Take us through a day in your life, from a possible morning routine through to your work, please.

This has changed drastically since I had a pandemic baby. But on a day in which I am able to work around the responsibility of child rearing, I typically fill up on breakfast and coffee, go the local pool and swim for half an hour, come home, drink more coffee, shower (I refuse to bring a hair dryer to the pool) and go upstairs and look at the carefully arranged notes on the cork board in my little office recording space. I then try and pick a couple of tasks that can be realistically achieved or at least investigated during the course of my day and set to work.

If I’m having a period in which I’m learning or refining drum parts, I’ll go to a practise space for a couple of hours and stick to working on 2-3 songs. More than that and I become a bit overwhelmed and lose focus. When working on my own music, it’s often a case of spending a lot of time picking apart the results of trial and error since I don’t have anyone else to bounce ideas off. It requires a lot of patience and I definitely have to hide my phone. I wish my approach was a bit more structured and easier to define, but I’ll get there at some point.

Usually by 6pm, it’s time to think about dinner, at which point I’ll pick apart the day with my wife and sit down and watch some prestige (!) tv with her until 10.30pm, at which point we will begin the slow march towards bed.

Could you describe your creative process on the basis of a piece, live performance or album that's particularly dear to you, please?

Blimey. Erm. I think I’ve surprised myself by thinking of an answer to this question because the more I think about it, the song I’ve perhaps listened to more than anything else these last few years is “Rêve” by Françoise Hardy.



I’m drawn to this song because it evokes something ending whilst something else is beginning, which makes sense to me in a way, since the song concerns dreams and waking up and says very little about either, but which for me is enough. I’m less interested in chapters than I am in the space that exists between chapters and the space that exists between being awake and asleep.

Listening can be both a solitary and a communal activity. Likewise, creating music can be private or collaborative. Can you talk about your preferences in this regard and how these constellations influence creative results?

I have an intense distaste for listening to and discussing music with other people and this most likely stems from an adolescence spent among blowhards who had much more disposable cash than me and thus the option to go to the record shop and come home with whatever and dissect it before moving on to the next thing. Perhaps I was more sensitive than I realised at the time to the market force that so often competes for young minds and drives them towards newer and newer things whilst couching this as a quest towards infinite coolness.

I actually refuse to talk to people about music, such conversations are of little import to me. Trust me, it’s a bind and I know I sound difficult! Music is so important to me but I just don’t want to ever talk about it (this interview doesn’t count as I’m typing) and quite honestly it’s fine, I’m no expert in the subject and I’m comfortable withholding my opinions.

This, of course, can sometimes make collaborating a little difficult for me, but I can’t be doing it all that badly since my entire livelihood has been playing in bands. As for how this relates to my creativity, nowadays I really need collaborators to clearly state their intention and I’ll do my best to help them realise it. Whilst I’m not a technically gifted player, I think I have a decent ear and am a pretty good mimic, so I can at least help get an idea heading in the right direction and give its progenitor a sense of whether it’s worth pursuing or not.

How do your work and your creativity relate to the world and what is the role of music in society?

I think music is simply there to help people commune around an idea or the physical sensation of sound waves moving air. It’s elemental, and an essential part of the lived (not just human) experience and I don’t particularly trust anyone who says otherwise, just as I don’t trust people who don’t remember their dreams.

My creativity relates to the world as a quiet mission to periodically wade in eerie waters, to open oneself and others to embracing the unorthodox whilst simultaneously not making a big song and dance about it.

Art can be a way of dealing with the big topics in life: Life, loss, death, love, pain, and many more. In which way and on which occasions has music – both your own or that of others - contributed to your understanding of these questions?

I’m not sure. I don’t think it ever has. I mean, as a soundtrack whilst I ponder these questions, music has a role, I suppose. I much prefer to talk to people about these things. Or read. I have perhaps spent too much time in the company of other musicians to particularly care what they have to say through the medium of music.

As for working on my own music, a voice that began to seem authentic as mine only really began to emerge when ten years ago, I started writing a poem for every day of January. So words starting coming first, rather than the music, but I began to feel compelled to set them to music and that began to really inform my approach and also my understanding of my life and how I wanted to live it, but could the words have simply existed on their own? Absolutely.

There seems to be increasing interest in a functional, “rational” and scientific approach to music. How do you see the connection between music and science and what can these two fields reveal about each other?  

I’m can’t say I’ve ever done much research into this connection. I don’t have much interest in understanding why music functions as it does because I can’t definitively state why I was drawn towards making music in the first place. It remains as mysterious to me as it did when I was 2 and toddling around with headphones on, listening to my parents’ records.

I suppose I think a bit about how AI has entered the realm of my field. I can’t say I’m excited about it or particularly understand who it will ultimately serve. Perhaps it can help non-musicians or people with disabilities to help communicate something they may otherwise be unable to, and that is certainly to be encouraged, but generally I’m usually a bit pessimistic whenever I see artists falling over themselves to understand and embrace whatever new technology enters their orbit because who it ultimately serves has always seemed extremely cloudy to me.

Beware the artist who plays too long in the devil’s sandbox, is what I always say. Yes, I likely watch too much Adam Curtis.

Creativity can reach many different corners of our lives. Do you feel as though writing or performing a piece of music is inherently different from something like making a great cup of coffee? What do you express through music that you couldn't or wouldn't in more 'mundane' tasks?

I wouldn’t say that someone who has utterly mastered the aero press is performing a mundane task.

I think when we talk about creating something, be it music, a new life or a quick dinner to be eaten in front of an episode of “The Crown”, there’s often a tendency to elevate one aspect of your experience or another due to outside expectation, and whilst this has accelerated during the age of social media, it certainly predates it.

For me, whatever I do, it’s just a part of my life. Sometimes I tend to some things more than others, but it’s all … and I’m lifting this from a dear friend of mine, “ordinary magic”. This is a friend who has been very poorly lately and he’s determined that all he wants once he’s recovered is to lead a quiet, thoughtful life, and that has really settled on me.

There is certainly something I can’t quite tease out of myself unless I use music to help me do so, but it doesn’t make my musicality, or music in general, exceptional to me. It just is and as such, I don’t find one thing more mundane than the other.

Music is vibration in the air, captured by our ear drums. From your perspective as a creator and listener, do you have an explanation how it able to transmit such diverse and potentially deep messages?

Music is completely tied to my formative experiences, yet it’s no different from how I perceive sound travelling differently when I sit in my childhood bedroom in mid-summer with the windows open. I can’t explain why that particular experience takes me somewhere that nothing else could.

It’s no different from the peculiar tomato-less bolognaise with carrots and peas with pasta shells my mother used to cook and that my brother and I had to douse in chilli sauce to get any real satisfaction from. These experiences were in company with my nascent observations of the world and my place in it: they were present as I was formulating potentially deep messages to myself and others.

I don’t know why the final chord of “A Day in the Life” makes me glaze over and wish it could go on forever, but that’s exactly how I felt the first I heard it with headphones on as a child. Music simply makes me want to understand how it comes to be and to locate the part of myself that unwittingly notices and is moved by certain works.

Its message, as I’ve always understood it, is to be “curious”.