Skin Deep

It’s been a whirlwind day for English singer-songwriter Newton Faulkner. Having arisen in his London home at four in the morning, he’s spent the day in Dublin promoting his new album, Write It On Your Skin. When Hot Press meets him in an upstairs room at The Workman’s Club, it’s still only quarter past three. Though tired looking, he is engaging and friendly. With Write It On Your Skin (the follow-up to two hugely successful albums, Hand Built By Robots and Rebuilt By Humans) set for release in a couple of days, I wonder if he feels in any way tentative.

“Not really, I’m generally really excited,” enthuses Faulkner, who retains his trademark dreadlocks. “It’s done very well in the build-up. Lots of good things are happening and I’m really happy with it. Plenty of people have heard it in random ways – it was on our website for a limited amount of time, and you can hear bits of it on iTunes – and people really like it, which is amazing.”
Among those collaborating with Faulkner on Write... are his brother Toby (a former drum and bass MC), production pair Nexus, and hip hop enthusiast Sam Farrar of Phantom Planet, the band which formerly counted actor Jason Schwartzmann as a member. One gets the impression that Faulkner wanted to bring more of a beats-driven, hip hop influenced style to this album.
“It’s something I’ve always done bits of,” he notes. “The first album kind of hinted towards it, and the second album was more about traditional songs. This one is just me messing around a bit more and having a really good time.”
He obviously felt the freedom to do that.
“Yeah, I don’t know why,” he replies. “I was still under an insane amount of pressure as usual, but I guess it’s partly the time thing. We were just chipping away at things, it wasn’t like, ‘This needs to be done next week, we’re doing the album now!’ I was trying to release an album last year and it just wouldn’t work. This record has had three MDs, so there’s been three full regime changes at the label. But I don’t think any of the external pressures would match the pressure I put myself under to do something good.
“I’ve seen both sides of it in a way. The first album did amazingly well, and the second album did alright, although it wasn’t quite at the same level. With this one, there were a lot of people working on it who knew they were about to get fired. People knew what was going to happen, so they were like, ‘What does it matter?’ It just pushes everything back a bit, and in this case it pushed it back a year – Write It On Your Skin was ready to go in 2011, but because of all the label stuff, it got delayed.”
Newton became a father since the release of Rebuilt By Humans in 2009, which presumably had a significant effect on him as an artist.
“It changes everything, it’s such a massive event,” he responds. “It’s had a number of effects that I didn’t completely expect, and certain things have been the total opposite of what I expected. I thought one effect it would have on this album would be to make it more commercially minded, because I now have to look after a family, serious stuff. I thought that would make me write more commercial material, but instead this other part of my brain almost completely took over, which was that everything I do, he’s gonna have to live with. I’ve just been much more rigid in my own opinions.
“Even the people who are putting it out don’t actually take it to their grave, but now I’m taking it not only to that point, but also beyond, by years. I don’t want to go to the playground in ten years’ time and have a kid going up to him with headphones, saying, ‘Listen to this – it’s your dad, it’s rubbish!’ I’m going to do everything I can to avoid that.”
As well as hitting the number one spot in the UK where it went double platinum and landing in the Irish top ten, Newton’s ’07 debut enjoyed substantial international success. Presumably that level of achievement changes your life in quite a profound way.
“It was crazy at the time,” he nods. “And for years afterwards. To be honest, I can’t actually take it all in, I don’t really know what happened. It was two years of my life where I know I was very busy, and saw a lot of places and did a lot of stuff, but it was definitely too much to really take in. It’s really weird, a lot of stuff I think I’ve forgotten, until I dig through a box of laminates from festivals and I’m like, ‘That was Belgium – I remember that!’ I did it the other day. I’d been home for quite a long time, I’d had a trip to LA, but I hadn’t been anywhere a bit mental for a while. And then digging through this box, there was Japanese stuff, New Zealand, Australia – just endless bizarre things.”
Did it afford him the opportunity to meet musical heroes?
“I’ve obviously met all the guitar people in my kind of bizarre, specialist acoustic genre,” replies Newton. “I’ve got to know quite a few – Thomas Leeb, an Austrian player, helped me arrange stuff on this album. He’s become quite a good friend, and was the first person whose stuff I started learning when I began playing guitar. That’s going back to when I was 15, so it’s amazing. The most starstruck I’ve ever been was quite random. If you’d asked me beforehand what I’d do if I met them, I would have said, ‘I’d just say ‘hey guys, how are you doing?’’ But I was a bit of a gibbering wreck when I met The Proclaimers. (Laughs) It was really strange!
“It was backstage at V. The entire cast of Hollyoaks was there, and Matt Lucas and Paul Rudd were hanging out, which was a weird pairing! I was like, ‘who the hell is that?’ Then I turned to go on and The Proclaimers were there, and they went, ‘Oh, hello mate’. And I went (babbles excitedly). I just couldn’t do it!”
You also did Jay Leno.
“Yeah, I was on with William Shatner,” Newton laughs. “I’d pay him a lot of money to do a spoken word version of one of my songs – maybe it can be part of the promo for the single!”
One of the singles on Hand Built By Robots was a cover of Massive Attack’s sublime ‘Teardrop’. I wonder if Newton ever had any feedback on it from the Bristol outfit?
“I did actually,” he affirms. “I was on a train with one of the guys from Massive Attack and I didn’t know him, apparently he clocked me. I think it was actually his girlfriend who said, ‘Sorry, I have to introduce you – this is the guy who wrote ‘Teardrop’. I was like, ‘No fucking way! Amazing!’”
Oddly, Jose Gonzalez also had a cover of ‘Teardrop’ out around the same time. Could we say that was the folk equivalent of Blur vs. Oasis?
“That got a bit dark!” Newton winces. “Not from him, but fans were like, ‘You stole the idea off him – he’s been doing it for years!’ I’d been doing it for a while as well, so it was just one of those bizarre things.”
Overall, Faulkner reckons that the tone of Write It On Your Skin is optimistic, albeit tempered by realism.
“There are positive songs on there, but they’re positive about the future and not positive about the present,” he notes. “I think that was a way of balancing it out. If I was to bring out a song now that went (does Prince-style falsetto), ‘Life’s amazing!’ I don’t think it would go down very well. Right now a lot of people are having a really hard time with lots of crazy stuff, so that didn’t feel like the right thing to do. I take the responsibility of being an artist relatively seriously; I’m not going to chuck out negative vibes. It’s almost like dropping a pebble in the ocean – if you plant that seed, then that creates ripples which are just bad.
“So I try and do new stuff which will have a positive impact on people’s brains, but in order to do that, I’ve had to balance it with some form of realism, and contextualise it a bit more. Otherwise, it’s just proper bubblegum pop, which isn’t what I do, and it’s not particularly satisfying.”

Write It On Your Skin is out now on Sony. Newton Faulkner plays the Olympia, Dublin on October 7