Interview: Ghostpoet
In honour of the release of Ghostpoet's already critically acclaimed, brilliant third record today, I thought I'd post the chat that I had with the brains behind it all a few days ago...
I read that
one of your album titles came to you in a dream?
The album
title didn’t come to me in a dream. Some of the lyrics did I believe, I can’t
remember the lyrics.
Did you get
any lyrics for “Shedding Skin” in a dream or was that just a one-time thing?
Just the one
time! This time I’m very conscious.
You’ve said
that you prefer to keep interpretation as open as possible and have thus
provided pretty vague titles on Some Say I So I Say Light (SSISISL).
However, on Shedding Skin you seem to have helped the listeners out a
little bit more in terms of title relevance (e.g. “Sorry my love, it’s you not
me”). Is there any reason for this change in openness?
I just
decided it’s easier. It’s easier for my sanity and it saves time in interviews [laughs].
I put things out there to make it a bit more clear about what I’m trying to do
‘cause I can understand the frustration of journalists when you’re kind of like
“Yeah, I’m keeping it vague and blah, blah, blah…” but I did that because I’m a
bit bored of being labelled as being a particular way and I just wanted to keep
it open and just let people decide whatever they want to decide. With this
record, I’m conscious that it’s a clearly different direction from the stuff
I’ve done previously and I want to make sure people know that by giving
influences on the record and y’know, making it clearer in the titles what’s
going on, to an extent. I still want people to make their own interpretations but
there’s nothing wrong I guess with being a bit clearer.
With SSISISL
you had the commentary available on Spotify. Can we expect a similar thing
for Shedding Skin?
Probably not
[laughs]. I had ideas about what I wanted to do and I don’t know, I mean
we’ll see. I don’t know, it’s kind of a label thing and I’m not sure what’s
going on there so maybe not, we’ll see.
As Shedding
Skin was recorded with a full band, do you feel like it will be a bit
harder to make
live
performances a completely different experience as the music may be easier to
recreate?
Um, I’m not
sure really because at the same time, I see what you mean but in a sense I can
expand on things as, because it’s all live you can drag things out a bit
more and extend bits. I’m quite happy with the end result of the record so I
don’t mind playing it similar to how it is on the record, it’s not a problem so
yeah, that’s my answer!
I heard that
you don’t currently play any acoustic instruments yourself?
No. I made
the demos on electric guitar and keys and programmed drums and stuff but I’m
not a trained musician at all. I can’t play it to a standard where I can play
it all myself and record it all myself; it’s not the case. That’s hence partly
why I bring a band on board, because of that fact so yeah. I want to learn but
I kind of just look at it like, I partly enjoy having the limitations of not
being able to play because the chords that I come up with and the ideas that I
come up with aren’t always technically right but they just sound right to me,
you know what I mean? I think if I learn the technical aspect of an instrument
that could affect how I make music, but at the same time, on the flipside, if I
know the knowledge it could enhance my stuff. So I kind of do and I kind of
don’t, if that makes sense?
Do you find
that the more successful you become the harder it is to write about life as an
“everyday man”?
Um, well I
don’t really see myself as successful so; no I don’t find it hard. What is
success? I don’t know what success is. I don’t feel successful, I feel normal.
I guess that being able to make music full time is a success of sorts but other
than that I just live a normal life [laughs] and when I say “normal
life”, it’s just normal [laughs]. I’m not doing anything out of this world;
I’m not smashing TVs and riding a jet-ski around The Thames or whatever. I just
live a very normal existence involving walking my dog, doing my own shopping
and cooking for myself. Normal shit! Because I strive to live a normal
existence, I’m always out and about doing normal stuff, so I’m out on the tube,
I’m out on the bus, I’m sitting outside a café now watching people in the rain
– normal things – so I’m always trying to write from that perspective. It would
be wrong of me to say “Yeah I’m an everyday man!” in the sense of the 9-to-5
person or the dustbin man or the man working on a building site. I’m not that
kind of everyday person because of the career that I’ve chosen, but I think
it’s my duty to write about things that as many people as possible can relate
to. That’s important more than anything.
You wrote
the song “Dial Tones” with the feature artist Lucy Rose in mind. Are there any
songs on Shedding Skin written in the same way?
Not with any
particular singer in mind. With that one, I guess as well as with pretty
much all of them I kind of write with particular voices in mind and that’s kind
of the way I try to write. Then I try and ask and see if that particular type
of voice – and that becomes obviously a person or artist I ask – would they
mind being involved in a particular thing and I don’t know if it’s going to
work or not until they come and record, it’s just kind of a gut feeling I have
that this particular voice will work on this particular track. I don’t know it
at all until we get down to it so it’s always a bit of a risk but, I like
taking risks y’know! Why not?
Earlier this
week you tweeted that “you have to keep pushing yourself otherwise, what’s the
point?”
Yeah! Yeah
definitely.
So how have
you pushed yourself on this new record?
How have I
pushed myself? Um, I’m just making something different! I just made a record
that I feel is a different direction and that in itself is pushing myself, do
you know what I mean? I could have easily made the same kind of record as the
first record that got nominated for a Mercury (prize). I could have just made
that kind of shit and just done that again on the second record and I probably
would’ve gotten away with it! But I just feel that I’ll get bored, and I’ll
start getting complacent and I’ll start resting on my laurels and I don’t want
to do that. I don’t want to ever do that. So, with this project I’m at quite a
happy place with it now and I feel that if I do make more records, it will be
along these kinds of lines. But I feel that I can easily pursue other creative
things and creative projects and push them to the extreme to push myself so,
yeah it’s something that I’m always striving for. If you’re not doing that, I
just don’t understand why you wouldn’t, personally. For me I just have to keep
doing that to keep sane.
You listen
to a lot of music from Jazz to Industrial Rock. Do you have anything at the
moment that you’d recommend to us?
At the
moment I’m really liking a guy called Boxed In.
He’s a great artist of sorts and he produces other people and he’s got records.
I’ve been listening to ZUN ZUN EGUI’s new record – love that! Listening
to Benjamin Clementine a lot – big fan of his. TV On The
Radio’s new record is pretty cool. Gaz Coombes’
new record is pretty cool; that’s come out this year. Dutch
Uncles new record that’s coming out pretty soon, yeah really like
what they’ve done on this record so that’s pretty cool. There’s loads! Ghost
Culture is another artist that I’ve discovered recently – really
cool. There’s so much. Hookworms is another one! Yeah, I really like
them. Oh yeah, Sleaford Mods! [laughs] I discovered them
recently and I really like them, they’re really interesting. They’re a
two-piece band from Nottingham and yeah, they’re not for everyone [laughs].
His language is very colourful (the vocalist) but I really like it, it’s quite
funny – funny but interesting. There’s loads more stuff…
What
language is being spoken in the beginning of “Off Peak Dreams”?
Japanese.
What does it
mean?
Basically I
watched this documentary called “Jiro Dreams Of Sushi” and it’s a documentary
on a sushi chef who’s based in Tokyo and he’s basically dedicated his life to
the art of sushi. He’s got a little sushi restaurant in an underground station
in Tokyo and for all his life he’s just pursued this particular endeavour and
it just resonated with me so much! I love the idea of that; not being a sushi
chef, but the idea of pursuing a dream and dedicating your life to it; being
the best that you can be at it and it was a last minute thing where I was like
“I wanna get some Japanese in the record!” I knew a lady who used to play with
me live, who was half-Japanese and basically I wanted to say “The beginning of
Shedding Skin”, “The middle of Shedding Skin” and “The end of Shedding Skin”.
She basically translated it into Japanese but it’s much better than that,
because if it was translated directly, she said that it would freak people from
Japan out because it’s like, it would just be literally the peeling off of your
skin, so she translated it to make it sound much more poetic in a sense and it
had more of a transformation. It became the kind of letting go of not your skin
but your past, your past problems or issues and so it was like “you’re in the beginning
process of that, and the middle process of that and the end process of that” if
that makes sense. So that’s kind of the translation.
You started
off in a grime collective at university. Is any of the music from it still
available to the public?
Oh no, there
was never any music, it was just like a thing that lasted not longer than a
year. It’s just old news! [laughs]
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