Monday 30 December 2013

Foy Vance brings the Joy of Nothing to KOKO

You hear a lot of talk about “how nice!” and “how humble!” certain musicians are when people talk about them, so it feels a bit futile to say all these things with fear of putting across what sounds like empty words. But what I will say that within ten minutes of walking through the maze of stairs to the dressing room at infamous London venue KOKO, Foy Vance has already poured me a gin and tonic, and as we sit in the back room with the window open he apologises for smoking about ten times (I’m trying to quit for a bit, after picking up a horrendous chest infection, and I assure him it isn’t his fault when I erupt into ugly fits of coughs every couple of minutes).

Foy Vance is a singer-songwriter from Northern Ireland, and in this past year he’s released much acclaimed album, “Joy of Nothing”, toured with Ed Sheeran, and collaborated with Bonnie Raitt. Tonight, he’s in London for a sold-out gig, in the middle of the UK leg of his tour.

I want to start off talking about the album, and Foy explains that he started writing a lot of the songs that are now on the record when he was living in London, but the inspiration really began the moment that his train pulled away from Euston, when he moved away.  “It was when I moved to the Highlands - you know what? I booked the house, unseen, because I was told where it was and who owned it and all that and I thought, that's going to be alright, so I put the deposit down and thought, I'd better go up and see it. So I got on the train at Euston station. And that journey, that change in scenery... I felt that this weight of city life was starting to settle the further north I got. By the time I got into the Highlands I was in love already, and I'd written the first lyrics of a song called "Closed Hand Full of Friends" and that was the catalyst to the record. The journey to the new record started before even getting there, but it was only when I got up there that it all came together all of a sudden.”

His move to the Highlands was an escape, after finding no comfort in the city where so many artists go to find inspiration. The title of his album, “Joy of Nothing”, refers to the silence and peace he became at one with, when re-settling in the Birks of Aberfeldy. “There is a nothingness up there - a beautiful nothingness, a simplicity I think. And I think I was feeling pretty complicated - to quote Annie Lennox - in London. It was like, I was touring all the time, trying to facilitate the London life, because living here's so expensive. I found that I actually wasn't enjoying London. The reason to be in London is when you can appreciate all that it is. It's one of the most amazing cities in the world, but all I was getting was the stress and the traffic and the to and from the airport and crowded trains, and paying for a house you couldn't swing a cat in. I just had enough.”

He says that we don’t spend enough time in silence, by ourselves, and points out to me how noise is something that it’s so hard to escape. “We're sitting here now and we're engaged in conversation. But I can hear the buses go by,” he says, gesturing out of the open window, traffic jams through Mornington Crescent, going down to Chalk Farm Road, there’s the occasional ambulance, or car alarm, in the distance and always a faint hum of machinery. “I can hear people talking in there,” he indicates to the lounge, next door, “but there's something about being in Aberfeldy, or anywhere where it's quiet, being in silence just focuses you. It does me, anyway.”

But Foy’s roots are not in Scotland – he grew up in Ireland, the son of a travelling preacher. “It was by the sea, by the water, which is a different kind of thing all together, even if you've got the city and all the signs of mankind behind you, you still look out to the sea, out to nowhere, and where does it go? I wonder, if I just went that way, where I'd end up. So I loved that growing up. Especially on Bangor Bay, because the boats would go out there and I'd see them going by and think, where are they going?”

I ask if he sees stories like this in everything. “It was beautiful. I remember just thinking having that sense of travel with me, if being born by the water had helped that, I've always had an affinity with the natural elements more than anything else.”

Leaving London, he says, has helped him not only to find inspiration but be creative in an environment far from the heart of the music industry. Yeah. You know what, not to put too fine a point on it, but it honestly felt like I'd moved from the humdrum of the industry to the haunts of the ancient bards, because that's what it's like up there, you know what I mean, people go there to write, and where I live's quite an artisan area, a few galleries, and a guy that's trying to reinvent tweed... or not reinvent, but he's a designer basically, with a little tweed shop. There's furniture makers, there's guitar builders, an old nineteen fifties art deco cinema, it's a lovely wee spot, and you feel that when you go there and it just makes you want to create.”

Foy also collaborated with Ed Sheeran on album track “Guiding Light”, and toured all over the States as Ed’s support act – arenas full of screaming girls being a very different experience to his normal shows. “It’s not what I'm used to at all. I mean, until that the biggest names that I'd toured with were people like Pete Townsend or Bonnie Raitt. Actually, The Who is a bad example because people go mental at their concerts, but Bonnie Raitt - you go to her concert and people sit down and they're there for the music and nothing else. The celebrity element doesn't come into it, it's about music, it's all about music. That's what I've kind of always strived for - a music loving audience. Because there's something... again, silence, at a gig, sometimes I get finicky about it when people talk or shout out during songs and I don't mean to be a prick, I don't mean to be a pretentious little twat but it's just cause I think music works better in silence, because then you can play with dynamics and go places that you just can't go if you're working with a constant din. At Ed's gigs, they were great fun, and I had a ball, and it was great to get to know Ed better. He's just a solid heart, a really good guy. But the gigs were just a different thing, I played to the people more than I played music, really, and had fun.”

However, he doesn’t want his audiences completely silent necessarily – people singing along is something that he finds very unifying and special. “I get people to sing a lot - well not a lot, but for a bit, and I like that, I like that when a room feels unified, but I also like it during quieter songs or whatever when you can disappear into your own little world and you know, almost forget that they're there, finish the song and open your eyes, hopefully they've enjoyed it as much as you have. But in saying that, very often when I play in Dublin - it always happens in Dublin - they just sing. Everything. And it just changes the gig, it's lovely. It's lovely because it makes it kind of... it makes it as if you're all in a band together. So I guess you've just got to take gigs how you find.” Silence, however, is important, both in his performance and his day to day experiences. “I like to be on my own as much as I can, because I think it’s good for you. We don’t spend enough time by ourselves.”

The show that night in sold-out KOKO is a beautiful collaboration of joyful unity, loyal fans singing along with lyrics like it’s a gospel church, and moments of complete silence, nothing but the music filling the room. Highlights include a special guest appearance from Foy’s ten year old daughter, Ella, who plays percussion excellently during the jovial and majestic “Closed Hand Full of Friends”, an angry and heartfelt rendition of “Janey”, which Foy dedicates to his friend Janey, who is in the crowd tonight. He pays amendment to Lou Reed, covering “Take a Walk on the Wild Side” and asking the crowd to “doo-doo-doo” as he declares, aloud, “Dear God - If Lou Reed isn’t in Heaven, I don’t think any of us want to go there.”


He ends with “Guiding Light”, once again, asking the crowd to sing along with the refrain, and they do – a continuous repetition of a thousand voices chanting “­When I need to get home, you’re my guiding light, you’re my guiding light.” And the most magical thing is that they carry on, long after he’s left the stage – in their seats, in the foyer, and out in the street.

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