Guy Garvey and I go back a long way. Many years ago, we shared a wee at the Glastonbury festival. We queued at the loos, and had a good natter – he was chatty, likable, normal. Couldn’t have been less like a rock star. It was only later, when I saw him on stage, that I realised who he was.
More than a decade on, I’m prodding his memory. To be honest (and it pains me to say this), he doesn’t recall our little epiphany. I tell him his band Elbow played a spine-tingling version of their song Grace Under Pressure, supplemented by audience members, who joined them on stage to form an impromptu choir. Like all their best songs, it starts quietly and slowly – mellow orchestral rock – building into something epic and transcendent; Garvey’s voice always at the forefront, sweet as a choirboy and northern as an eccles cake. “Ah, that puts it at 2004. I think I was dating Edith Bowman, and she was working for Radio 1.”
Blimey, I say, do you measure out your life in girlfriends? He smiles. “I do. My dad’s got seven children spanning a couple of decades, but he measures out his life by what car he was driving. I measure mine in girlfriends.”
At the age of 41, Garvey has just made his first solo album, Courting The Squall. It’s a lovely affair – intimate, occasionally desperate, romantic, ultimately hopeful. And, of course, it’s about girlfriends. Garvey’s lyrics have always been deeply personal – love, desire, drinking, failure, guilt – but never more so than here.
We meet at a pub in Somers Town, north London. It’s the north-west of England that has inspired much of Garvey’s music, but recently his life has undergone a dramatic change and he’s splitting his time between London and Manchester. He’s a gentle bear of a man; everything about him is big – hands, chin, belly, heart. Garvey says he’s not drinking today because he’s off to meet his latest nephew, baby Elwood, his younger brother’s son, later in the afternoon. Well, he’ll just have a pint of stout to wash down the sausage and mash.
Why has he decided to make a solo album now? “I’m pretty sure it was the 40 thing. Around 40, I thought, wow, I’m officially a middle-aged man. I should do more work. There should be more output than 10 songs every two years. So I flung myself at it.” Elbow are notoriously slow in the studio. And while Garvey says he loves playing with the band, that it’s the thing he’s proudest of, it can also be maddening. “If we were doing nothing else, it would take us two years – and that’s doing five-day weeks. One of the albums we weren’t as satisfied with. We felt we’d rushed it, because we only spent 18 months on it. So I decided to up the output.’’
And can he work faster by himself? “I’ve proved I can. It’s only by virtue of there being five decision-makers in our band.” He does his sums. “Mind you, it took less than a fifth of the time, nine weeks in total, to write and record it.”
So does that mean he’s had it with Elbow? “No, not at all. I see what I’m doing with Elbow as what’s going to define me, full stop, regardless. And I’ve given my entire adult life to it, so I’m not going to stop doing that.”
But it has been liberating, he admits. Where the band painfully craft and debate every layer of sound that goes into a song, here Garvey just went for it. “There’s a vastness to Elbow records, like a cinema-effect to them, and in places, almost a regal thing. This record is more rough and ready.” He’s right: it feels more raw and energised. The opening song, Angela’s Eyes, uses the kind of crude synthesiser that would never pass the Elbow taste test.
Garvey says it has taken him until now to feel confident that he could make a solo album without starting rumours that the band was about to split, or people thinking he had got too big for his boots. But Courting The Squall is also too personal to be a collective project. A couple of years ago, Garvey and his long-term partner, the writer Emma Jane Unsworth, split up, prompting an existential crisis and reassessment of his life. He took off to New York, where he wrote many of the songs on the last Elbow album, The Take Off And Landing Of Everything, which addressed this subject, albeit in an oblique way. While in New York, he made a list of things he wanted to do that he’d never done before, notably write a memoir of sorts (which he has parked for now) and record a solo album.
The title track is Garvey at his most poetic and abstruse. It comes early in the record, and appears to be about a couple losing their way: the woman worried about the passing years and her diminishing chances of conceiving, the man seemingly sunk in depression. But it’s also about reinvention – a middle-aged man starting out again, learning to live and love once more. In Juggernaut, he finds himself staring at a stranger, fantasising about a life with her, while in Yesterday, his evening desires trouble him so much that by morning Garvey, a lapsed Catholic, is saying 10 Hail Marys. The gorgeous, jazzy Electricity, written and sung with Jolie Holland, is about rapturous long-distance love, “fizzing through the lines/from the day into the night”.
It’s eight months since Garvey got together with Rachael Stirling, Diana Rigg’s daughter, and a fine actor in her own right. Yes, he says, things are working out very nicely, thank you. That’s why he’s spending so much time in London. You sense he still can’t believe his luck, and sounds positively giddy about his “sweetheart”. I’ve seen a bit of the forthcoming TV adaptation of John Lanchester’s Capital, and say that Stirling is brilliant in it as the nasty, materialistic wife of a City banker. “Yes, but she’s actually the sweetest person ever,” he says. “It’s official.”
When Garvey says he measures out his life in girlfriends, it’s not quite true. He measures it out in women, not least his mother and five older sisters. He grew up in Bury, Greater Manchester, in a working-class Catholic family. Garvey’s parents were bright, leftwing and ambitious for their children. His father was a grammar school boy who couldn’t afford to go to university, but worked as a chemist at ICI and a proofreader; his mother a police officer who went back to university and became a psychologist. Garvey was named after Guy Fawkes, his younger brother Marcus after Jamaican freedom fighter Marcus Garvey.
His sisters were all high achievers, going into university education and good careers. They also made sure Guy and Marcus were given a thorough grounding in music, competing with each other over who could influence their younger brothers’ tastes more. Gina loved soul, Louise was into folk, Sam was a punk, Karen liked Elton John, Becky introduced him to Peter Gabriel. Garvey’s voice, a mellow tenor that often soars mid-song, is often compared to Gabriel’s, and it’s not coincidental. “I learned to sing singing along to Peter Gabriel’s album So. When you start singing, you mimic your heroes.”
He can remember all the colours, sounds and smells of his childhood – the music blasting, his sisters singing and never walking down the stairs because they were always in such a rush. “They just jumped the length of the stairs, and every five minutes you’d hear this crash in the hall. They’re still manic when they’re all together now.”
Garvey excelled at school, until the age of 12, when his parents split up. He got two GCSEs, and was eventually thrown out of sixth-form college after enrolling three years on the trot without attending classes. He knows his family were disappointed in him. “I’m the only one who didn’t get a cap and gown photo on my mum’s wall. And then I was given an honorary doctorate in Manchester, which my sister Sam was furious about. She worked for her PhD.”
He was always a big lad, but despite his size he was bullied. “I was the tallest in school. But a couple of little shits made my life hell. I had massive, sticky-out ears. Huge. They tortured me about it.” When he was 12, he had his ears pinned back, got his first crew cut and thought he was making a new start. “I went back to school and within half an hour they were singing Holding Back The Ears. It’s kids: twisted, evil geniuses.” He finishes his pint. “Very nice stout this, by the way, mate.”
I order another. He tells me how much he’s looking forward to seeing nephew Elwood, and that on any other occasion he’d be joining me. Well, maybe he’ll just have one more for the road.
For a decade, Elbow never had a sniff of success. Back in 1990, when Garvey was 17 and failing at college, guitarist Mark Potter asked him to join a band with his friends, Richard Jupp on drums and Pete Turner on bass. They were joined by Potter’s brother Craig on keyboards, and began gigging as Mr Soft (a tribute to Cockney Rebel’s song of the same name). Nobody took any notice. They changed their name to Soft. Still, nothing. In 1997, they changed their name to Elbow, inspired by a line in Dennis Potter’s The Singing Detective, in which the fictional crime writer Philip Marlow describes “elbow” as the loveliest word in the English language. The name change appeared to do the trick: Elbow won a battle of the bands in the north-west, were signed to Island records and made their first album. Only then Island was sold to Universal, Elbow were dropped, the album wasn’t released, and the lights went out.
In 2001, they finally released their first album. Asleep In The Back was nominated for the Mercury prize, and Elbow became a festival favourite – their swoony, scarf-waving romanticism uniting vast crowds at Glastonbury and the 2012 Olympics in London (First Steps was written as the BBC’s official Olympics song, while athletes arrived for the closing ceremony to Elbow’s anthemic One Day Like This). In 2008, they finally won the Mercury for their album The Seldom Seen Kid.
Had his family always thought his success was just a matter of time? No, he says; they spoiled him rotten, adored him, but they also thought he was wasting his time. “One of my sisters used to refer to me as the great unwashed. They were very critical of the fact that I appeared to be doing exactly what I wanted, without any thoughts of the future. But I had my band, and I took it really seriously from day one. All the boys did. Which is why we’ve never had anyone leave.”
Was he as smelly as his sisters said? “Yeah. Terrible foot odour problems. Just terrible. Evil. I once came home and my housemate had put a gas mask on my door.”
Garvey’s sisters were right about him indulging himself, too – in cocaine, lots of weed and even more drink. He has written almost as often about boozing as he has about love, and frequently in the same song. Garvey is convinced that the band would never have got anywhere without Manchester’s drinking culture – it was hanging around the Night & Day bar and the Roadhouse, where all the band members worked, that brought them to the attention of the industry.
I ask how he manages to be so productive. “Most of the things I do for a living I can do drunk.” Does he worry about his alcohol consumption? “Yes. I drink too much. The one I’ve really got to watch is whisky. I adore it.” How much can he get through? “I’m ashamed to say I could polish off a bottle without a problem. I could have this conversation after a bottle of scotch.” How long would it take him to drink? “A couple of hours.”
Does the drinking help him write? Garvey smiles. “I used to think booze helped me write. It doesn’t at all. I used to convince myself it was a necessary part, but that’s bollocks.” Nearly all his best work, he says, is done sober. Why did he tell himself he wrote better drunk? “The drinking was all part of the garret, the romance of the swinging lightbulb, the dedicating my life to unpaid art idea. Tortured in my 20s – all part of that.”
He sounds as if he’s being glib, but he isn’t. For years the band didn’t know what direction they were headed, if any. Elbow played dance-funk, and often Garvey didn’t bother completing lyrics because he thought nobody would listen even if they could hear them. But he continued to write, using his sister Becky as a sounding board. “She was always ruthless with her opinions. She would say, ‘I like that, but it doesn’t sound like you mean it’, ‘I don’t like that, it’s too noisy.’ So when one day she went, ‘That’s gorgeous’, it was like, really?”
The song was called September Sometime and, of course, it was inspired by a girl. “I’d had my heart broken.” He laughs self-consciously. “This girl appeared. Beautiful. I was 19, 20, and she was the older sister of a pal, and I just couldn’t believe she was interested in me. I was skinny, spotty, smelly, and I couldn’t figure it out because she was so beautiful. We had a lost weekend in the office of the rehearsal studio where the band worked, then she disappeared, wouldn’t return my calls. Then she came back and did it again. We were sat in the cafe at the top of Afflecks Palace [in Manchester] and I went to the loo, and when I went she scribbled her name in my book, did a paw print and wrote the words “September sometime”. I found it after she had disappeared again. September Sometime was the first song that was written in earnest. It was more soundscapey and had a string arrangement.”
It was also the band’s first properly melancholic song. How does he feel when Elbow are described by detractors as Manchester miserabilists? “Well, it’s not necessarily chipper, but miserabilism? Manchester miserabilism?” For once Garvey is narked, and his voice rises. “They can call it that if they want, but it’s a bit… crap. Look a little harder.” He’s got a point. For me, it’s romanticism that fuels their music. Garvey nods. “I like to think so. Also it celebrates friendship and love and nature, all those things. I’ve never got the Manchester miserabilism thing. But I’ve never got it when people have said the same thing about Morrissey – he’s got shitloads of humour in his lyrics.”
In the early years, Elbow often came close to calling it a day. “We always used to say, if nothing’s happened by March… None of us can remember why it’s March. My birthday’s in March, so maybe it was that. And every time we got to March, we had another recording session booked or another gig on the horizon.”
When they played their first gig as Elbow, they went on thinking it might be their last. But the show was well-received, their EP sold out, John Peel played them on radio, and that was that. “We had our first big piece in a national paper, the Guardian, and it said, in big letters, “Garvey is a master of arresting imagery.” He grins at the memory. “I insisted that the rest of the band and the crew called me a master of arresting imagery for the rest of the day. I wouldn’t answer to anything else. Brilliant!”
That doesn’t sound like the sensitive Guy Garvey of popular repute. Ach, he says, “I was always an attention seeker, and still am.” Really? “Yes! Massive showoff. Imagine the noise in the house I grew up in.”
A few days later, Garvey is back home in Manchester, talking about the title of the new album, Courting The Squall. “The song is about somebody who regularly flirts with danger. I wanted it to be a gentle way of talking about a wreckhead, someone whose recreational pursuits are going to harm them. It’s amazing how quickly that accelerates. I’ve seen it dozens of times – somebody likes a drink and stays out drinking, and then they might have the odd line of charlie, and before you know it they’re in pieces, or accidentally pregnant and they don’t know who the father is, or running the car into a tree and splitting up with their girlfriend, and six months later realising what they’ve done. So Courting The Squall is in that sense of, ‘I’m just a little bit worried about your habits’.”
I quote some lyrics at him. “You’re out with a friend in the capital/I’m a thousand leagues under the sea/ You’re hovering worriedly over your eggs/ And I’m pondering trees.” He says he wrote that a while ago, “but it was a little too tender a spot to put on the Elbow record at the time”.
You sound lost, I say. “Yes, everybody feels lost from time to time.”
Garvey’s been contemplating things since we met, he says – as is his way. Perhaps he didn’t give as full an answer as he should have done about how he coped with failure in the early days. “In my early 20s, in retrospect, I was very depressed, worryingly so.” How? “Just that my situation was horrible. I often pondered sucide. And also that thing young men often have, I thought there was something heroic in it. The way music idols were held up because they were dead, the way Nick Drake was talked about, Kurt Cobain, there was some kind of heroism in it, which is obviously ridiculous. It leaves a trail of destruction. There’s nothing remotely heroic about it.”
Why did he feel so down? “I hadn’t gone to university, I’d stayed with the band, I didn’t have any money. Where I was living in Bolton was poverty-stricken, and the kid across the street was being neglected to the point of abuse. I tried to get involved and could do nothing. It was just a hard time.”
There’s another thing he’s been pondering, he says. He’s worried that he talked too much about ex-girlfriends, when the truth is, he’s head over heels in love now. I assure him that he seems besotted. He’s relieved.
The thing is, he says, he invariably stays friends with former girlfriends, and refuses to think of past relationships negatively. “I’m not fond of the phrase ‘failed relationship’. I don’t see any of my relationships as having failed. Finite perhaps, and they change. But given the limited time we have on earth, to choose to share the majority of time with a person is an enormous act of love.”
He says that after he and Emma Jane separated, the house they made together, where he still lives, became alien to him, hostile even. But now he loves it more than ever. “It’s full of new memories, and old ones that might have been painful become lovely again. They become part of the history of the place.”
I ask if he and Rachael get together with Diana Rigg and knock back a few drinks. He laughs, and says, as it happens, they are going out for dinner tonight. “We’re very good at drinking, all three of us. Yeah. Hehehehe!” Does he get on well with her? “She’s lovely. She’s endlessly positive and cool, and she’s got amazing stories. So has Rachael. Rachael’s got the best stories. So what could be better?”
There’s so much he’s excited about, he says, not least politics. Is he optimistic about Jeremy Corbyn? “Course I am. I follow his fashion. I’m going to bust that blazer out with the patches on the elbow. I’ve got loads of that kind of wardrobe. The more successful he is, the more compromises he’ll have to make, and I hope people won’t be too disappointed when he does. He’s got every chance of being leader of the country. It’s brilliant. It made me very happy.”
Meanwhile, he’s getting increasingly involved in the politics of music, trying to ensure today’s musicians have a chance of making a living. A few years ago, he worked with the Musicians’ Union to get the law changed, so that landlords didn’t need a licence to have a couple of people play in their pub. Now, he’s trying to get the Noise Abatement Act changed, so that residents can’t move into an area and have established venues shut down. On his weekly Radio 6 show, he asks listeners to request songs he hasn’t heard, to boost the profile of little-known artists.
Right now, baby Elwood is staying with him in Manchester and Garvey can’t stop cooing; his brother Marcus has just made them breakfast. Yes, he says, things are about as good as they get. Geographically, he might not have moved far from his early 20s, but life couldn’t be more different. “My brother’s just presented me with a bacon butty. How great is that? A whole eight miles away, with a bacon sandwich of my own.” At the end of the song Yesterday, Garvey sings, “I am reborn/Cause my girl loves yesterday/And lives for tomorrow.” And that, he says, pretty much sums up how he’s feeling today.
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