C Duncan

Chris Duncan makes the most shimmery music you’ll ever hear, with beautiful harmonies and synths that could have come straight off a Carpenters record. A Glaswegian born and bred, Chris was not only nominated for the Mercury Prize for his debut album but also designs all his own cover art and has a degree in composition. He plays Norwich early February for the second time, and we can’t wait – his first gig here at Norwich Arts Centre was mindblowing. I spoke to him about The Twilight Zone, drawing in vans and testing out his music on his parents.

Architect came out last year to great acclaim, and you had a headline tour off the back of it. Did you expect such success from it, and how did it feel to be nominated for a Mercury prize?

It was a complete surprise that I had any success with Architect really. I started recording music and got signed and thought this is great, it’ll take maybe two or three albums until we can do some headline tours, and then something just happened. It got Mercury nominated and it got picked up, it really was a surprise to me, a very very exciting one!

Your new album The Midnight Sun came out in October this year – did you have most of the songs already written before you started recording?

I’d already started thinking about it after Architect came out and started playing around with ideas. Because we were on tour so much I had some time to think about it. But a lot of the musical work was done when I got back after being on tour, over three or four months.

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You recorded this album in your flat in Glasgow just like last time – but this album is more experimental and expansive – did it take longer for you to put everything together this time around?

It actually took less time, because with the first album I was trying to make it sound as clean as possible but by the end of recording it I kind of had a better idea of how to do that. That was the part that always took ages – a week to write a song and two weeks to produce it. So that time was cut with the new one because I knew what I needed to press to get the sound I wanted. It was nice not to dwell on songs – I’d go over them a lot but not to the same crazy degree that I did with Architect. The music making was more intuitive this time around.

I read that The Twilight Zone was an inspiration for this album – in what way did it help you to have a theme for writing the songs?

I always wanted to do something to do with The Twilight Zone because I’ve been a fan for years and years. The sounds I was making had an icy quality to it, I started watching the show again and started to think of the two things together one day, and thought I would try to achieve the same feel that I get from the show. It’s not based on any particular narrative from The Twilight Zone but more the overall feel, although I did name the album after one of my favourite episodes.

The new album is quite shimmery, 70’s, almost disco at times, and definitely heavier on the synths and keyboards than Architect. Would you say the music of the 70’s is particularly special to you?

Yes, sort of, it wasn’t a starting point but I was using retro sounding synths so I guess it was going to sound like that anyway. Regarding the music from the 70’s I love The Carpenters although that sound is slightly removed from the new album.

My favourite track on the new album is Do I Hear – it seems to stand out from the others. What’s the story behind that one?

That’s a song I wrote a couple of years ago for a soprano voice and a piano, so it was always performed by other people to begin with. I’d always wanted to do something with it for a record, and actually it was the starting point for this album. It’s less electronic than the rest of the album but still has the same sound.