Way back in 2010, when Brian and I started the VeryVeryMuch blog which would eventually mutate into Bass, Mids, Tops, I posted a mini-manifesto that posited underground culture “[not] in terms of obscurity, or of extremity, or of being a secret society, or of elitism, or of drugginess – although it can entail any of those things for sure – indeed, as many of the interviews will demonstrate, much of what I'm most interested in took place in mass movements and at the top of the pop charts. No, I mean occult social history1: the underground in the sense of something that people live and move and exist within, in which, slightly hidden from view, our culture is transmitted: not national culture or racial culture or class culture (although, again, all these certainly come into it), but yours and mine, the sort where you can look around the people you're with and go ‘yep, these are my people’.”
All that holds true for what we’re doing here, 13 years later. And that makes David McAlmont a perfect subject for Bass, Mids, Tops and the Rest. Even if it weren’t for the fact that this forms a part two for the interview we’ve already done with his current creative partner Hifi Sean, even if they hadn’t made one of the albums of the year in Happy Ending, he’d be perfect. Because this is someone who’s plotted his own course, whose creativity completely ignores ostensible genre and era boundaries, whose career has been built on personal connections and following lines of musical and cultural influence wherever they may lead.
McAlmont has made indie rock, film themes, high drama, minimalist classical, he’s made big hits and lost classics – and he is now also an art historian of some note, having among other things created a gorgeous exhibition at Hampton Court Palace earlier this year which playfully looked at how standards of beauty are constructed. His voice is one of the great treasures of British music, and he’s a characterful lyricist and above all else possessed of huge stage presence.
He’s also enormously engaging in person. I conducted this interview on the same day as our last one with Colleen “Cosmo” Murphy, and funnily enough, he has a similar way of being so fluent in his ideas that speech tics don’t show up in the moment. I was extremely surprised to find on transcribing the interview that he has a pronounced stammer, because I hadn’t noticed that for a second in conversation. His speaking voice is fascinating, rich with a country burr that combines Norfolk where he spent his own very early childhood and the unique accent of Guyana where he went to school. He is by turns rambling, tangential and razor sharp, and pretty much always extremely funny - especially when he unexpectedly created a nun’s wimple from a t-shirt to illustrate an anecdote. As ever there are interesting subcultural historical intersections - for example the presence of The Boilerhouse Boys as also mentioned by Fabio & Grooverider albeit in a very different context – and as ever some really deep dives into creative process. But anyway, let’s not spoil it – see for yourself… here he is:
How are you keeping David?
Well it’s that grey area between the holidays and the new semester beginning which… I always find that unpleasantly stressful so, ahh, I'm not really having as good a time as I once did I education because it means that all of your creative stuff is suffering because of it, making time for everything is difficult as you might imagine…
Is it your is it your main job now? Is it what you say if someone asks “what do you do?”
No I definitely refer to myself as a singer first and an art historian second – I think it's too pretentious to say that: “Hi, I'm David and I'm an academic” or “Hi, I'm David and I'm an intellectual” I think that's really bogus because I'm not that secure of self… some people really have that swagger or this element of the game whereas I don't – I'm often very unsure of myself and have to check everything before I present anything – whereas if you ask me to sing I can just open my mouth and sing a jazz standard and be really pleased with myself. [laughs]
Oh well I'm sure that that keeps you on your toes if you feel you have something to prove… or does it?
I do often wonder if I create that for myself. I have been a fish out of water for a very long time: I've always been the oddball, the odd one out. So I was the only Black boy in a school when I was at primary school, I was the only British kid in Guyanese schools, when I was in Guyanese schools I wasn't a regular kid because I was a born again Christian... and then when I came into the industry I was doing indie music but I was Black, queer and flamboyant which wasn't very indie apparently and… you know, I suppose that there might be some sort of reflexive, instinctive tendency to keep myself ever so slightly different. So I have two BAs where usually people have a BA and an MA: the first time was performing arts second time was a bachelors in the history of art – but that's because I wasn't convinced that by doing a masters I would get a wide overview of what's going on. So at my school I'm surrounded by people with MAs who are working towards their doctorates and I feel once again like there's a bit of imposter syndrome going on going on. Also they retained me because I'm a singer and they wanted someone to be a consultant in that respect – around performance and audience and so on – but I've studied art history and now I teach art history at the Architectural Association, so yeah imposter syndrome is definitely a part of it so but then I think maybe because it feels quite natural to be a bit of an oddball... I kind of maintained that.
Well, this is super interesting because, as I hopefully explained, we are trying to make this series of interviews about subculture and about belonging and so on – so it's very good to have the perspective of someone who has not belonged to a lot of things. Did you ever want to belong, though – did you ever want to be part of something bigger culturally?
No. I think it's best described as putting one foot in front of the other. There is this constant thing of, on the one hand, people saying “Don't give up your day job,” and on the other hand people say “You've got a great voice and you should do something with it.” When I went to university and did my first degree it was very much a case of “You've got a wonderful voice, you should do something about it,” but then I had lots of people in the church saying “Don't waste your time.” So I left the church and decided that I'd have a go at wasting my time and it worked out really well. But it was like, um OK I'm gonna join a band, what do I do? Look at the back of the Melody Maker, there's an ad, respond to the ad, OK I've been asked to do an audition, pass the audition2, this is what we're doing, OK demos, fine, tour, fine, and then as time has rolled on um… here I am! The other thing I've noticed just about me is that – and I don't think there's any reason why I can’t – but I don't think I've ever approached anyone to work with, certainly not in terms of what's been put out there... Bernard3 came to see me at the Jazz Café, and Craig Armstrong4, David Arnold5 both reached out to me…. um... Sean reached out to me on Facebook, so did Michael Nyman6. But I am a daydreamer – you know, I'll sit down in my house and say “Oh it'd be really cool to work with this person,” and do nothing about it, or make an attempt and then think “No, never mind…” I mean, somebody I'd really like to work with his Philip Glass but have I written an email or tried to find out where he is or anything like that? No. [laughs]
Did you have any models as far as performance goes? Was there anyone you aspired to be?
Well, what am I... born ‘67 so really coming of age, or gaining musical awareness, in the 1970s and the one thing that hit me more than anything else – and it's a very interesting story to tell because there are some people who just don't like it, you know some people are just really dissatisfied with the fact that I don't name Stevie Wonder as the most important influence – but it was Art Garfunkel in 1975 doing “I Only Have Eyes for You.” I was absolutely pinned to the wall by watching this curly-haired man on top of the pops do that to that song with his voice – because I had heard it in Gold Diggers of 1930-something7 first, as part of one of Busby Berkely’s epic routines, epic sequences, but when I heard Art Garfunkel reinterpret that I was completely spellbound. And then my mother's taste was also really important… and so I suppose by paying attention to certain performers I learned and the skill in a certain way, then there's the whole cutting your teeth in the church thing, and not singing for yourself but singing for the glory of God and hoping that you are going to be singing under the anointing at one point - because when someone sang really well and someone really moved the congregation the people would say they were singing under the anointing and more than anything else I wanted to sing under the anointing… and I do often wonder what those people would make of what I do now because it's very... it's not exactly under the anointing. It's not necessarily given to those gospel tropes…
But also I've been very inspired by Tony Bennett and the way that he performs – I've seen him three times and watched him a lot and I like the way that he communicates. I really like the cabaret space I do these live Song Book shows because that's a real my favorite space in this whole performance malarkey is live I like being live much more than I do in the studio the reason that Hifi Sean and David McAlmont has worked so well it's because we haven't been in some windowless room with air conditioning drying my skin out8... Yeah I'm much happier on stage: you get it done, it's over and you go home and then you try again the next time you haven't got something hanging around that people can pan and scan and pull apart. In Guyana in the mid to late 80s what I noticed there was that famous people didn't come to Guyana in South America so we had a local Stevie and a local Luther and a local Whitney and all of these singers who owned that territory – and if you dare to sing a Stevie Wonder song you know someone was gonna have a word with you. “I do Stevie in Georgetown – find another artist!” So I was sunk in secular singing in Guyana because you know, Michael Jackson was taken, I couldn't do Whitney [laughs]… Fish out of water, always.
So you spoke a lot there about the craft, the voices, but did you ever as a youngster think about who these people were? In his interview for us, Jeremy Deller talked about thinking as a child that pop stars were otherworldly, that they actually existed in a different world.
None at all. I remember my sister and I had a religion for a few months or a few weeks scene when Queen were doing Bohemian Rhapsody – you know it just seemed to go on and on, what was it, nine weeks at number one? And every week we'd be there with our t-shirts [he reaches behind him, pulls out a t-shirt, flings it onto his head and with startling deftness forms it into a wimple, then makes praying hands], “Is this the real life?” Every time that was on at number one my sister and I were there going through that but, um now I don't know that I didn't really it wasn't until years later, when they reappeared with “Another One Bites the Dust” that I actually appreciated that Freddie Mercury was a person with agency. I didn't have a fantastical sense of them though, at all – I just enjoyed the music I guess. I remember really liking Tony Bennett a lot because of the picture of him smiling on the cover of his 20 Greatest Hits and for years that was all I knew of Tony until I went to see him live with the Royal Albert Hall decades later... I think that success is selective, I think it helps if you're really nice and if you do the right thing, and if you ruffle few feathers. I think again it's different if you're a man or a woman, I think you can get away a lot more explicit lyrics and so on if you're a woman – if you're a man you can't just listen to Lana Del Rey and Amy Winehouse and Madonna and assume that people will be comfortable with that sexual frankness coming from a male. So all of that is going on all of the time and I feel as if though the music I make, the songs that I write are always kind of outfoxing people, I think I'm an anomaly to many. It's like, “Well who is this guy? What is he doing? How do all of these things combine?” Which is not to say that I haven't combined it creatively well but for tastemakers it's just… “I don’t know what to do with this!”
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