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Cambridge’s Nick Mulvey prepares for the release of his debut solo album
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20 | May 1, 2014 | cambridge-news.co.uk | Cambridge News
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Nick Mulvey: “It’s not a thinking thing, it’s an instinctual thing” Hailing from Cambridge and blurring the boundaries between jazz and almost everything else, the multi-instrumentalist and singersongwriter is preparing for the launch of his debut album, First Mind. ELLA WALKER finds out more.
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ick Mulvey’s speaking voice has a constant, restless edge of agitation to it. His singing voice though is a richlylayered wonder that loops and grips and draws you in. It’s also just one strand of the Cambridge born singer-songwriter’s arsenal of talents and accolades. Now based in Dalston, East London, the multiinstrumentalist (he’s a big fan of all things percussive), is the son of an opera singer and the grandson of a pianist, he’s supported Laura Marling and is lined-up to tour with London Grammar in June; was longlisted for the BBC’s Sound of 2014, has a degree in music from the School of Oriental and African Studies in London, and is just 26 years old. Impressive, no? He also started out in Mercury Music Prize nominated jazz group Portico Quartet. When we speak Mulvey is travelling back from Cornwall where’s he’s been doing his first round of shows with a live band. His solo gigs to date have just involved him expertly picking at an acoustic guitar, but things are beginning to seriously escalate
for the bearded musician. Since releasing his second brilliant, melodic EP Fever to the Form in 2013, he’s gone from echoey gigs in churches (he played the Emmanual United Reform in Cambridge last November), to turning 150 people away at his last Cornish gig this weekend. He’s even deemed cool enough to appear on the Made In Chelsea soundtrack, so there. Laid back, although sometimes wavering from intense to disinterested, it’s quite a leap considering, musically, he’s notoriously difficult to pin down. “I always find it very difficult to describe my sound because it’s quite limiting putting words on it,” he says thoughtfully. “From my end there’s so much going on, so when someone says ‘put it in a sentence’ it’s like arghh!” “I definitely don’t have a word for it and to be honest, in this day and age when often reading about music is one click away from just listening to it, I don’t think I need to put it in a sentence anymore. People can just listen.” It’s a good point. Throwing yourself into YouTube is also helpful when trying to make sense of his influences, which are just as tricky to track. There’s the stuff he grew up with, “The Beatles, blues music or great songwriters like Van Morrison”, then his teenage years, pumped with “the hip hop and drum & bass and raves I went to”, submerged in years of electronica, followed by “modern classical music and people like Steve Reich and Philip Glass and minimalist music”, while at the same time he was getting into “pop music from Zimbabwe or ceremonial music from Senegal or lots of Congolese music”. He also got “really interested in Islamic music and Moroccan music and Egyptian music”. He sounds like he’s all over the place – how do you distil those influences and find a common ground, unique to you? “Between all this different stuff,” Mulvey muses. “What I like is where
hypnotic and texture based repetitive music meets song and songwriting and song-singing.” The result, after pottering, tinkering and listening to all of that, is his debut full length record, First Mind, out on May 12. He’s been working on it for more than three years, with a lot of the guitar parts in particular “brewing” while he was still in Portico Quartet and playing the Hang – a steel drum type invention that you rarely see bandied about. He left the 2008 Mercury Music Prizenominated jazz outfit, whose album Knee Deep in the North Sea lost out to Elbow’s Seldom Seen Kid, in 2011. “It was a change I needed and wanted to make,” he explains matter of factly. “Even though there are some moments when I miss them, in general it was the right move, it all works out. It was the right move for them as well, they were happy for me to go.” Despite the months of hard grafting, and the pressure of being up on stage all alone without his former bandmates, Mulvey is more hyped than terrified by the prospect of the album release in just over a week’s time. “I’m not nervous, I’m really, really excited,” he buzzes. “I’m very proud of it and I feel like I’ve done my best and when you feel like you’ve done your best then it liberates you from being too nervous because it’s like, well, I’ll get what I deserve.” The name First Mind, he explains, is shorthand for how he develops his music: “I don’t think my way to my music, I feel and play my way to my music. It’s not a thinking thing, it’s an instinctual thing.” He adds: “I woke up one morning with the fully-formed lyric, ‘Why would we ever second guess when we both say the first mind is best’, and I just really liked that and decided to run with it.” While Mulvey struggles to pick his favourite track on the record (“You love all your children don’t you?”), his
ᔡ First Mind will be released on Monday, May 12, priced £8.99, available from all good record stockists.
Editor: Paul Kirkley Writer: Ella Walker Email: ella.walker@cambridge-news.co.uk
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last single Cucurucu seems to have captured audiences, and snagged the most radio airplay. Why does he think that is? “I don’t know really, maybe because of the very honest and open sentiment of ‘yearning to belong’. People can identify with that,” he says, suddenly getting quite animated. “It’s obviously the setting of quite a famous poem by DH Lawrence [Piano] and the way that poem works is he really sets the scene beautifully. It starts with the speaker hearing a woman in the dusk singing, and that takes him back down through his memory to ‘A child sitting under the piano, in the boom of the tingling strings’. So listeners are really following that line.” The song is pretty stunning, building so you get caught up in Mulvey’s nonsensical Cucurucu embellishment, which fizzes and soars but leaves you strangely sad. On why Piano appealed as a starting point, Mulvey explains: “I love poetry, I always have done. It naturally filters in.” As a musical and literary magpie (in his track Nitrous he also borrows lines from Olive’s 1990s absolute dance classic You’re Not Alone), who else is currently on his radar?
Mulvey enthuses: “I’m listening to a lot of this guy Arthur Russell. He’s from New York in the 70s and 80s, he was cellist but he also made disco, and it’s very, very interesting music, particularly an album called Calling Out Of Context.” Scribble that down for next time you want to channel your inner hipster. When it comes to the last gig he went to though, Mulvey’s mind goes blank, disappearing off the line to ask his girlfriend before remembering he just saw St Vincent play in Paris (how do you forget that?) and to rave about London rapper Kate Tempest, a “very awesome artist” who’s been working with Dan Carey, who produced his album. Although he won’t be back on home turf until the Cambridge Folk Festival this summer, and he’s all caught up in this debut album business, Mulvey is still working on snippets of new material. “In a way I’m always writing, to be able to do it at all I think you have to do it a bit every day,” he says. “I’ve got lots of new little bits and pieces coming through.” Hopefully he’ll stay on equally impressive form.