ED HARCOURT
Ed Harcourt tears up the London A-Z, bringing visions of the apocalypse, culinary advice and his trusty 1930s army chaplain’s pump organ.
The resurgent artiste gets On The Road in East London and… East London? Read on for a full explanation.
“IT’S A PARADIGM SHIFT! OR WHATEVER YOU WANT TO CALL IT.”
In May this year Ed Harcourt took part in what he describes as “the most English thing ever”. Gathered in a rain-lashed residential Chelsea street, the singer-songwriter, his extended family and various nobs of the food and publishing worlds witnessed the unveiling of a blue plaque celebrating cookery writer Elizabeth David, Harcourt’s great aunt. “It was very funny,” he grins. “It was raining so heavily, but they kept on doing these speeches about her legacy. Brilliant!” Tonight in east London, Harcourt is enjoying a somewhat compromised celebration of his own. Having just released sixth album Furnaces after a three-year gap, the man who sprang to attention with a series of pianodriven, poppy yet surrealist indie albums in the early 2000s is beginning his latest live campaign with that oddest of gigs: the ‘in-store’. As the 200-strong crowd squeeze in among racks at Rough Trade East this humid August evening, the performer admits to pre-show nerves and sweats. “I always get self-conscious playing record shops,” ventures Harcourt, pacing pre gig. “When I see the people who work here I always think of High Fidelity and presume they’re going, ‘Who’s this idiot coming to play here? I wish we had the Canadian math rock band from last week again.’” Fortunately, the staff turn out to be appreciative, though Harcourt has one more hoop to jump through. Having just made his most expansive and involving record yet, he’s playing Rough Trade as a loop-pedal-aided, one-man band. Unrehearsed. “I haven’t practised doing these songs like this,” he confesses. “It will either fuck up, or it will work. It’s all about hitting the right pedal with force at the right time so the loop doesn’t go out of time, because if it does you look like a total cretin.” His footwork proves faultless. Using just keyboards, guitar, programmed beats and a reconditioned, 1930s army-issue chaplain’s pump organ, Harcourt rebuilds Furnaces’ songs from scratch. The minimal set-up effectively exposes the
dystopian concerns the Sussex native has woven into his latest record, with the intimate performance investing melancholia and frenzy into Harcourt’s ruminations on the dark side of the male nature. The jagged Loup Garou and the bewitching/menacing Occupational Hazard prove brittle yet brilliant, while the emotional embers of the title track are stoked with a primal howl. “I wrote these songs after the birth of my last child and a lot of it comes from a concern for future generations,” he explains later. “But it’s not just, ‘Woe is me, it’s the apocalypse.’ I’m not trying to do a Muse – no offense to them, they’ve pretty much got the apocalypse covered – it’s more a rumination on the origin of the apocalypse, and how far we’ve come towards it.” It seems there is hope, though. During the performance, the explicitly doom-laden Last Of Your Kind actually bathes the shoppers in warmth and optimism with its love-at-the-end-ofthe-world message and a starring role for the pump organ. “It’s amazing,” says Harcourt of his vibrating wonder, later. “It was made for military chaplains to sing hymns to soldiers in the field, so it would have to sound optimistic, wouldn’t it?” As for his unrehearsed performance,
Harcourt declares that catastrophe was averted. “It was a half meltdown, half experiment. It was good. It’s really important to expose the songs and to deconstruct it in this way, though the next show will be very different to what you saw tonight.” Though Harcourt’s next scheduled gig, at Shoreditch’s Village Underground, is just half a mile away, it takes place a whole month later. Part of the reason for this journey in time but not much distance, and the cause of the delay between records, too, is Harcourt’s decision nine years ago to hire himself as a songwriter. He’s worked with the likes of James Bay, Paloma Faith and Sophie Ellis-Bextor, and even plays a show with the latter between his two gigs. His successes in this field meant that though Furnaces’ songs started to be written in 2011, other bills-paying work plus a self-inflicted, studio-based trip down a production rabbit hole also held him up. Harcourt believes the delay was a blessing, however: his skills improved and he’s releasing Furnaces on Polydor, having self-released all his records since leaving the Heavenly label a decade ago. “This is a rekindling, a new chapter,” he suggests. “It’s a paradigm shift! Or whatever you want to call it.” The Village Underground gig is certainly a change of gear from playing in a record shop. At Rough Trade Harcourt exposed the heart behind his new songs, while in the cavernous east London hall he celebrates their vibrant souls, performing every track from Furnaces backed by a band that includes Primal Scream’s Simone Marie Butler on bass. The appropriately woozy Dionysus ponders the flaws of being the god of wine with swooning strings, while on windswept Antarctica, an ode-cum-cautionary tale about escaping society, Harcourt delicately balances hope, fear and wisdom. The breathless Watching The Sun Come Up from 2003’s From Every Sphere raises temperatures during the encore, and shows what a durable and evolving songwriter he is. Indeed, it feels like Harcourt’s career might be about to echo his great aunt’s (see sidebar), as after a period in the wilderness he too is changing tastes. “It’s really gratifying to have worked your arse off for 16 years, when it feels like it might be paying off. There’s definitely a second wind to it,” Harcourt muses. “Or maybe I’ve just been in a 16-year lull.” Whatever, he’s clearly cooking now. Paul Stokes