Interview with Newton Faulkner
"Party night! Wicked, so it’s gonna be very loud, or it might be another picnic. Who knows?!" - Newton looks forward to his gig in Norwich...
Newton Battenburg Faulker is a talent of virtuoso standards; carving a path from his Guilford Music Academy education, through the rite of passage various bands – a Green Day cover act and a funk-rock band noted – he finger-picked, hand slapped and fret danced his way to become a solo star with an upcoming third album to his name. The thing is, is that we didn’t get this information from Newton’s mouth; he would no more claim status as a guitar virtuoso than he would a molecular physicist. He doesn’t even consider himself a singer. Luckily, his songs betray his modesty, and portray him for the musical mastermind he is…
So where are you now Newton? I’m in my studio at home.
Very nice… I was going to ask you about your home studio actually; I read that you’d been setting it up – did you manage to record a lot of the new album there? Yeah, that’s what I’ve been doing – I’ve just sort of been topping and tailing album stuff and kinda doing odd bits.
Is it a good environment for you to work in, at home? Do you manage to stay motivated? It does make a difference, but the tricky thing, to be honest is stopping, as opposed to getting started! I work in my head pretty much every second that I’m awake and obviously I can cover that up most of the time, but now I’m always thinking, ‘Oh, I’m just popping upstairs to try something pretty quick…’ and then end up spending kinda all day. I’ve stopped; the last few weeks have been pretty bad and I was pretending to go to sleep really! I’d kind of tuck myself in and wait ‘til everyone was asleep and say, “Are you asleep?!” Then I’d sneak off and work, then pretend to have been asleep when I’d come back to bed and wake up with everyone else, pretending that nothing had ever happened, which did take its toll. I’m not gonna lie, I got quite tired! But I got everything done, which I wouldn’t have done otherwise. Obviously it’s very easy to put things off because I’m not paying to be in the studio, so I’m not going in and saying, ‘OK, we’ve got this amount of time, we’ve got to get this done by this point’, it’s more like ‘I can do this kinda whenever I feel like it!’, which took a bit of getting used to. I’m better just doing stuff as soon as I know it needs doing.
We’re tantalisingly close to hearing some new material from you, because you’re releasing your EP next Tuesday. Do you think that will release some of the pressure, because you must be desperate to get your new material out? To be honest, I think I’m still carrying it all in my head and I think you do for a while after it’s out; it doesn’t instantly dissolve. You do end up carrying it around for a while and I’m still double-checking everything for the EP, like is that definitely good enough?! That high note, is that… OK, good.
So is a release date a good release of pressure, or does it actually intensify? The main thing that has massively reassured me – in fact there’s been two major ones recently; there was playing all my new stuff at gigs, which I did recently on the pop-up gigs that I did for six dates. At the end of the first gig, I was like ‘woah, people really got into that,’ so it actually went really well and I was astounded by how much new stuff I could get away with playing. When I was writing the setlist for the first gig, I was like, ‘OK, let’s start it here and I’m pretty sure we’ll have to cut back’, but then at the end of the first one, it was like, ‘that really worked!’ Just doing that gig and seeing people get used to the songs was great, and obviously by the end of the tour, most people have seen pretty much all of the first gig on YouTube, because that’s what happens pretty instantly. Apparently the first thing I played one night was up on YouTube before I’d even come off stage at the end! Also that’s been really useful; I’ve gone back and listened to the gigs on YouTube, song by song, and I’ve gone back and changed things on the record.
What is it about these new songs, do you think, that’s given them such immediacy in the connection there? They’re just very much written to be played live, which wasn’t so much the case before. I’m probably playing the game a little bit more on the second album; on the first album, I was trying to write songs that I thought people would like, and I was trying to write songs that would work on the radio, and I was kind of over-thinking it a tiny bit… I mean, there are songs that I wrote when I wasn’t thinking at all that I’m incredibly proud of, but the general tone was one of striving for something, whereas this one is made to be played live, and live is where I’m most comfortable, so it’s a lot easier to listen to in a lot of ways.
I know you’ve been asked a lot, but how close are we to the release of the new album? Well it’s definitely summer, and it’s kind of bobbing a little bit between three possible points. It’s definitely going to be this summer though, because it HAS to be summer as well. That was one of the things that went wrong with the second album was that because of my wrist, we delayed it until the start of winter and I’ve only really come to respect how much I’m kinda linked to sunshine, which is a strange thing to become aware of! I moved into a new place and I moved in at the end of one summer and obviously I’m wandering around every day, just going in and out, seeing people and eventually knowing names and saying ‘hey’ – the first day that the sun shone this year, someone stopped me in the corridor, by the main door where you could see the sun and my face and was suddenly like, ‘Are you Newton Faulkner?!’ It’s kind of that linked, which is amazing!
You’re intrinsically linked to the sunshine… That’s quite nice! I can live with that. I’m definitely aware of it now, which I wasn’t before; I thought it was just something people said, like ‘Oh, the festival was good and your music’s quite summery’. I realised we should probably release in summer, but I didn’t realise the extent of it!
It’s been a prolific period of songwriting for you, writing this album; I read that you had about 50 songs to choose from… Sixty-five! Haha, it’s just that I was trying to release the album last year; I was ready to release a whole album last summer and then obviously you find out that it’s not happening and you’re like, ‘Oh, alright… what shall I do?!’ So I thought I guess I just keep writing and I took the things that I liked and either kept it on and improved it, or finished it in some cases. I also took vibes and wrote better songs in the same vibe, which is another thing that I end up doing quite a lot. You’ve kinda got something which feels really good, just not quite enough of a song, then you take the vibe and take an offspring of that song.
That’s cool. And how do you detach yourself from the song’s original incarnation? It can be hard; I’ve re-written quite a few things recently and it’s really hard when you write something that you’re happy with, and you’re like, ‘that is good to go’, then people are like, ‘really good, but that bit doesn’t work’. Yes it does! Of course it does, what are you talking about? Are you mental?! Haha, then you listen to it through someone else’s ears and it’s a bit like watching a film with someone; if you’re watching a film that you like, but you’re sitting with someone that doesn’t like it, you suddenly get that weird feeling – it happens with comedies more than anything else. You’re like, ‘check out this, it’s so funny!’ And they’re like, ‘it isn’t funny.’ It’s like that whenever you send a track out and get the feedback, then you listen to it again and you’re like ‘Oh… OK, I can see that.’ You end up kind of digging in and sorting it out, which is what I’m about to do when I get off the phone, some song doctoring.
You’ve toured extensively, I think it’s fair to say, so even while you’ve been waiting for this album to be released, you’ve spent some time out on the road. Had you travelled much before your career took off? No, not really, not to the same degree; I guess since the first album came out, I’ve been all over the place, it’s been amazing.
And what do you absorb from travelling, or is it just a necessity of your job? I think it definitely seeps into your personality; I think travelling is really good for the human brain really, having to deal with other cultures and get your head round strange situations like ending up in Tokyo and stuff, you really do have to think on your feet, especially when you’ve been spat out somewhere really random. Then you have to do the same job, but with completely different rules! It certainly keeps you on your toes. Also, because obviously I’m relatively known for talking now, a lot, when you go somewhere where there’s a massive language barrier – I think the first was a French gig that I did after I’d been gigging here relentlessly, and I’d been to mainland Europe and travelled round a bit, but that was earlier and I hadn’t been talking as much as I do now. The set in England, I think, was an hour and 45 minutes long and the same set in France was about an hour and 15 or 10, hahaha. That was really weird! I came off and I was like, ‘is that it? Am I done?!’
You’re lucky they didn’t know about the English set length, or they might have been asking for a portion of Euro back! Ooh, hopefully not, although I have just mentioned it now, so it might come up!
Yes, we’ll try not to publish the article in the French-speaking regions. Yeah, it’s a strange thing and in Tokyo I did some things with a translator, which not many people do.
Japanese isn’t a language that is easy to even attempt though, because of the nuances. Yeah, I can say hello and thankyou, and that’s pretty much it. I mean, I can order a drink in pretty much most places in the world now, so it’s handy… for ordering drinks, but outside of that, it’s pretty useless, haha!
Those pop-up gigs, they looked like fun… Oh, it was so fun; I had such a good time.
I saw a few boys had joined you up on stage for a couple of songs – was this a planned thing, or did they just rock on up? No, they were just singing really loudly about three feet away from me and I was listening to them and I was like, ‘hang on, you guys know every single word, don’t you?’ They were like, ‘yeah, pretty much’, so I was like, ‘Get on up here!’ That was fun.
Did they invigorate you, those live performances? I guess being detached and having that safe distance between you and your audience can’t always be the best thing… No, that’s generally not what you want unless it’s a festival where it’s gonna be the way it’s always going to be, but I think indoors you want to be as close as you can get pretty much, especially when it’s just me because my whole thing kinda relies on connection, because it is just me and I need the crowds to basically be my band. That’s kind of how it works out by the end of the gig; I’m like, ‘OK, you’re good at that, you’ve got that down, you like stuff like that, but you don’t like having to do stuff that’s too complicated, so I’ll stop there with that one…’ Then you get other crowds who just want to be challenged. There was this one gig where I got like a five-part thing going on, I could tell that they were really up for it and wanted to do stuff, it was really strange! The genuinely quite shocking thing that I realised four dates into the pop-up thing was that they were all completely different vibe-wise.
That must be so much more awesome though than playing identikit gigs on a massive tour – - Well even on a massive tour, you still feel the difference, but this was a huge difference; one of them was loud and really drunken and intense and mental, then the next night – and it was Friday and Saturday as well, so I thought Saturday might feel the same because they’re both party nights – I came out and everyone was sitting down like a picnic. It was really funny because I’d wound myself up, like ‘C’mon, this is it, whaaaa…!!’ Every gig had its highlight, like the highlight of the one in Midlem was the boys getting up on stage; I had guys come up on stage in Brighton as well, but I knew them – I had some friends join me, which was lovely.
You’re known as a virtuoso on the guitar, but you know, you haven’t got a bad voice either! You’re very talented using both, but which came first? Erm, oh, I don’t know; it’s really weird because I was kinda singing when I was relatively young, but then as soon as I got into guitar, I was very much a guitarist and still in my head I’m primarily a guitarist. I only really think of myself as a singer when I’ve done like, 20 dates on the tour, then I’m like ‘right, I’m a singer, that’s what I do every night – I’m a singer,’ but it’s not part of my general make-up particularly, which is probably quite a good thing.
You kind of used your voice as a tool then, as another instrument you needed? Well I think I was kind of a guitarist and a writer, like I was writing instrumental pieces on guitar, then I started putting melodies to them and I started singing a bit. It wasn’t the primary reason I was doing it.
It’s kinda handy that you’ve got a cracking pair of lungs then! Well it took a lot of work, like when I first came out, I think my tone was always OK, but I trained pretty hard to do what I do now, and I’m still going.
Was that self-taught? Were you able to recognise what you needed to work on? No, I’ve had loads of singing teachers dotted around and I’ve even got a guitar lesson on hold that I want to grab at some point. I just find it really… I just love learning really, I mean when I was at school maths wasn’t great, but when it came to guitar and singing I find it really inspiring to learn new tricks. I was hanging out with Thomas Leeb who’s one of my major influences, but seeing him up close helped me get my head round some of the things that he was doing. I trawl the internet and find interesting players and usually stick them on my Facebook and see what happens – Gareth Pearson went down very well indeed!
So you still feel like you’ve got more to learn and more to discover – - I don’t think you’re ever done. It’s really weird because I’m playing a gig in Guilford and I’ve been asked to do a masterclass! And I think ‘what are you doing, being asked to do a masterclass?!’ What a joke! Don’t call it a masterclass, just call it a little chat. It’s weird but it’s good; it’s nice to be asked and that people like what I do. I can’t really ask for more than that.
Now Newton, you’re coming to Norwich in May and you’ve talked about the varying audiences you like to have, but what would you like from your Norwich audience? Is it seated or standing? Standing’s good. What day of the week is it? I wonder if it’ll be like London where you can tell what day of the week it is just by people’s faces?
Hang on… it’s a Saturday! Party night! Wicked, so it’s gonna be very loud, or it might be another picnic. Who knows?!
Emma Garwood
Newton Faulkner comes to OPEN on Bank Plain on May 12th. For tickets, go to www.ueaticketbookings.co.uk. Read the full version of this interview at Outlineonline.co.uk
