Love &Hate WITH Del Water Gap

Words by Sam Hetherington

1. The number one thing I love is tinned fish, just because it’s right next to my computer. I love them! They’re tasty, they’re healthy, they’re good for your brain, and they have great art. I was just in Portugal and I basically filled an entire duffel bag with these. I was in the airport in LAX running away from the agricultural dog, you know the beagle that finds you. So that’s number one.

2: I love running. I love running! I like to run with nothing in my ears just the sound of my brain. When I’m on tour it really cleans out the cobwebs, you know, just my flow state, so I love running.

3. I love my Grandma. My Grandma Is nighty eight, her name is Patricia, and we’re really close. We talk all the time. She is the only other artist in my family, she’s a film-maker, and she’s really a hater in a way that’s funny. I showed her my first album, she listened to the whole thing two days before it came out, she goes, ‘I have some bad news,’ and I said ‘what Grandma?’, she goes, ‘you have to start over.’ Then she took my phone out of my hand and proceeded to play a bunch of songs that she thought were better than my songs like Frank Sinatra and Aretha Franklin… I love my Grandma.

4. Speaking of Grandma I love film, I love watching movies, I have a film club that I started with my Grandma and a few of her friends so we watch a movie every week and we talk about it on Zoom. It’s beautiful.

It really became the way that she and I kept in touch during the pandemic and we’ve watched a movie every week since. Films have become a really big part of my creative inspiration too.

5. I love curly hair products. I’m a curly girly as you can tell. I think every curly girly knows that it’s really a journey to find what works for your hair. I think there is a lot of stuff marketed towards us that is not right, so when I find a new good curl product that makes me feel good, makes me feel confident it makes me really happy you know, especially on tour. I feel like skin and haircare is really important to stay sane

6. I love fashion, I got interested in clothes in the last two or three years, I love aesthetics and silhouettes and I love a shoulder and a shoe. A shoulder and a shoe not a shoulder in a shoe. I love a shoulder and I love a shoe and I love the way that clothing affects the way that we move through space and perform. It’s really remarkable to me the difference between playing a show in a T-shirt and playing a show in like a double-breasted suit. It just makes me feel so different. I think about fashion and the lineage of fashion, seeing how everything connects together in a bit of a web of history and creativity is really interesting to me. I just saw this amazing documentary about Margiela that you should see, I’ll send it to you, so good.

7. I love dessert. I think it’s one of the great joys of being human. I truly cannot go to bed unless I have had dessert. I love gummies, Haribo gummies, do you have those in Australia? I love, love ice cream, you know. I really got into classic vanilla, like I was never a guy that would get vanilla but I recently got into it. I feel like it’s really the true test of a brand in the ice cream world, like if the vanilla is good. Love a brownie, love a hot chocolate chip brownie straight out of the oven, so yeah dessert is definitely up there.

8. I love sleeping. I love sleeping late, I can really sleep late, I can sleep until like 3pm. I take bedding very seriously, I have a little eye mask that travels with me and a white noise machine. I’ve been known to fall asleep to a Harry Potter audiobook.

9. I love photography, I think that’s really my second creative outlet on tour, I always bring a camera and a bunch of film. Yeah, I just love taking photos. I look at the world differently when I have a camera in my hand. I’ll notice things. I’ll notice people. The act of documenting life is very transient, very romantic to me, so I like taking photos and then looking back later.

10. I love fall in New York City. The smell, the feeling of the air, the melancholy. It’s when everyone starts wearing coats, so you can express yourself with your coat, you know leather coat, pea coat, barber, the options are limitless. So I love fall in New York City.

Singer, actor and all-round nice guy Marlon Williams is someone whose career seems to be on the up and up. A stint touring with Lorde and a cameo in A Star Is Born will do that to you. Having returned to his homeland, Marlon is homing in on his Māori culture and simply enjoying himself and we were lucky enough to grab him for a chat.

Do you still live in New Zealand?

Marlon: Yeah, still here.

Whereabouts? My mum is from New Zealand. Christchurch. Where’s your mum from?

Napier. I always wonder – what are some of the distinctions between the New Zealand music scene and the Australian that you’ve noticed having lived here and there?