Newton Faulkner tells Charles Hutchinson about being filmed for 24 hours a day as he made his Studio Zoo album.
ACOUSTIC guitarist, singer and songwriter Newton Faulkner likes to experiment.
After writing much of his third album, the chart-topping Write It On Your Skin, on a boat on the Thames, the Reigate musician entered the pop history books by streaming the recording of last year’s Studio Zoo album 24 hours a day for more than five weeks from his home studio.
“I am as excited as I am terrified by the prospect of having a house full of cameras film me while trying to record an album,” he said at the outset of the project.
The album was released through RCA last autumn and will be supported by a 23-date February and March tour. Dates include his February 19 return to York Barbican, where the guitar man with the rust-red dreadlocks made his debut in October 2012.
Earlier he had played York’s Grand Opera House in 2009. “And I think did a house concert at York when we did the Pop Up Tour. That was great fun, playing to as many people as you can fit in one room in someone’s house,” says Newton.
Wherever he plays, he believes “a gig is never wasted”. “The third album had just come out when I did those shows and I was still learning the songs, and the best thing at York was the crowd, which was so loud,” he says.
Don’t crowds become nervous in such small numbers in compact surroundings? “I just take a nervous crowd until they submit to me,” he says.
No nerves gripped Newton when the four cameras were switched on to stream his recording sessions for Studio Zoo, when he applied the remit of “making the album before your very eyes; no tricks, no producer and no engineer; just me, a guitar and a few surprise guests”.
“That’s the kind of bizarre experience I like,” says Newton, who turned 29 last Saturday. “It started out as a very simple, very small idea; the kind of thing you have in a radio studio: just a screen, and it wasn’t going to have sound, and it would be just me for an hour each night, because I thought that what’s the label would say I could do.
“But when we took the idea to them, they said, ‘No, it’s got to have sound’, so I thought, ‘OK, that changes things’, and it just grew and grew from there. Four cameras; two in the studio, two downstairs. You could watch my sleeping face.”
Newton had written the material with his brother, Toby, in advance of the live streaming sessions. “So we knew what we wanted to do, though there were a few songs where we weren’t sure how they would turn out, and some came to fruition but others didn’t.” he says.
“In My Head was one we thought could be too weird but once we recorded it, it’s now me and my brother’s favourite. It’s gloriously bizarre.”
Faulkner fans logged in online to follow every detail of the ups, downs, dramas and laughs of making an album, not least for guest appearances from Mumford & Sons bassist Ted Dwane, The X Factor contestant Janet Devlin and South East London singer Andreya Triana.
Of course he warned his guests well in advance that they would be filmed. “We wouldn’t invite them to the studio and not mention it was going to be streamed, would we?” he says.
When Newton reflects on how the cameras and the timescale of six days allotted by the record company impacted on the recordings, Newton concludes: “I think it made the album lie somewhere between a studio album and a live album in its vibe, because it wasn’t just a recording to a microphone and computer. It was also a performance to people who were listening, so that added another dimension to it.”
Plans are afoot to release a DVD from the streaming sessions “at some point”. “But because of the size of the project, the editing is going to be rather hard,” he forewarns. So watch this space for further news.
Making the album such an unusual way was nothing but beneficial, reckons Newton. “The sound of this record was something that people had been waiting for from the first album onwards, because the main criticism had been that my albums were too polished by comparison with the live shows,” he says.
“I’ll be honest. The reason we did the albums that way was to get on the radio. Just me and the guitar wouldn’t have worked on the radio for the first album.”
By albums number two and three, Newton had become much more involved in the production side of making a record, hopping back and forth between Los Angeles and his purpose-built studio in east London for the third one.
“But I still haven’t established any pattern of recording,” he says. “I’m still trying to find my recorded sound, though Studio Zoo is perfect for my stripped-back sound. It’s very airy and sounds very real, like I’m in the room with you, playing my guitar and singing.”
In which direction might Newton’s sound travel next?
“Now I have to look at a more built-up sound, as soon as I can find something that works on every level,” he says. “So I’m going to slow down for the first time to think about it.
“I’d love to do more stuff with Cornelius, who I wrote Won’ Let Go with on the second album. He’s very strange! This way I’ll be repeating the pattern where I do something that’s completely bizarre and I’m told it ‘s too extreme, but I think I might just take the gloves off again.”
• Newton Faulkner plays York Barbican on February 19, preceded by Leeds O2 Academy on February 15. Tickets update: still available for York on 0844 854 2757 or at yorkbarbican.co.uk; Leeds, gigsandtours.com
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