In Discussion with Dave Rowntree on his Debut Solo Album, 'Radio Songs'
Interview by Tiara Grace
Fans of the British indie-rock Blur will recognize Dave Rowntree in his longtime position as the drummer so it comes as no surprise that music is forever embedded in Rowntree’s life and takes over most of his work day. Yet he still found time to put together his most recent release, his debut solo album Radio Songs which debuts on January 20.
As a drummer, singer-songwriter, film music composer, occasional animator, and definitely won’t forget to mention that he’s a Labour Party councillor. A solo album debut seems like it would take a seat on the backburner but in conversation with Rowntree, it seems like it’s actually been a long time coming for this release. He keeps himself busy as an industry veteran and multi-hyphenate who continues to stay focused on his goals.
Rowntree’s aforementioned album features tracks such as “London Bridge","Black Sheep”, and “Volcano” with most of the tracks inspired by lifelong musings, daily inspirations, and seemingly random occurrences. Even in the age of streaming and the ability to share instant reactions, you can sense that he knows how to intertwine his return to his childhood roots with a familiar sound that helps set his album apart when listeners are able to hear the tracks for the first time.
Ease Up: You're known for being the drummer of a well-regarded British band [Blur], and I know that you have been working on some solo work for a while now, so I want to know what was the inspiration behind putting out your solo album?
Dave Rowntree:I think the inspiration was well, I've been a songwriter for a long time, since I was a kid and putting them onto a record and putting them out took some kind of confidence, and that came really from my film music career. I've been doing that for over eight years now. That's gone quite well. I've got quite successful at doing that. That gave me the confidence to think, “well, why don't I do something with these songs like I mused on doing for all these years?” and there it probably would have stayed, but for COVID and the two lockdowns we had here, in the first lockdown, I was still making film music, so I carried on working through that, really. The second one, though, the film industry had ground to a halt entirely, so I found myself sitting in my studio, really, with nothing to do, and Leo, the producer, who we both decided at some point it'd be great to work together, but we never actually got round to it. He found himself at a loose end in his studio, so we thought, “Well, of course you can't make a record in two separate studios.”
DR: We thought we would at least do some preparatory work, see how, you know, we could set things up so that when we could get back together again, we would make the album. And inevitably, as Nightfalls Day, within six weeks, the album was finished. Turned out to be a ruthlessly efficient way of working. We would get together in the morning and divvy up the tasks of the day and then both work in our separate studios, hopping files back and forth when necessary and it could be nice to do things. It seems obvious now, but it didn't seem likely at the time, but we moved twice as quickly with two studios than we would do with one studio. That was it, really. I had the motive and had the opportunity, like any good musical murderer.
EU: Yes, of course. It sounds like you've been sitting on these tracks for a while, like these groups of tracks. I know you spoke about how COVID expedited it, but did you start writing it way prior to COVID and came into COVID with all of these tracks ready to go?
DR: Some of them are older tracks that I'd written some time ago and never found a place for. The rest, yeah, I wrote some of the before COVID. When I decided to do something, I took some time out and spent a couple of months just writing. And so the rest of the bulk of the tracks really were written in that short period.
EU: Nice. So I want to call out a couple of singles that I listened to. Obviously, “London Bridge” was the most notable one. I really liked “Devil's Island” and “Tape Measure”. I wanted to ask you about “London Bridge” and I saw that it's been kind of covered a little bit more recently. When you were writing that track, what were you thinking of when you were getting into basically putting that out and putting that into this album specifically?
DR: The idea came, really popped into my head. Pretty much fully formed. I usually try and spend the day before I do a writing session, if it's a co-write, coming up with ideas that you turn up with something. And so I sat down the day before, after lunch, pen in hand, book open in front of me, and nothing came. And it was incredibly frustrating. The more I struggled to make something work, the less they seemed to work. And I went to bed. Pretty disputed that night. Had to get up early the next morning, got the tube over to see Gary, who I was going to do the writing session with. Embarrassed, really. I was going to have to turn up to this session. It's quite rude to turn up to a writing session with nothing. I have no ideas. I'm sorry. I've got nothing. I was on the underground. I looked up and on the opposite wall there was a map of the Underground. And right in the middle it said London Bridge. And into my head popped Launder Bridge far, far from the edge. The words and the tune and the chords kind of fully formed.
DR: That was how it started, really. That was the germ of the idea and then I had to figure out what I wanted to sing about and I chose to sing about a couple of times in my life where things seemed like the universe was trying to tell me something. Once, when I was a kid, and I had a weird experience with a particular number, I lived at that number house and I caught that number bus to get to school and then everywhere I looked, I started to see that number and it was like the universe was screaming this number at me and I knew what that was. I knew it wasn't the universe trying to scream a number at me. It's a psychological phenomenon called ‘confirmation bias’. One of the most studied psychological phenomenon there is, and responsible for many of the things that people think are spooky in life because you tend to notice things that confirm your idea that something spooky is happening, and you tend not to notice things that don't confirm it but I would see the number, the particular number, I would go, “Well, there it is, it again.”
DR: A number that wasn't that number. I wouldn't go, “Hang on, that's not that number that counts against this theory.” That's the way our brains work.
EU: Yeah.
DR: And it happened again later in life, bizarrely, around London Bridge. I was at university in London and every time I saw it was near London Bridge or something connected with London Bridge, spooky things happened around me. Again, it seemed like the universe is trying to scream out London Bridge at me, which is presumably why I saw it on the tube map opposite. But the interesting thing about both those experiences was I knew what was going on. I knew that the universe wasn't playing tricks with me, it was my mind playing tricks with me. But that didn't make the effect any less powerful. So that was what I decided to write the lyrics about how your mind can play tricks on you. And using the example, “London Bridge” actually ended up being about a particular instance rather than that in the generality, because that was quite hard to get across. But anyway, that was the genesis of the idea and that's what I developed it into.
EU: Wow, that's awesome. Yeah. And I feel like that song, when I first heard it, when I was listening to all the treks, the one that stuck out to me, and now I'm knowing the story behind it, and now it really makes a lot more sense as I listen to it. You talk about also, you appropriately named this album ‘Radio Song’. So you love radio and you kind of talked about that. You said the music it sounds like you've got a radio tuned to some static and you spin the dial and the song pops out of it. What part of your childhood made you fall in love with this?
DR: It's always been a constant in my life, radio. My dad introduced me to it really. He was a radio engineer in the Air Force when he was young, and so he learned his love of electronics doing that which he carried with him throughout his life, and he passed that on to me. And so where some dads might go fishing with their sons or go to football matches or whatever, he and I used to sit around the kitchen table with soldering irons, designing and building radios and then plugging them into antenna we had in the backyard and spinning the dial and listening to the stations pop out. So it's been a kind of constant in my life, really, radio, in all kinds of different ways, but it's kind of radio technology that I'm in love with as much as listening to music on the radio, which can be all right, can be the most infuriating thing ever.
EU: Yeah, definitely.
DR: So, yeah, that's kind of what it's about. The idea is as I did when I was a kid, I had a radio by my bedside and when I was supposed to be asleep, in fact I would turn this radio on really quiet and spin through the dials. And on long ways especially, you can hear stations from all over the world and I would dream they'd be exotic music and sonic languages. The stations in different parts of the world kind of textually feel different as well in a peculiar way. So they're probably less so now. This was like the 1970s where poorer countries had cheaper equipment and so kind of felt more analog and the stations from America and Western Europe felt more expensive and more processed and more compressed. But anyway, that idea of lying awake at night spinning the dials and dreaming of these exotic places all over the world and wondering what they were like that's what the record is supposed to be. Originally, I was going to do that very literally and have static in between the songs, have the songs pop out like a radio station pops out when you tune it in.
DR: I thought that was probably a little too on the nose, yes to it really. I did use, as well as the radio stations hopefully being interesting. There's also a lot of really interesting noise in between the radio stations for all kinds of reasons. Some of it's naturally occurring noise, some of it’s noise. Some of the static you can hear in between the stations is the echoes of the Big Bang, is the echoes of the formation of the universe. Other sounds with thunderstorms and naturally occurring phenomena. Also there are machines talking to other machines. They make particular noises and people communicating with other people but via nonverbal means that could make all kinds of noises. So I recorded hours and hours of all this different sound in between the stations and used that as the texture underlying many of the songs in various different ways. Sometimes it's obvious like some of the songs start and finish with radio noise and other songs I cut it up and used it to make instruments out of, especially percussion instruments and things like that. I tried to give back to the radio spectrum what I got from it.
Some of the joy I got from radio, I try to give back to the ether somehow.
EU: I definitely can when I was listening to it, I heard that and I really enjoyed it and going into that, because I watched some of the visualizers for some of these tracks. I watched “London Bridge.” I'm wondering, since you have a film score background, do you have any insight or perspective into creating those visualizers? Obviously when you think of radio you don't think, “Oh, there's going to be like a visual attached to this.” What's your perspective?
DR: I just look for interesting ideas really and especially for London Bridge I stumbled across that there's a French trio of artists who make videos, but their USP, if you like, is that they make everything in the video from scratch. They have a camera, which they buy. Everything else in the video is what they have made, and I really like that idea. I'm kind of that sort of person as well. A lot of the technology underpinning the album I made, I still build things with a soldering eye and so it's some of the equipment in my studio, stuff that I've made. And so I thought that really fitted in really well with the ethos under which the album was made. And they came up with something so amazing, it still boggles my mind the amount of effort that went into it and how beautiful the creations they've made are. So that was that. One other time, I just kind of cast out the net to video makers and filmmakers just to get some ideas, really, just to see who's got some interesting ideas. There's a woman called Megan Yaxley who's done a couple of them and I hope to work with her a bit more going forward.
DR: she has a really interesting animator and kind of combines drawn elements with digital graphics in a really interesting way. Which one? It was now one of them. I just simply Googled videos, music videos sent to one of these sites where people just pay people a couple of hundred quid and they do it from their bedroom. There was this one guy in Pakistan who just seemed an extraordinary artist and the way he worked seemed really interesting. He wanted me to send him photos and drawings and anything I could think of, and then he digitized it and had a really lovely eye for color with the whole thing. And he's just this guy in Pakistan. I mean, I would never have met him otherwise. It's just amazing that in this connected world now I could just reach out to people like I used to with the radio. Now you can do it in a much more connected way. Just again, it just felt right. It seemed to fit what the process of reaching out to him and the way we worked together seemed to fit in with the ethos of the album very well. And I really liked what the video he ended up doing.
DR: So yeah, it was an interesting process, I think, given that it was about a year between finishing the album and the first single coming out, though. It's amazing how these things are always done at the very last minute. Yes. Even though I had a year to do these three videos, they were all just ready on the day they were needed. Yeah, I like to get around that, really.
EU: Yeah. I feel like that's very common in this space. It's cool though, because the visualizers are like they really help inform the music, obviously, and it's very helpful, especially for me. I love listening to music, but I also like seeing something to help complement what I'm listening to. So. Yeah, I think I really enjoyed “HK”. Was that the one that you were referring to that you might have?
DR: Oh, no, “HK”, that was Megan, the first one Megan did for me. And she said, what do you want it to be about? And I said, well, that song was written originally in Hong Kong. It's a very different track now, but the original song came from Hong Kong. I said something about the Hong Kong skyline. She said, Leave it with me. Didn't hear anything from her until suddenly the day before it finished. Let that be good. Real trouble.
EU: Yeah, I like that one. That's cool to hear then, too. Another question I had, because I know, obviously this is your debut album. Is there any track specifically that you think people who already know you, who have already heard your music, would really love? Like any specific track?
DR: That's hard to say. I find it difficult to get into other people's heads like that. My favorite song on the record is “1000 Miles”. Is that one you've heard?
EU: I think that was in the recording, yeah. In the track list, yes.
DR: So that's a love song. It was written towards the end of the writing process and I was getting more confident in my lyrics, I was being more direct, I was getting the confidence to make myself be a bit more vulnerable in the writing process and show a bit more of myself. So it's a love song to my girlfriend and I really like that. I'm a sucker for a tune, even my own tunes. I think I'm really happy with how that one worked out. I think that one, we're going to try and sort of release it as a sort of feature track. Not really a single, but sort of a feature track after the album comes out, because I think that one deserves a wider listenership.
EU: Yeah and speaking about that, since you have a little bit of time before it comes out, what have you been doing to keep yourself busy? Have you been, like, anxiously waiting for people to give feedback or what have you been doing now?
DR: I've been doing press pretty much full time for three weeks now. And I've been saying all along, well, it's okay, when the album comes out, that'll be it for press, so just get it all out of the way now. Turns out that's not true next week as well. Okay. I'm playing a show on the release day, so I'm just setting up to rehearse that now. But it's been an incredibly busy time, to be honest, I haven't had much time to myself in the last couple of months. Well, certainly since the autumn, it's been pretty much full on since we started releasing singles. There's been stuff to do every day, meetings to be had and with Blur, we have teams around us that we've built up over the years. But with this project, I'm starting with Scratch, trying to build those teams up. Even that takes time, meeting people and trying to start work with them, seeing if it works out, and if not, you got to find somebody else. All that's terribly, incredibly time intensive. So, yeah, it's been pretty busy. Busy when I'm not doing anything, which is rarely at the moment, I'm studying for an astronomy degree with the Open University.
DR: So that's what I laughingly calle spare. Time is spent doing, working and educating.I love learning, so I've always got something on the go like that.
EU: My concluding question is, do you plan on coming over to the US and performing here? What's the plan for this album?
DR: I sincerely hope so. We've got, obviously, Blur is back on the road this summer. I was originally planning to take the album out on tour over the summer, but that will have to be postponed now. So the new plan is hopefully to get a few festival dates amongst the Blur ones. But my main focus, my solo career, is to finish album two and get that out in the spring of next year and then spend next spring and summer touring both records. That'll be the plan andI sincerely hope I can come to the States.
EU: Yes, that would be really awesome and I'm glad to hear you're doing another album, so I'm excited for people to hear it and then expect another one.
DR: Yeah. Three albums in three years. That's the plan. We'll see. We'll see what happens but I think that's doable. That's the same goal I set myself.
You can follow Dave on Twitter, Instagram, and listen to his music on Spotify. You can also check out the visualizers for the singles in “Radio Songs” on his YouTube channel.
