NOX Meets: Will Varley
2000 Trees Festival, 2018.
In an increasingly divided world, English singer-songwriter Will Varley never fails to bring a room together. Authenticity, humour, and a contemporary twist on folk set him apart from the rest; his ability to have an audience howling one minute and sobbing the next a welcome change from today's regurgitated chart music of spectacle rather than substance. Varley’s weathered songs open discussions rather than distract from them, the track ‘To Build a Wall’ more relevant than ever in 2019…
Q How would you describe your sound to those who haven’t listened to you before?
A That’s always a very tough question. I was asked this question the other day and I ended up thinking about…music is, the whole idea of it is that it’s something that transcends words, so it’s a funny thing to try and describe it. I guess it’s kind of, schizophrenic awkward folk music…with a twitch of country.
Q How do you find that one thing in your work that really resonates with people?
A For me, it just starts with my own meandering experience and I don’t ever try to concentrate too much on the experience of listening to the song. I tend to just write whatever I feel at the time, it’s great that people are taking those moments that I’m putting in for me, and having that resonate in their own lives. It’s kind of the whole point I suppose. But ultimately in terms of how I do it, I do it for me. I’m very selfish for a songwriter.
Q I’m a huge fan of your book Sketch of a Last Day, so of course, I made friends read it too. We both picked up on the exact same phrase, something about the sort of the grey evenings after school when your parents make you do the washing up. It’s so vague but so specific. How pick up on those universal experiences and feelings?
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A I’ve just had a baby and I have a studio set up in my basement where I’ve been tinkering around and having a go at writing some new stuff, it’s still to me as unstructured as a process as it was when I first started writing songs. I never really know how it's going to come out, or if it’s going to come out at all. That’s the scary bit. And certainly, when writing something like a book, you go very much into yourself and into your own head and hope something comes out.
Q What kind of process was the book for you?
A The book sort of felt like it wrote itself. I wrote it before I wrote my first album, I was playing a lot of music in various bands across South London. Then I kind of stopped and I felt like I didn’t want to do it anymore because it was becoming something so far removed from what I’d originally intended and what I enjoyed doing, which was writing silly songs and singing them. Writing the book, again, was very selfish and a cathartic kind of therapy I suppose. I just wrote a load of stuff that was on my mind, and from doing that, I started writing songs again. It had this weird tennis effect after I finished writing the book, I started writing songs again. And that’s how I wrote ‘Advert Soundtracks,’ my first album.
It felt really natural. With songwriting, you’re trying to make everything as small as possible in a way, with a song you’re trying to get everything into these tiny couplets and rhyming schemes and all that sort of stuff. It’s a bit like Tetris. But with a book, suddenly you have this wide open space, a canvas where you have enough time and space as you need to write what you want to write.
Q Do you think you’ll ever write another one?
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A I’d love to! Absolutely. With writing a book you have to throw yourself into it, you can’t just do a little bit here and there. It takes over my whole life. After I finished writing Sketch of a Last Day I went to a festival and I heard voices in my head. Because when I finished writing the book, I’d been working on it solidly for about 6 months, so when I finished I had all this spare RAM in my brain and I heard these voices of the characters talking to me, it was terrifying. I thought I’d gone mad. For me, it completely took over my whole being, so I’m not quite ready to go back into it at the moment, especially after having a baby. Probably wouldn’t be a great thing to be sitting around hearing voices in my head. But I definitely will at some point.
Q In the current political climate, do you think there needs to be a revival of the protest song?
A Well, the protest song never went away, political music and politically motivated music has always been there. And it’s always been around, there’s always been young, new singers, songwriters or bands. Artists making political work. I think all that’s changed is the way those kinds of acts are promoted and how easy it is for them to gain the exposure they would have had back in the 60s and 70s. I’ve done interviews where I’ve been told what I can and can’t talk about. I think that’s a pretty sad state of affairs, major news outlets where politics is off the menu in songwriting and discussion. I think if we want to revive the protest song we have to look at how we’re consuming music and our attitude towards it. It’s become a little bit of a cliche, people will roll their eyes at a political songwriter, and that has to change if we want it to revive. But it’s still there, it was never gone.
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Q Do you have a song you feel embodies the spirit of 2000 Trees Festival?
A Seize the Night for me, I’ve played this song here three years in a row now. That song for me is about trying to make your way through the madness of it all and find these pockets of light, of hope in times where you feel like there isn’t any. For me, in terms of 2000 Trees, it's a group of people who have found some light in the fields amongst the darkness. The lights go down and we’re here for the music and the spirit of humanity, it’s wonderful. What a place to be…
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Click here to see where you can catch Will Varley next, or here to read Sketch of a Last Day for yourself...
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By Hannah Nicholson-Tottle
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