Q: Can you tell us a bit about yourself and how your childhood impacted your musical direction?
A: ‘Imagine the view From a helicopter gunship And a man comes into view And you hit that switch and you cut that man in two Imagine the view When they bounce that shit off of satellites And they hit that switch, and when they hit that switch All the heaven falls on you’ Thee Silver Mt. Zion Memorial Orchestra – ‘Ring Them Bells (Freedom Has Come and Gone)’
08:46, Tuesday 11th September, 2001. A passenger jet, piloted by al-Qaeda terrorists, hit One World Trade Center in New York City. Around 20 minutes later, as the top floors of the North Tower were engulfed in flame, another passenger jet hit the South Tower. Another plane was flown into the Pentagon, and yet another, probably bound for the US Capitol, crashed into a field in Pennsylvania. Three thousand five hundred miles away, an 18-year-old me was having a nice day slacking around in Croydon. I had not yet picked up a guitar, let alone written a song. At this point, I hadn’t even realised I particularly liked music. The events in New York filtered into my consciousness over the course of the afternoon – snippets of news overheard in shops, my fellow commuters’ disbelieving phone calls on the bus. I was aware ‘something’ was going on. But this was 2001, and 24-hour access to the news wasn’t yet a thing. Coming home, I turned on the TV. The first thing I saw was the South Tower falling.
I’m not American, I was on the other side of the world, but when I saw the tower collapse, something collapsed inside me. The atrocity surrounding that crisis point reached around our interconnected world and stuck its fingers inside my head. I was 18. Soft, privileged, clueless. Just coming of age. My innocence was lost. That was the fall. Thirty-one years earlier:
Five o’clock in the morning, Sunday, August 17th, 1970, Bethel, New York. The Who take to the stage of the first Woodstock Music & Art Fair. Due to contractual issues, they are going on approximately half a day late. And due to other kinds of issues, each member of the band has been spiked with acid. What follows is an hour and a half of barely controlled chaos. When the band play ‘Sparks’, from their rock opera Tommy, it doesn’t sound like music. It sounds like buildings falling down. It sounds like war. The message to the hippies of Bethel New York was: peace and love? They don’t exist.
The members of The Who grew up in post-war London, a city ravaged by the Blitz. Like my Dad, they grew up playing in urban bomb craters and destroyed buildings. The city they grew up in was a museum of senseless destruction and war.
Footage from their set is recorded and included in the film Woodstock, which I think was also broadcast by the BBC in 2001. In any case, I saw it at some point around September 2001.
In 2001, I, and millions of others, saw the forms of the world dissolving. Towers of smoke, visible from space. Destroyed buildings chasing crowds along the streets. Confusion, shock, spectacle, sound, fury, death. Something hidden from me was revealed – the fact that someone thousands of miles away could press a button or say a word, and I, or someone like me, could be turned to red paste.
The combination of these two events in New York, intermingling in my brain, sowed the seeds of With Stones in His Pockets.
Weeks after 9/11, my parents happened to see me pretending to play guitar along to The Who using a walking stick tied to a dressing gown cord to simulate a guitar. This set in motion a series of talks which led to me getting a real guitar for my birthday – a cream-coloured Squire Stratocaster, which I immediately set about playing so frequently and so hard that it soon became unusable. So I saved for a cherry red Gibson SG, the guitar Pete Townshend used on stage at Woodstock. It had to be that guitar. That was the guitar I needed. No other would suffice.
I didn’t know when I started making music in the three-piece band that eventually became my solo act, that I was trying to use my guitar to simulate the sounds of history being cleft in two. It wasn’t a conscious thing, but With Stones exists because of those two events. The terror, pain and conflict inherent in those two events are also inherent in With Stones in His Pockets. It’s sowed into every note and lyric.
Q: How are you planning on growing your fan base and sharing your music with the world? What message do you have for anyone who is about to discover “With Stones in His Pockets”?
‘Culture sucks down words.’
Manic Street Preachers – ‘Motorcycle Emptiness’
A: In 1992 Francis Fukuyama declared the end of history. He perceived ‘the end-point of mankind’s ideological evolution and the universalization of Western liberal democracy as the final form of human government’.
In 2011, the BBC transmitted an episode of Doctor Who called ‘The Wedding of River Song’. At the start of the episode, every moment in history is happening at once. This was interpreted on screen by having Winston Churchill be Holy Roman Emperor, pterodactyls divebombing family picnics, the War of the Roses still being fought, and Charles Dickens showrunning an in-universe version of Doctor Who. This short scene is the most on-point and prescient thing Doctor Who ever did. Because that’s what life has felt like for the past 5 years.
Recent world events have belied Fukuyama’s neoliberal ’90s utopianism. Belied is too mild a term – they’ve taken Fukuyama’s neoliberal utopianism around the back and shot it in the head. History is back with a vengeance. It’s 2001, it’s 1989, it’s 1938, it’s 1765, it’s 1642, it’s 44BC. All at the same time.
How can art reflect the violent anti-structuralism of the modern world without becoming an amorphous, formless blend of meaningless images and sounds? How can the structure of a song, or a neat set of lyrics mean anything in an existential void?
Whenever I write a song, it feels like an exercise in futility, an attempt to impose a modernist structure on an amorphous, post-post-modern culture. As my songwriting progresses, it progresses further into a void of meaning.
What can an artist do in the face of a world of ‘alternative facts’? How can art and entertainment possibly do their work in the face of the qliphothic forces rising from the depths of human history? The answer doesn’t seem to be to write a song, or a book, or whatever. It doesn’t even appear to be mass protests or speaking truth to power. For the last 5 years, I’ve been in a freeze response. And for the decade preceding those five years, I didn’t make any music.
I have no idea what my responsibility is. Since the age of 18, all I’ve wanted to do was be a songwriter. Now every move I make in that direction is tempered by a thought that says, you shouldn’t be With Stones in His Pockets, you should be Tank Man, you should be Rachel Corrie.
So…
How am I planning to grow my fan base and share my music? By making myself a product. By giving up, shrugging, and using services and digital spaces owned by oligarchs, the running of which actively damages an already devastated natural world.
What message do I have for anyone discovering my work? Well, I hope you like the pretty chords, but you can probably spend your time and energy more wisely than the person who wrote them. Please save the world, because I don’t seem to be able to stop playing guitar, and I’ll be dead in another forty years, but you might not be.
Q: Who is the most inspiring artist for you right now? And where do you find inspiration for making music?
A: The best education I got at university was the musical one I got from my friends. I was recommended Godspeed You! Black Emperor, and instantly became obsessed with them. Their almost perversely inscrutable music went against everything I knew about ‘rock’ at the time – no vocals, no frontman, no individual personalities, not even any songs, per se. They were able to be so disruptive because, despite being ‘difficult’ and inherently hostile to the concept of ‘fandom’, they were undeniably excellent. That was very inspiring to With Stones in His Pockets as a band (we were a band back then). The same goes for many of the interconnected acts and bands on the Constellation Records label around the early ’00s – Thee Silver Mt. Zion Memorial Orchestra, Do Make Say Think, Fly Pan Am, Black Ox Orkestar, Hangedup, and Tindersticks. And more recent acts from Constellation’s roster like Jessica Moss, Kee Avil, Ky and Matana Roberts. Constellation Records are curators of some of the best music out there.
Richard Dawson’s music recently clicked for me. He’s a solo singer-songwriter from Newcastle. Listening to his almost offputtingly overt guitar playing helps me realise my instincts are correct – I can be as abstruse and arcane as I like and the centre will hold. Listening to Richard Dawson opened up a whole new musical world to me, bringing in influences from American Primitivists like John Fahey, Robbie Basho and Mississippi John Hurt. From there, I got into the ragtime of Scott Joplin. This in turn opened me up to George Gershwin, which in turn finally opened me up to classical as a genre, and now I love listening to Ravel, Sibelius and Debussy.
With Stones is a ‘genreless’ project, as it’s just a tapestry of the music I’m listening to at any particular time. The music industry is obsessed with genre, and with the advent of playlist culture, that’s probably more the case now than ever. Conveniently With Stones in His Pockets fits into a ‘folk singer-songwriter’ mould, simply because it’s one guy, singing and playing guitar. But when I write, I’m not writing for guitar. I’m writing for orchestras.
Q: Can you tell us about the story or message behind the EP, “Devour.”?
A: ‘ Become aware not only of the emotional pain but also of “the one who observes,” the silent watcher. This is the power of the Now, the power of your own conscious presence. Then see what happens.’
The Power of Now – Eckhart Tolle
“I’ve been thinking with my guts since I was fourteen years old, and frankly speaking, between you and me, I have come to the conclusion that my guts have shit for brains.”
High Fidelity – Nick Hornby
Devour is about the antidote to suffering. There is a method of counteracting the doubt and freeze I describe in the answer to your second question, which is to try and consciously bypass the part of my brain that strives to make sense of the world and my place in it. The voice in my head that creates a narrative of everything, that makes connection after connection striving to arrive at a solution, to think ‘ah, that makes sense now’, has no point. I’m not going to solve the world, or my life, no matter how much energy I expend on thinking. There’s no point in the future where everything will make sense to me, no matter how much I learn, no matter how much I think. All my emotions, feelings, thoughts and impulses are ultimately pointless. And that’s not a nihilistic worldview. On the contrary, it represents freedom. So, thanks to the teachings of spiritual master Eckhart Tolle, I try to step into the present moment. Tolle says, ‘you have no problems in the present moment’. So when I get the sense that the world, or my life, is spinning out of control, if I feel unhappy, or slighted, or bitter, or scared, I try to focus on the information my five senses are giving me, and the feeling of energy in my body.
It’s not easy, but it is simple. And that allows me – a little bit more every time I practice it – to operate from a calm and peaceful place.
That’s what this EP is about. The key to the EP is the song ‘What Will It Take to Let Go?’ That song tells the true, if uneventful, story of my going for a walk to try and get out of a busy and painful headspace. On that walk, I saw a fox, which darted into the field, away from the sounds of a nearby road. A minute later, I saw birds, and a rabbit, various animals a fox preys on, fleeing from the fox. Those animals were aware of a problem – that they could be eaten at any moment – and they were dealing with it, not by saying ‘oh why is this happening to me, this is so unfair’, but by taking action. Later on, their fellow creatures wouldn’t be berating them for running from the fox, they wouldn’t be saying, ‘you coward, I can’t believe you ran from that fox!’ They wouldn’t say anything, they would get on with the business of surviving. ‘There’s more to the world than the thoughts that swirl in my busy head.’ As much as my ego tried to tell me I’m the main character, I’m not. That’s what the EP is about.
It’s kind of antithetical to the rest of With Stones’ work. But oh well.
Q: How would you describe your sound in one word for potential listeners?
A: Tangled
Q: Did you face any challenges while writing or recording “Devour EP”?
A: No. It all went very smoothly. The trouble came afterwards, when I tried to get people to pay attention to it.
Q: What is the message of your music? And what are your goals as an artist?
A: The message of my music is: History didn’t happen in the past. It’s right here, with us, the elephant in the room. And it’s not one of the vulnerable, endangered elephants from the Greenpeace ads, it’s one of Hannibal’s Elephantry, bristling with firepower, charging us, trampling us, breaking our ranks, instilling awe and terror. What can we do with it but face it?
As for my goals, I’d like to get better at writing lyrics, and I’d like to play the Barbican one day.
Q: Who is your dream artist to collaborate with? (dead or alive)
A: It’s not a very fashionable thing to say, but With Stones in His Pockets is sort of allergic to collaboration. When it comes to the songs I write for With Stones, I’m convinced that everything should come from me. Because I want to be fully accountable for every sound you hear when you listen to me. Because I suppose I want it to sound as close to the inside of my head as possible. With Stones’ musical triumphs are my triumphs, and With Stones’ musical failings are my failings. The closest I’ve come to collaboration is asking Joe to play bass on a couple of the songs I’m releasing this year, or Leif from Goatthrone Audio’s production choices when mixing and mastering Devour.
But then I think about the late Vic Chesnutt collaborating with Thee Silver Mt. Zion Memorial Orchestra on his albums North Star Deserter and At The Cut. Vic was a brilliant, melodic, funny, incisive songwriter, but on his two releases with Constellation Records, his jangly alt-country sound was suddenly infused with Silver Mt Zion’s epic, neoclassical style. The band sits back and doesn’t dominate Vic’s songs, so you get this amazing sound of one man playing a classical guitar and singing, with this orchestral-punk monolith crashing in and out. The dynamics on those records are astonishing. The musical palette violently expands and contracts depending on what Silver Mt. Zion is doing. So, without wanting to compare my talent with the empyrean Chesnutt, collaborating with A Silver Mt Zion, or perhaps even better, Godspeed You! Black Emperor, would be a dream come true.
Around 2003, when With Stones in His Pockets was a three-piece band, I went to a Silver Mt. Zion show. I had brought a taped With Stones rehearsal, which I planned to give to the drummer of indie-sleaze/Beatles/Godspeed crossover act Hope of the States, who I knew was attending the gig. But before I found him, I spied Efrim, Silver Mt. Zion’s singer and guitarist crouched in the corner. I approached him, introduced myself (he was very nice) and gave the tape to him instead. Later, it occurred to me that, if he ever listened to it, he would have heard half an hour of material copied, sometimes verbatim, from his own band. So any collaboration between us would have to be preceded by an apology from me.
Q: What is your advice for people interested in pursuing music as a career or for those trying to enter the industry?
A: ‘If you meet the Buddha on the road, kill him.’ – Zen koan
If you write songs with the aim of earning money, you won’t have any money, and you won’t have any songs.
Go and be a nurse, or a teacher, or a social worker instead. Go and be Tank Man.
Also, don’t listen to me, I’m confused and I’m a hypocrite.
Q: If you could go back in time and give a younger you some words of wisdom, what would they be?
A: Once you’ve picked up the guitar, please don’t put it down again. Ever.
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