Deceiving Appearances With EdHarcourt

Mon 11th Oct, 2004 in Features

Ed Harcourt is a man of contradiction. Impossibly verbose, thoughtful and even comedic he is the everyman framed in a West London accent, countering vast pop-cultural reference points with scouring wit and un-erring self depreciation. An interview with Ed about his brilliant fourth release Strangers tilts from apologetic explanations, Zoolander references, marriage proposals and global politics. You may even get a few serenades! Today, he is as captivating as ever, ladies and gentlemen, sometimes it’s all to easy to slip into a (very detailed) conversation with Ed Harcourt.

“The thing is there’s no point in me talking to you after I have done four interviews, because if I had talked to you after four interviews it would have been crap. I need to take 10 minutes to get my head back into a space where I am not completely repeating myself and sounding mentally exhausted.”

Ed had taken a break in order to get his head together, which is fine – but he had stood me up last night, so I felt I deserved some explanation.

“I had to go sorry. I had a cab…I had to go to the studio and do like two songs for student radio, and then someone wanted me to do a Christmas carol for a magazine for December…so I did In the Bleak in Winter and it sounds like Beach Boys/Jesus and Mary Chain version, but with like really low Bauhaus vocals. It sounds quite disturbing…” 

Imagining Ed doing Bauhaus is tantamount to witnessing the apocalypse, but I guess you could play the creation over those old school plasticine Christmas cartoons that get repeated each year.

“Oh God yeah – like those Chester Vaquian avant garde cartoons! Yeah, yeah I think I have a future!”

Well if your career kind of drops out you’ve got something to fall back on.

“Well yeah – that could happen very soon!”

Or not. Ed’s latest release Strangers is possibly his most comprehensive and freely jointed effort to date, mending his usual wit and carefully constructed lyricism with lush, yet contained arrangements. So how is the new baby coping with the attention?

“Well, you know, it’s another album out, so I am excited about it. Like I say, they’re all my children, so I have to give them all equal attention…although some are more difficult than others…”

Some cry more at feeding time?

“Some like to stand in the corner and sulk.”

Really? Which ones have been doing that lately?

“Haha! Probably From Every Sphere has been the most difficult child, and then Strangers is the child that gets away with everything – the youngest child – and Here be Monsters is the one that had to learn the quickest. And Maplewood is the one that’s charmed…it charmed people first. Intoxication.”

The collection of tracks on ‘Strangers’ is perhaps the most acutely mirrored image of Ed, as they are the most recent, and in turn, reflective of where he is at now…

“Well they’re all pretty new. I mean on the previous albums I had been dipping into the back catalogue of all the songs I had, and bringing out old ones and re-editing and reinterpreting them…but for this album it was like pretty much everything was done, everything was written in the same amount of time. Some of it was written as I was going into the studio, and some of it was written six months earlier.

“The single, This Ones for You, actually, the first time I played that was in Australia. In Sydney, so that was kind of around a year and a half ago, so that’s when I started writing Strangers. But I have loads of other songs that I haven’t made it onto Strangers that I haven’t recorded that I’ll probably use for the next album. But I wanted to make something that was really upbeat, and fairly positive, and I think with the next album we’re going to make something that’s really fucked up.”

So will you dip back into those dark, Bauhaus vocals?

“I think so. I think it’s time. Time to go back to hell!”

Really? What turned you onto there?

“Well I have songs like Satan Made Me Do It and Revenge and Sorrow and things like that.”

So you’re in a completely different place now, as opposed to when you wrote that?

“No, no, see that’s what I mean. That’s the whole point! The more comfortable I get I think the darker the music is going to get…I’ve reached the peak – I have made an album that’s very romantic and very happy, pretty upbeat. I just think ‘well, what’s the point of making something even more happy and upbeat, it’s going to make people vomit.’ And although I make music for myself and then it’s for everyone else once it gets released, I think each album has to be a little bit different from the one before. So I have lots of ideas actually, for the next one.”

So you have made an album that’s romantic, happy, upbeat – how do you manage to do it without being inextricably soppy?

“You see that’s the thing, well I don’t know. I don’t think I am that soppy a person, there’s still a healthy dose of cynicism coming through, even though I am looking into myself because I am a solo artist and it’s quite egotistical and all that, in order to write a song you have to have an ego, and it’s very easy to get schmaltzy, but if you listen to the lyrics, there’s always a little bit of an awkwardness, and I think maybe that’s the key…when you’ve just started seeing someone, and you know you’ve just fallen in love, you don’t want to get to comfortable. And I may not – just because I am not screaming doesn’t mean I am not…I’d rather put something across in a subtle, restrained way. You know?”

Let the words do the talking than the angsty howl?

“Exactly! I mean I think the words do much more talking on this album, than ever before, it’s a little more – lyrically it’s a little more personal, a little more direct. Uhm, I’d like to think that I am living up to the potential that I had always threatened. You know lyrically.

“I’ve always said: ‘oh I am influenced by Roman Carver‘ and ‘I am a realist’ and all this stuff, and before some of the lyrics have been quite surreal. And now, I wanted to do something that was a bit more human.”

If it’s so personal, how does your girlfriend feel about the album?

“Oh, she’s fine with it. She loves it, she’s very happy with it. She knows I won’t take any prisoners, and I’ll always write exactly what I feel, and shoot from the hip. We’ve been going out for like 20 months, you know it’s still a pretty new relationship…I actually asked her to marry me last week. I can’t believe I am telling you this! Ha ha ha! I don’t even know you!”

Onto another topic then…how was recording in Sweden?

“It was cool! We had a lot of fun. We drank lots of wine and whisky and beer, and played into the night…it was a very easy experience as well, it wasn’t sort of as draining as before, it just seemed to fly by in no time at all really. We did the whole album – I think we mixed and recorded the whole album in like three and a half weeks.”

When chatting to Ed during the release of his previous work, From Every Sphere he expressed a desire to record in New York, so why the about face?

“I think if I was to record an album in New York I would record like a punk/funk record…I don’t know. It’s like, for me – well for anyone – it’s very easy to jump on the bandwagon and be a parody, and I’d rather just write really good songs. I just want to be remembered for writing really good songs actually. And who knows if that will ever happen – I have got a long way to go yet. It does feel like I have just started.”

Letting out a deep sigh, Ed seems more contemplative now, more than ever.

“Going to Sweden just seemed the logical thing really, going into the middle of the woods, and it’s faraway from everything else. They’re no people ringing me up and asking me to go for a drink.”

And in a flash, the depricating comic is back: “Oh God, I am so popular it’s just a nightmare!”

So it works better being in the middle of the woodlands then?

“It works better when you’re cut off from society, you know you don’t have to…it doesn’t mean that you’re going to stop drinking or anything, it just means that you can get down to the business at hand, and get on with it really, rather than being distracted by the evils and the vices of the city.”

There are a lot of distractions at home?

“There are distractions, ‘Let’s go smoke some crack!’ No, not really that but you know what I mean.”

Yeah, I didn’t think you hung out in East London…

“Ha ha ha, no I don’t actually. I am a West Londoner, I am not that cool! I am not part of the Hoxton scene. Although I do know a few of the shady characters, just from partying with them and stuff like that, but you know…I am pretty hectic at the moment running around.

“I’m off to Ireland, playing an Anti-Bush gig tonight. It’s actually to get people that are from America that live overseas to vote against Bush, so it’s just to say:

‘Look, we know all most American politicians are wankers, but Kerry is a better wanker than Bush.’ The guy does seem to have a little bit more integrity.”

So, Vote ABB? ‘Anyone But Bush’?

“I like that, that’s good. I might say that tonight. I am going to cover Political Science by Randy Newman, do you know that song? He wrote around the time of Nixon I think, and he’s like, oh it’s amazing, he’s talking form America’s point -of-view, and he’s like [at this point Ed is singing down the phone line]:

Asia’s crowded
Europe’s too old
Africa’s far too hot
And Canada’s to cold
South America stole our name
Let’s drop the big one there’ll be no one left to blame us
We’ll save Australia,
Don’t wanna hurt no kangaroos
We’ll build an all America amusement park there
They got surfing to
And then it goes:
Boom! Goes London
Boom!  Paris
More room for you
More room for me
In every city
The whole world round
Will just be another American town
Oh how peaceful it will be
We’ll set everybody free
You wear a Japanese kimono baby
It’ll be Italian shoes for me
They all hate us anyhow
Let’s drop the big one now!

I just thought I’d sing that tonight because it is so funny – and it is so relevant to now, and it’s 30 years old.”

After a ten minute tirade about American and Australian politics, we get back to the matter at hand, Ed’s new record. Well, sort of:

“Well the only reason I am really in this frame of mind is that I watched the US debate last night, so it was really interesting to watch the both of them.”

Who hosted it?

“Oh God I dunno! Some fucking cunt. They’re all cunts, I hate them all! Well, we try not to be, “We’re going to go down in a fucking ball of flames. Bring on the apocalypse! I am ready! Bring on the apocalypse! I am fucking hell boy!!”

So back on track – the touring?

“I am doing like a European and UK tour which starts on Halloween and finishes on December the 12th, and then I guess I’ll go up to America in January of February, and after that I am hoping to get over to Japan and then Australia. That’s my plan, if I can convince EMI to, you know, give me some money. Get me on a plane. I mean it would be great to get my whole band out to Australia, I have never had my full band out there before, it’s always been just me and Hadrian playing trumpet.”

“I like Australia in general really – people just seem a little bit more laid back. When they’re drunk they do get a little bit mental. There was one guy in Sydney who was like ‘I love you man’ and he kept hugging me and pushing me as well, and it was kind of doing my head in actually, and he started screaming at me, so I started screaming at him back, ad I lifted him up off the ground and started screaming at him. I think he got a little bit freaked out…maybe when people are acting like the clown, and then you act like the clown – they don’t really know how to take it.

“And people, when they meet me as well, they expect to meet some kind of like, fey winsome troubadour, and actually I’m kind of built like a hard fucker. If I do say so myself, and I’ve arms like pop-eye – it’s quite annoying really I’ve got arms like builders arms. I’ve got like farmer’s hands and builders arms!”

And there we have it. Ed Harcourt, thespian in the caste of a brickies labourer – contradiction indeed! Ed’s latest release Strangers is available soon.