Return of the renaissance man

I’m a believer in the fact that we are products of nature, so depending on where we are and what time of year, you’re either an oak tree or an apple tree; you’re either a daffodil or an evergreen. I think the time of the year and what the cycle is of the earth in correspondence to the universe affects our personalities and the ways we act.”

Whew. There’s an opening statement and a half, delivered in response to my inquiry about Tom Baxter’s date of birth, October 29, 1973, and how it informs the song ‘Scorpio Boy’ from his first album Feather & Stone. Tom, I figured, must have had at least a passing acquaintance with astrology, astronomy, cosmology, or some other branch of the esoteric arts and sciences.
“Of course it can get silly at times reading the Sun’s horoscopes and nonsense like that,” he says, “but I do think there’s a poignancy about nature, or at least our involvement in nature, because if there wasn’t, then what is art? Even the Scorpio sign itself, the nature of the Scorpio myth, the animal – it can be quite forthright, visionary, strong, and can also manage to fuck up and sting itself.”
Presumably he’s heard the old fable about the scorpion and the frog?
“Remind me.”
A scorpion and a frog come to a stream. The scorpion asks the frog if he can cadge a piggyback ride across the water. The frog agrees on condition that the scorpion won’t sting him. The scorpion assures him he won’t, but halfway across the stream, he stings the frog anyway. The dying frog croaks, ‘Why’d you do that? Now we’re both screwed.’ The scorpion replies, ‘Because I’m a scorpion.’
Tom Baxter, thankfully, seems to have taken the high visionary road and is avoiding the pitfalls of self-sabotage. As we speak, his second album Skybound has just ascended to the top of the Irish album chart, bolstered by the single ‘Better’, a song destined to do for the Suffolk songwriter what ‘Babylon’ did for David Gray and ‘The Blower’s Daughter’ did for Damien Rice.
As we sit down to talk, Baxter makes himself a cup of tea in the North London studio he rents but will see precious little of anytime soon. The coming year will be a blurry montage of morning calls, airport lounges, backstage catering, planes, trains and automobiles.
Fortunately, Skybound is a record that should translate to the stage with ease. The album’s ten songs were recorded swiftly and mostly live, their natural, free-flowing textures suggesting Tim Buckley, Nina Simone and early Van (‘A Night Like This’ is Baxter’s ‘Moondance’).
“All those artists are live artists through and through,” he observes, “and I suppose that’s where I come from. I yearn to hear live music. A record like Nina Simone’s Baltimore for example, with strings and a soul influence. And then you’ve got early Van stuff, which is just great. I really had to stick to my guns and just make sure that we recorded it live. And fortunately I was working with Jeremy Stacey, a drummer who’s played all over thousands of records (including Sheryl Crow, the Waterboys, Echo & the Bunnymen and Charlotte Gainsbourg) and knows how bastardised a lot of the records he’s played on have become, so we were kind of Batman and Robin in that respect. We both wanted to make sure that it was us playing live, our main aim was to make it sound like real music.”
The breadth of styles on Skybound ranges from jazz-inflected folk to modal rock, flamenco and early ’70s soul. Consequently, it sounds like an album that could have been made at any point in the last 50 years.
“That was kind of my aim really,” Baxter admits. “Y’know, a lot of records in the ’70s, which was I suppose the boom of the music industry, there was a lot of experimentation with someone like Tim Buckley, who you mentioned earlier. He’d go from Dream Letter to something like Look At The Fool, which would be an out-and-out soul record. It was a flop, but I thought it was great. I get so continuously shoved into this singer-songwriter mould that I think part of me just wants to be an artist rather than a square peg in a round hole. I understand the association with James Blunt or someone like that, it’s a man with a guitar, but it’s not experimental, it’s not going to other places, although he’s done incredibly well. So it was quite important for me to just make a record that almost tricked the listener: ‘What do you call this style of music?’”
Baxter grew up in Suffolk and Cornwall; his parents were active in folk circles and also ran a hotel. It seemed preordained that he and his brother Charlie would spend their teenage years messing about with musical instruments.
“Living out in the country, where we grew up, we didn’t watch much TV,” he says. “It was a bit of a mad upbringing in many ways, bohemian. But at one point from the ages of 10 to 20 we were to-ing and fro-ing from this hotel that we had, and we had a little tiny cottage which was costing my mum twenty quid a week, it was totally falling down, no heating. You had a lot of time on your hands, and I think music almost became a saviour. I was quite lucky that I didn’t feel like I had to fit in with any kind of cool crowd, I could like what I liked. It’s probably harder in the city because there’s a lot of your peers, perhaps you’ve got to listen to Dizzee Rascal, or if your mate doesn’t like Dizzee Rascal you shouldn’t either. But there’s a lot of time to kill, so music becomes your little dream world.
“It’s a weird thing,” he elaborates. “Probably with you, in your line of work now… When you’re growing up you feel very much out on a limb, it’s quite difficult when you don’t fit in, but as you get older your job is designed around your disadvantage perhaps, that you did stick to your own guns and listen to what you wanted to, and that becomes your world later in life. But it takes quite a lot of years to realise that not being the same as everyone else is alright. But it’s a good time for music. I mean, obviously I’m in a good position at the moment, but even since I made the last record, it’s been really exciting for me.”
From this vantage point, Baxter can afford to be philosophical about the Sony years.
“I learned so much from being with Sony,” he proffers. “I felt very privileged to have had that experience and to have gotten out. Sometimes people might think that it’s perhaps a negative, but I see it as totally a positive, ’cos I feel like I got the opportunity to see how I can make it work rather than not work, which is what I think they do quite a lot; it’s a very, very prehistoric way they go about putting records out. And obviously they’ve had to acclimatise and they’ve had to come up to date more now, and the system’s getting better. But it’s a good time in terms of technology and how people use it.”
It’s certainly a long way from labels like Asylum or Island nurturing an act through a four-album development period.
“It’s true, it’s very much a business now. Sometimes you have to really remind yourself that you’re meant to be making music. I hardly get any time to make any music, especially since I made Skybound, ’cos it’s just been busy, having to try and push it and get it out there to people, which perhaps isn’t as romantic as I’d like it to be. But in a Sam Cooke sort of a way, I’m excited about having my own label set up and creating my own world. There’s a lot of albums to make.”
The remarkable thing about the way Baxter financed the Skybound sessions is that it reversed the usual art-versus-commerce paradigm. Whereas most musicians use their dayjob to subsidise their arty dabblings, Baxter exploited his talents as a figurative painter to help fund the recording, and each song has its counterpart in a painting, all of which were exhibited in the Richard Dennis Gallery in Kensington.
“Yeah, because I made it with all my money, and I was having to pay for independent radio pluggers and independent press, I had this idea,” he says. “What I wanted to do with the whole experience of making Skybound was to redefine the way in which I went about being an artist. I had worked out that the thing that makes me happy is being creatively prolific, doing stuff that I’m proud of.
“I wanted a figurative image for each individual song, so they’re very much based on either one or two figures, a representation of the lyrics. I mean they’re all effectively me and my girlfriend, but they’re all based on how I felt when I wrote each song, so the image in ‘Half A Man’ is the image that comes to mind of when I was living in a council flat in London where I wrote that track. For me they’re very personal images.
“The original idea wasn’t really to make money,” he continues. “It just happened that way when we put the pictures on sale. I wasn’t sure what the response would be really. It’s just what I wanted to do, because I did painting as I was growing up, and when I first lived in London I was exhibiting in different market stalls selling work – not with huge success, but I was doing it.
“And this time around I was doing exactly what I wanted to do and I felt very passionate about it, and I also felt very passionate about the price label on it, because I felt, ‘Well, if I’m going to sell these, this is what I want for them’. I would have been quite happy to have kept them, but in a great way, they went. Not only has it encouraged me to do more of it, but it’s really nice to know that those ten individual pieces of work are owned by ten different people across Ireland, England and Italy. At the moment we’re trying to get in touch with the people to get back to do another exhibition.”
The exciting stuff happens, Baxter reckons, in the cross pollination of different artistic disciplines.
“Being an artist for me crosses over a lot of things,” he says. “I mean, what I think you’re really saying when you say someone is a true artist is they’re a thinker. I’m a huge fan of Khalil Gibran and Pablo Neruda. Gibran was an artist who became known as a poet – and he’s only ever really known for The Prophet, which is the sort of thing you hear at people’s weddings now – but actually a lot of his other poetry is just stunning. The drawings that went with it, I’ve always loved that sort of thing, particularly William Blake. Even if you look at Michelangelo, you’ve got a fucking great book full of his poetry. He was a poet, he was an artist, he was a musican, he did loads of different things. He’s known for being fundamentally a great painter and sculptor and all that stuff, but they all feed off each other really.”
Not content with having distinguished himself in two distinct mediums, Baxter has also published a book entitled Tales From The Forest Of Hope.
“I wanted it to be a sort of little guide book to what I’d been doing,” he explains. “We’re actually going to be extending it and possibly making it into a box set for sale, which would include more stuff. But it would really just be because of my love of those people, Gibran and Blake. For me, as a fan of other people, I love all that stuff, I love finding out about what makes it tick and how it began.
“Also I’ve been doing it for a long time, so it was another opportunity for me to show the people who’d come fresh to the music, like people who heard ‘Better’ on the radio or something, if they do buy that book at a gig, they’ll see that there is another album. It talks about the way the paintings came together, the sketches, and the memorabilia, each band member on the record talks about the relationship we’ve got together, where and how we met and what we’ve done. It’s nice, because it’s not just about me, it’s about five people who’ve actually made that music sound like something.”
Certainly Skybound is one of the few albums to feature a shot of the artist’s manager – in this case Sara Lord – on the sleeve.
“Yeah! (laughs). She’s a great manager so I should let people know who she is. I’ll tell you why I really like that: I got to know (producer) Gus Dudgeon quite well, remember him from the early Bowie and Elton John stuff? And he was a big fan of my stuff, and so we hooked up a few times. We never actually got round to any recording, and he unfortunately passed away a few years ago, but all of those early records, particularly Elton John records, or the Springsteen records, there’s pictures of all the people involved. And I love that, ’cos I want to know who the manager is, what Peter Grant from Zeppelin looks like. One other album that did it that I really liked was The Strokes album, there’s a photo of each member including the manager and the producer, and I think it’s important. Y’know, they’re the people who’ve made the record.
“I’ll tell you what the other thing is as well – one of the major reasons why it was exciting for me doing the the paintings was it took my mind off the music industry. Because the music industry really, really is a business, and it’s very much a mechanical business. I’m sure you see it every day, you’ve got PR people or whatever pushing you to do pieces on the latest signing to Universal who have just pumped so much into this and blah-blah-blah, and you know three months later they may not exist.
“It can be quite disillusioning and depressing, because sometimes it’s not based on art at all, it’s based on how much money is being pumped into it. It becomes quite a machine. I’ve got a great manager, but still I’m having to do things a lot of the time which… y’know, you kind of want to get to the level where hopefully the art will speak for itself. Unfortunately in this day and age there is so much profiling that you can’t always have it your way, but that’s the aim anyway.”
Once I might have considered such observations as the bellyaching of a lucky man. But in recent times, when artists like Jack White and Damien Rice declared media blackouts, I thought it a wise and healthy way to avoid over-saturation and preserve the sanity of all involved.
“Well, the more I’ve done it the more I can appreciate what they’re saying,” Baxter says. “I think there’s a middle ground. For me, I enjoy talking to people like yourself. I think if you’re having to repeat yourself endlessly it becomes a bit of a chore, but at the same time it is good to get your music out there. Even with Damien, who I do know, often I think people get like that when they’re maybe not having such a good time, probably a lot of it’s to do with the fact that they don’t want to be that vulnerable and talk to people, which I can totally understand.
“It’s alright in this case when it’s very much like having a chat with a mate, but you do get some people who haven’t done any research, they don’t know who you are, they’re just asking inane questions, and that can get a bit tiresome, because you do feel like a bit of a promotional whore, you don’t feel like you’re really having a conversation. It’s more Heat magazine stuff: ‘What do you read? What’s in your fridge? If you could go out with any woman, who would you go out with?’ That sort of crap. It’s like, ‘Oh fuckin’ hell, here we go again!’”

Skybound gets a live airing in the Olympia, Dublin (February 28); National Stadium, Dublin (May 2); Crane Lane Theatre, Cork (3); Dolan's, Limerick (4); Roisin Dubh, Galway (5); Nerve Centre, Derry (7); and Spring & Airbrake, Belfast (8)