Part Two

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

Morning consists of an early walk for my German Shepherd dog, then a bowl of muesli and banana. Very important to start the day with the right energy source. Maybe after that, a little further lie-in in bed. Snoozing, answering emails. Then once the rush hour is over, I set off on my hour-long drive to the studio. This gives me time to iron out my thoughts. On arrival at the studio I say hello to everyone in the building and then settle into my lovely, vibey little room, surrounded by all my favourite instruments. Obviously, the rest of the day is spent making music, interspersed with lunch and more chats, followed at some point a return to home. Ideally, missing the rush hour again. Dinner with the family and then not long after…. bed. Nodding off to the sounds of either the music I’ve written that day, or something to quiet my brain.

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

Well it’s simple and straightforward, but ‘Arkansas’ from my new album Battery Life epitomises the simple joy of turning nothing into everything in quick time. I sat down at the piano, had a EM140 reverb for the piano to bounce off, and just played! It was finished as a composition instantly. For extra gravitas and texture I added some synth lines from a Prophet 08 (in a way emulating what I feel a string section might add) put through a Strymon Volante delay pedal. Once I’d added that it was just a case of taking it to Berlin to be mixed by my good friend Greg Freeman, having given myself a break from it for a few months to acquire fresh ears on it. He understood what was required and just made everything sound poignant, ‘on purpose’ and perfect.

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?

Listening for me is almost entirely solitary. It’s so important to me as an exercise that I can barely do it in other people's company. I’m worried that they are not enjoying it and it distracts me. It is a hypnosis I enter into and I place it very highly in my priority list. Listening in the car is great and that tends to be alone also. The joy of driving whilst listening is that the driving element also occupies a part of your brain which I feel interferes with the listening process. The same ‘inner voice’ which has been written about in many books which can prove so distracting and destructive to performance.

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

My work and creativity are my way of communicating my innermost feelings with the world in a way that I would find impossible under any other circumstances. That really ties in with how I feel about its role in society. Going back to the earlier point I was making, it is about universal feelings and understandings that sit within us. Music is a way of connecting those feelings between us all. In an age when we have felt in very real terms what the removal of music (particularly music played in the moment and in the flesh) can feel like and the detachment that creates I think it is all too obvious what it means to us.

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?

Recently an old friend of mine passed away. A bass player. I hadn’t actually seen him in many years, but musicians tend to sit in each other's souls in a timeless way once they have played together.
I found a commercial recording of him playing with an artist called Kevin Coyne from 1982 and listened to it a few days after he died.
I concluded at that moment, having listened to his sound, his musical choices and his presence on the track that I knew him better through his playing than some of my own relatives. His DNA was in mine. He had influenced my music making and it was extremely obvious to me on listening to that piece of music. Another testament to how deeply inside us music reaches.
My album ‘Battery Life’ is my way of dealing with the dormant memory of my own mother. Based around the existence of her diaries and my reluctance to read them. I am trying to chronicle the process I am going through with them. Of questioning the validity of reading them and their effectiveness as a gateway to memories.
I certainly wouldn’t listen to my own music to comfort me or make me reflect on my own life. I leave other artists to do that for me. Like most people, I’ve known how effective that can be. I have the tears to show for it.

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 think there are differing results for this approach. Like I have said before, there is no strict rulebook as to how you achieve great music, or even how you convey emotion. I’ve enjoyed ‘The Master and his Emissary’ by Dr Ian McGilchrist on the subject of different sides of the brain and how they relate to creativity and logic. It would suggest of course that there is no gateway to emotive music if you allow the more logical, scientific side of the brain to completely control the creative process. But then that would be impossible anyway. There has to be involvement and interjection from all parts of the brain. So, to make it more scientific doesn't necessarily eradicate the art.
There seems to be a thirst for finding the formulaic answer to music and why it works. This quest feels like it comes from the most non-musical place imaginable. Who knows, maybe it will be found one day. But then, perhaps in the quest to do so, those responsible will have found that they have actually just created the very thing that was there all along. A human being.

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 don’t think it is necessarily different. There are many crossover features of making a great coffee and performing a great piece of music. Both potentially induce a trance like state and both have the consumer in mind to some extent. Even if that consumer is yourself. Music performance is a skill that takes you over and when it is mastered expresses the subconscious thoughts within us. Therefore, it is actually functioning almost independently of your conscience. That’s when you start to put other things into your music. Emotions, thoughts, feelings. Perhaps great coffee is coffee with a teaspoon of emotion stirred in.

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

I think sound is the greatest access to sensuality and memory that there is. Though I’m sure others would argue for other senses. Those little vibrations of sound can calm a great anger, stop you in your tracks, conjure up tears and make you happy. If I knew why, I’d be both extremely clever and potentially very sad at having solved the mystery. It is the mystery of it that keeps us interested. We know it in ourselves, that it has this magic grip over us and has the potential to change our moods and we love music for that reason; as we would a benevolent or a cheeky God that keeps us from harm or excites our senses. Something about a cello run in a Shostakovich symphony can stir such large horizons in our brain. Or the harmonica line by Toots Thielamans in John Barry’s Midnight Cowboy can make us yearn for something indescribable. A combination of drama, harmony and passion. It is all those things, but an utter mystery as to how it is induced.