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Purple Rvolver caught up with ginger-haired, singer-songwriter Newton Faulkner backstage at his Liverpool show to have a chat about the current tour, free nude pictures and where he’s been for the last three years.
Purple Revolver: You’re finishing up the current tour, how’s it been going?
Newton Faulkner: It’s been amazing actually. I’ve been really pleasantly suprised by the hunger and the response to the new stuff, it’s been so much better than I ever thought it would be.
The set-list I wrote for the first gig was kind of my dream set-list. Loads of new stuff and I thought let’s start there and then I could chisel back once I’ve done that and see where the lines are, but it hasn’t changed.
PR: How have the fans reacted to all the new songs you’ve been trialing?
NF: Better than I hoped, because I was convinced that I would have to cut some stuff but I haven’t done anything to it at all.
PR: There’s been a three year gap between the album that’s coming out in July (Write It On Your Skin) and the last, what have you been up to?
NF: Literally I haven’t stopped. I’ve just been working solidly, it’s been mental, because I did all the groundwork for a release last year but the label weren’t ready to do it.
So I went back again and re-wrote and improved on the material.
I feel like between the first and second album I hadn’t changed much, I just had a good time and that was it and there’s only so much you can take away from that, it was just travel, gig, travel, gig and that was it.
PR: You’ve started a family since then as well, has that affected your approach to the new album?
It’s changed my brain and in a lot of unexpected ways. I take way less crap than I used to.
On the first and second album if something I wasn’t happy with make it on to the album I wouldn’t be happy but now if something production wise or lyrically makes it on then I’m convinced that someone is going to play it and be like, ‘This is your death, I’m going to beat you up for this’.
PR: The singer-songwriter genre has gone mainstream with people like Ed Sheeran and Michael Kiwanuka, how do you feel about being talked about as an influence for those younger guys?
NF: It’s brilliant, there’s loads of really good stuff going on. There’s always good music, it’s just whether it makes the chart or not.
But going from the release of the second album, wbich was at the height of grime to the way everything has moved over the last three years is interesting.
It’s werid being cited as an influence though, that does make you feel really old.
PR: You have a Facebook reward app available online, what’s the deal with that?
NF: It’s just an incentive system, if there’s 25000 people and we get to a certain target everyone gets a gift, free tracks, videos, naked pics that kind of thing.
Is that right? (asks manager)
(Agrees)
Drugs, especially for kids! Can we delete that? No it’s never in drug form, just tracks and videos.
PR: Your gigs are quite interesting, with lots of chatting with the crowd and playing around, is it easy being a singer and entertainer onstage?
I get right in there. Some of the gigs have got out of control it’s just descended into a big chat.
We’ve had two or three actual Q&A sessions, because one person has asked something and then I’ve asked if anyone else has anymore questions and it’s just gone from there.
Every instrumental player has to have a couple of stories and that was what I was really into.
They had to be pretty good at talking because there are no lyrics, so it was play a thing, tell a story, play a thing, tell a story, and I think I kind of absorbed that.
The more tired I get I will play forever and it’s because all my filters don’t work.
Sometimes I look down at the set-list and I think ‘I completly ignored that’.