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Interview
by SashaS
1-8-2001
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| Ed Harcourt |
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Something In The Cans
Album 'Here Be Monsters' is like a great novel, in bad need to be re-read
The best music should be like great novels, fictionalising life to understand it but it is unfortunate that often fails so miserably. Luckily for the minority of listeners there is always someone who stands up to the standard and he, justly - for once, has been nominated for the Mercury Music Prize and there is little doubt that Ed Harcourt's debut album 'Be Here Monsters' should win it.
Harcourt valiantly defies the shallow remodelling of the parental bedsitter-blues know as - acousto-rock as well as the sonic facelessness of highly sexed-up images. He has songs that appear to be of the easy-aural-digestion type and has the looks of archetypal teen-pinup but that is deceptive: Harcourt songs are passionate, driven, aggressive and he's been known to have smashed a piano or three and has described himself as a "Yngwie J. Malmstein of the piano!"
Ed has a sense of humour and can talk about emotional monsters, inapt relationships and ghostly imagery. Backed with some strange musical solutions, like 'Beneath The Heart Of Darkness' -- guitars kicking in, rhythmic fury and all-sides lashing.
"That's the one that divides people," Harcourt calmly observes, "some don't get it and some people get obsessed with, which is brilliant. That's' what music should do, polarise people, make people think. Music should be about diversity, it should be brave and ambitious and not homogenised, packaged, as it's been of late, becoming insipid, clone-songs performed by marketed robots. I'm glad to challenge it."
"I'm a magpie"
Son of a diplomat, young Harcourt lived around the world attending schools where he had no time to form friendships that caused his imaginary world to grow instead. It was almost inevitable that this 23-year-old would get hooked on music and has got a cache of 300 songs and continues to write furiously, already planning another album that is going to be about ghosts, darker and stranger than the present debut.
Harcourt's influences are all over the place, from "Obligatory Tom Waits, Randy Newman, but also The Cure, Todd Rundgreen," he lists with a knowledgeable smile. Even Billy Joel has been mentioned when 'Shanghai' is discussed although it is nearer to Paul McCartney's Wings period.
"Perhaps but I've never listened to Wings; to me it is more ELO (recently reformed Electric Light Orchestra) and that's fine. It is my character, I'm like a magpie, and all that is reflected in my music. There are some great contemporary artists and I like Elbow, I love Super Fury Animals and Simian."
Magpies are indiscriminate in their collecting; what strange influences are stored in his nest?
"Songs from 'West Side Story' and 'Wizard Of Oz', these kind of songs like from the film 'The Jungle Book'; then, classical music and it is normal, I've been trained as a classical pianist; thirdly, it is more visual, literature and poetry, films like 'To Kill A Mockingbird', some designs."
These wallet years
According to Colleridge "The world is a vast heap of littleness" to a man without imagination but having it is not a sign guaranteeing mental stability. Young Harcourt was convinced the Swedes were spying on him through a bathroom wall in Stockholm while his father was on a tour of duty in the Viking's backyard and laughingly dismisses it by saying that he recently played there without any emotional trauma.
His commercial breakthrough is lagging behind his critical acclaim but the Mercury Prize jury has wisely shortlisted the album. And winning it also means a 20 thousand pounds cheque.
"If I won it," he says with a mischievous sparkle in his eyes, "I'd offer it to Atomic Kitten. I know it is not enough but it might be just the start of a fund for them to give up music! They are very sad and the world would be a slightly better place if they never made another record. 30 years ago, and I'm too young to remember it but I know, pop songs were written by people and were clever, fun and yet amazing songs that defined culture, society for the difference from now when everything is strategic, so planned, demographically driven. There is hardly anything natural and people don't know how to handle real music anymore."
Let's hope Ed Harcourt launches a re-learning process, as we can't think of anyone better, right now.
SashaS
1-8-2001
Ed Harcourt's 'Here Be Monsters' has been released on June 25 on Heavenly/EMI
Tour:
12 September - Wedgewood Rooms, Portsmouth
13 September - ULU, London
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