There’s echoes of early Elliott Smith in the music of Stephen Fretwell. You can hear it in the 24-year-old’s softly pronounced vocal and the torrents of emotion flowing through songs like ‘Rose’ and ‘Emily’.
Fretwell’s debut album Magpie emphasises the beauty of understatement, a sparse and meticulously crafted piece of work. No wonder then that he's somewhat miffed with the recent reworking of one of his songs for the sake of commercial appeal. ‘Emily’, the bitter sweet centrepiece to Magpie, has just been beefed up and released as a single, with drums, bass and strings supplanting the original acoustic version. At the time of writing it’s the third most played track on BBC Radio 2, but Fretwell is far from pleased.
“It’s hard to be excited about such success when you yourself don’t dig the music you’re promoting,” he laments. “It may still be the song that I wrote but it just sounds like a cover version to me really.”
Fretwell, it would seem, is experiencing the downside of being on a major label. Shy and nervous, with a weatherbeaten face, he’s not the sort of character who looks cut out for the glare of mainstream success.
“I shouldn’t be saying this, but I’ve no great ambition to have a massive hit or anything like that,” he confides. “There’s this pressure on me, because I’m on a major label, to be a big act like David Gray or James Blunt and sell millions. To me, my thinking is if you sell 10,000 albums, then 10,000 people have got a copy of your album. Probably another 10,000 have got a CDR of it. That’s really flattering for me as an artist, but perhaps less so for the boys in the commerce department. When business meets art, that’s where the problems arise.”
In Ireland though, business and art have been good to the Scunthorpe native. Thanks to a number of well received live shows, his stock has risen considerably. Later this month he’ll return to Whelan’s, the scene of one of his favourite gigs this year.
“I was very shocked the last time I played Whelan’s,” he says with a smile. “The reaction was amazing. People listened. Over here people who like music are a lot more respectful then the UK. They don’t talk the whole way through, which is great, because it makes you play better. The little experience I’ve had of playing Dublin, has been fucking amazing. You don’t hear people up the front row talking about what they did last weekend.”