and I am interested in the darker side of life, macabre and grotesque, the things people don’t really want to talk about. That’s my passion lyrically. I do however want to make beautiful music that I would want to listen to. So I guess that’s where the contrast comes from. I think there can be a really interesting contrast in the lyrics and the music. The guy who wrote that described it as oddly euphoric; I think it caught him by surprise. I don’t think of it as euphoric at all, just a weird marriage between music and lyrics. I like to think there is black humour in there too. If you listen to Bob Dylan or Leonard Cohen there is humour there which some people don’t see, but I think it’s deliberately funny. If you look at Radiohead they are often branded as depressing, but to many people it’s life affirming and it can absolutely cut straight through you. One of the reasons for their success is that they never wallow in their past success. They have always explored new territory and sometimes it’s popular and sometimes unpopular, but it’s always interesting and always has integrity. 

The guys from the black cab session started following me on Twitter! They got in touch to do a session just after my set at the Big Chill Festival, which I said I would love to do. You only get one take and there was no starting again, so I had the keyboard sliding all over my lap! It was a pretty surreal experience but they capture something that’s really interesting. Its not easy finding a small keyboard that has decent sounds and we got a brilliant take, so I was very happy with the SH-201.

Music was the career of my Mum and Dad, and they were away a lot, so as a child I associated music with not seeing enough of my parents. I guess “resented” is a better word to describe how I felt about music. I used to play a lot of sport when I was younger, and I got really ill with a collapsed lung. So I couldn’t play sport for a while, so had time on my hands to learn the piano and eventually started writing songs. I absolutely loved it all of a sudden. The writing process made me realise this is what I want to do for the rest of my life. The first song I wrote was inspired by a poem written in the back of the Big Issue. It was all in falsetto in the similar style of Fake Plastic Trees and I thought it was pretty good. I sang it with my band when I was around 15. I thought if I can make a career out of this it’s merely secondary, I just wanted to write and play songs.

 

The lyrics I write are from a very personal place. I’m a great believer in expressing personal sentiments through global and wider topics. I think there is an obvious interaction between poetry, drama and novels and music. I studied literature at University and read a lot of fantastic books there. I properly fell in love with Beckett, James Joyce and T.S. Elliott because of the way they could express what they wanted to say in such an interesting, compelling and sometimes shocking fashion. They definitely focus on the darker side too, which is what I relate to.  I want my lyrics to have a certain ambiguity. I don’t want the listener to know after 20 seconds what the song is about. Hopefully they will have their own interpretation of the music. A good bit of art can be interpreted in many different ways depending on the person that’s consuming it. I think how you deliver a song is just as important. Have you got integrity? Have you got balls? Often it shows how much you care about the material when it’s being performed. I think it separates a great artist from an average one.

I will be playing for an hour-ish at the roundhouse. Half the set with just me and a piano, and half the set with a string quartet. Some arrangements we have done before, and some brand new ones for the September the 11th show-which by the way, I hope is not a bad omen.

More and more these days I start with lyrics. Sometimes I start by writing a piece on the piano, but really there is no formula, no routine. Sorry! 

I only write my songs with the vision of it being a really good song. I don’t intentionally think of it any other way. I do love film and would be very happy if a Director wanted to use one of my songs in a film. Jonny Greenwood’s soundtrack from ‘There Will Be Blood’ was absolutely beautiful, and was totally the right mash for film. I love film, and I love the cinema. I wouldn’t say I was an expert but the soundtrack is normally secondary to the film, so hard to get right, and amazing when achieved.

I love dance music, I mean, I’m not a clubber, but I was a big fan of the Bristol scene in the nineties with Tricky, Massive Attack and Portishead. It really opened my eyes to a new musical world. So I’ve always been really interested in what’s happening in the dance and electronic scene. I think there is a natural synergy between electronica and music that is created with natural instruments. Piano strings and even horns work really beautifully with electronics. I hope some of my songs reflect the fact that I’m comfortable in that environment and that I spend a lot of time listening to that kind of music. 

I’m very much looking forward to it! I had a little look on the website and it looks like a super instrument. I look forward to reporting fully very soon!