“IN ORDER TO BE INTERESTING YOU NEED TO BE INTERESTED”
David Lawrie is an independent artist who just released an EP launching his solo career. Magda Wrzeszcz meets him to find out what makes his approach to music so strikingly different.
Spotting David Lawrie at London St Pancras station was an easy task. There’s definitely an aura of effortless eccentricity about him, from his homburg hat via suede jacket to rose printed shirt. He greets me with a huge hug and straight away the conversation kicks off as if we knew each other for years and were only catching up. The interview itself is far from ordinary, with about a month’s worth of a build up involving actually getting to know him over emails, Facebook messages and Skype calls. Before we got to the ‘question and answer’ recorded part we manage to visit his hotel in Victoria, have sushi in Liverpool Street (where he demonstrated that he is indeed capable of eating his weight in salmon nigiri) and pop into his friend’s audio book launch in Bethnal Green. Since it’s getting late and all the venues are getting louder, we end up in a shabby pub in Whitechapel where the interview begins to Hues Corporation’s ‘Rock The Boat’ in the background.
Why was it so important to him to go into so much effort beforehand? “I’ve learned that in order to be interesting you need to be interested. That has pushed me to network, get out of the studio, learn the creativities all around me. I started talking to people and I was surprised how many of them had time for me, I didn’t have to pretend to be someone else, in fact I let my guard down.” He’s not just a musician interested in getting his music coveted - he genuinely takes time to get to meet the people he decides to work with to eventually have his own creative posse. The interview is being soundtracked by shutter releases with Keith Wheeler aka eYe $eE y@ behind the camera. They first started to work together five years ago and became best friends since. “If you’re positive people want to work with you and people will be positive to me if I want to work with them. Collaborations come out of a good work and one thing seems to lead to another, it’s fantastic.”
His remix EP ‘Over, Under’, released on a limited edition vinyl and digital download, launched on 22nd February and it marks the start of David’s solo career. This release however is not his first. “I went to university to do Bachelor's in Music Production and I realised that doing the rock star thing is less and less likely” he casually mentions over a glass of whiskey. He decided to learn to engineer and produce instead, hoping it would lead to a career in that field. “Throughout my Bachelor’s and my Master’s I concentrated on arranging, engineering, producing and composing. I made two full length albums as a demonstration of what I can do in all those fields so I can give them to clients who might say ‘We’re looking for an arranger or a producer’ and I can say ‘Oh, listen to this, see if you like that’” he explains. One of those albums, “Liars, Charlatans, Jinxmongers”, got him some attention from the industry, but because of its demonstrative nature it didn’t really represent him as an artist. Since he never gave up on his true love for composing, that became his trigger to start the process of releasing a solo record, and it was heavily interrupted. “I’ve worked with a new artist Marck and the Rodeo Falls, I’ve even worked with David Lines, author of 'The Modfather: My Life with Paul Weller', on our upcoming spoken word piece ‘Parasol’ amongst all other engineering jobs here there and everywhere.” However the start of 2013 was a good time to finally make the solo career take off. “I just thought it’s a new year, we were supposed to die at the end of 2012, that never happened, we’re still here, it’s a new year, let’s go for it.”
David Lawrie’s academic career seems to be coming back in the conversation and very obviously plays an important part in his life. It also has an impact on his music and makes it instantly distinguishable. Instead of bragging about it, he points out to advantages of belonging to academia. “It means that I have access to strictly academic practices, especially in electro-acoustic composition, but I made a conscious decision to apply those techniques to more contemporary popular music. I’m hoping that people will notice that I’m employing techniques that aren’t associated with it.” Having said that, the moment Meat Loaf blasts from the pub’s speakers he straight away confesses “Perfect soundtrack to this interview! ‘Bat Out Of Hell II: Back Into Hell’ was the third CD I owned. I still have it till this day and I love it dearly.”
Meat Loaf opens a list of his inspirations which, apart from John Cage, Phillip Glass, Steve Reich and Erik Satie, also includes Baz Luhrmann, the movie director and author of the cult single ‘Everybody’s Free (To Wear Sunscreen)’. Lawrie’s approach to popular music is very close to Luhrmann’s approach to popular cinema. “I want to provide people with music that’s got more and more layers. If they want to peel away the layers they can find something more and if they don’t - I want to give them a broad outline upfront.” This comes through in composition of ‘Over, Under’ where “every beat is manipulated from the vocal. I don’t know how obvious it is on a first listen but I think the more listens you give it, you realise where things have been reused and recycled.” Pushed to describe his music in one sentence he comes to the conclusion: “I’d like to think that my music is experimental but I don’t release experiments, I release the conclusion at the end of the experiment.”
Releasing ‘Over, Under’ on a limited edition vinyl, which made it to top 100 of bestselling vinyls on bandcamp during its first week, was an important decision to Lawrie. “It’s a collector’s piece and I need a core fan base. I’m well aware of the fact that I need you more than you need me. All the great artists, who I consider to be seminal - Björk, Radiohead, even Pink Floyd - they all created a loyal base of fans who are their patrons. By being independent I want to shake hands with the people who come to me and want to own a piece of my work.” With this attitude his solo career certainly is off to a flying start.
Magda Wrzeszcz
Credit: Photo by eYe $eE y@
