22 Nov. 2020 - an interview with British musician Thom Carter, whose work includes the bands Keylock and Holy Magick as well as a prolific solo career.
You can hear some of his work here:
How did you get into music?
Well, I don't come from a musical family. And I didn't hear that much music as a child. I occasionally heard my dad play Bob Dylan and I have to say I didn’t like it for a long, long time, and my mum sometimes sang along to sort of Leonard Cohen albums and things like that, but they weren't musical and they weren't that interested really in playing a lot of music. But I really came to love their taste. I think it formed a lot of important influences on me later.
But I think I got most interested in music when somebody at the place my dad worked at gave him a little Yamaha portastudio, all-in-one keyboard - so it's got drums and organs and strings, and they all sound a bit crappy. But sitting there on my own, with a pair of headphones, it totally blew my mind and that really engaged me. I didn't understand what music was, I didn't understand what I was doing. But that still remained, you know, it became the seed for an interest in not just keyboards but synths and orchestration and other things like that. And then somebody else gave us an upright piano. And I really, really got into playing that. So I took piano lessons as a kid, up to grade one.
And then foolishly, my parents asked me if I wanted to continue, and you should never ask a kid if they wanted to, you’re supposed to just put them in front of it and they'll do it. And for whatever reason, I said that I didn't want to carry on [with the lessons]. So I just kept on playing. I wish that I'd formally engaged with it a lot more. I came back to written music much later. But that was what really got me into it. Just a happy accident. Same with guitar, to be honest. I sat next to somebody at secondary school, and they had a guitar and showed me a few chords. And it's just pure luck that that person happens to turn up that day. I wish it had been a bit more thought about. But I suppose that's not the good side of it.
But the payoff is that because no one takes an interest in what you're doing as a kid, you're just sitting there doing, I guess, and learning a lot of things by accident which you come to understand why later on when you get more into music theory. But yeah, just happy accidents and finding it a pleasurable thing to do as a kid [and] really not wanting to give it up as you become an adult.
When did you get serious about music?
I don’t know if I’ve ever been that serious about it. It’s the antidote to being too serious. I've never positioned myself as a person who's had a sort of a career. My own personal releases, I take very seriously if you like, but I'm a bad parent to them. I just put them out. I don't guide them in any way. I don't look after them. And I don’t promote them or gig them. And with bands, I've always loved the songwriting and the music and steered well clear of the promotion side as well.
On the session stuff, I'd seen friends get very serious about doing music and approach it a bit like sort of active friends. I'm sure you've been around them at college as well. They've always got an audition and they learn the script and they go in and their eyes are sparkling and they do the thing and maybe they get it, maybe they don't, but. . .it's not really me. So I always found the more I keep it close to my chest in a way the music, that the happier it makes me. The more I try and present myself as like ‘Oh, today I'm a session player,’ today I'm this and ‘today I'm gonna make dance music,’ the more it seems to slip away. So I've always tried to be aloof and the happy fool with music. And I've always been lucky in finding people who are making interesting things to work with, like Aaron [Keylock] and his band with Keylock.
Last year I'd done some session work with Paul Godfrey of Morcheeba for his album. And same with the guys from Alabama 3, I’ve just done a lot of keys with them but never thought of it as a serious sort of prepared career path. Things just sort of happen and the Internet is such a blessing for that because I think it lets you put things out and people can bump into it in all shapes and forms. It's not always a perfect finished product. That's what I really like about - I don't know if they're still called it but - netlabels when I started first releasing music, and I found that there was a really healthy community of people just releasing for free on Creative Commons license through net labels. I think my mindset’s been the same ever since: it's not that I don't want to earn money, I certainly enjoy doing that. For music, it's always a bonus. But the foremost thing in it all seems to be people who were just basically anonymous, you never saw their face, just talked to them by email. And you never really saw their band picture, just listen to them on your headphones. And that to me always penetrated far more than the much more scrubbed-up professional outfits. Because you just have to look at Instagram, and there's a million people and they're all so shiny and new and planned. Amazing, perfect stuff. And yeah, that's serious. I'm not serious.
It’s kind of like you just do it because you love making music.
I don't think there's any other point. It's certainly not a career which anyone with the sane mind who wanted to earn money would choose because statistically, it's just so miniature, the chance of you being able to earn a regular wage. I teach music, and that's been my only stable income from music; sometimes you get nothing, sometimes you get paid. And sometimes you get paid well in it.
It's a strange world economically with music. I think everyone always thinks if you're a musician that you either sort of stratospherically wealthy with crazy amounts of private jets and all that kind of stuff, or you're just kind of a pub have-a-go sort of player, but they're only viewing it economically. I think it's just more about what it does for the person. And that's all I enjoy it for: what does it bring into my life? What does it make me feel and think that I couldn't on my own? And also, how does it let you get along with other people with bands and things? If it brings money, of course, grab it with both hands. But for me, it's mainly just a free form of being and thinking and, yes, therapeutic in the best sense of the word.
Get paid more in experience than in cash, say.
I'm not so much of a hippie that I've turned down the money - everyone likes to get paid. But my reason for doing it, if you like, is just that it does something for me. It feels very natural to make music and I don't see it [the same way] as I think talking to some people I've met along the way who make music, who tend to see it more as either a competition amongst your peers, or as you know, kind of like how the Stones have that song ‘Starfucker’. It becomes like a sort of ladder hierarchy.
And I think it's something that when you start putting that weight on music, it starts to look and sound a bit phony to me anyway. I think that's why I listen very little to a lot of music that's being made at the moment because it just seems like it's putting your face by the big machine. They want you to listen to it. So they get their revenue and they get their streams and the people making it seem like bad actors. And they're wearing the clothes that are hip at the time and delivering the message that the focus group tells them that some group of people with money want to hear. I think it's better to acknowledge the material world but second to the art form - that the art form should be allowed to do its own thing and that your decisions shouldn't be made upon a tightrope of career and anyone else's expectation. It's better just to be a channel and a receiver for ideas, and express the machine will try and just do it. That's my way of looking at it.
You said earlier that you kind of have different projects like dance music, and then the folk acoustic stuff, and then everything in between. It's kind of almost like a vessel. It seems just to get your thoughts out there in different forms.
Definitely. I think I'd be very bored if I just made one style of music. I find it very limiting without growth. Some people do that, and they do it so well. I don't want to name living people's names, but if you think of someone like Johnny Cash, he did basically the same thing all his life, and he's wonderful at doing it. And it's profound music. And you get other people who make music very much in a style, you know, country blues, like Freddie King is just always going to play the blues, but he's an amazing artist at it. And I listened to both those artists with pleasure.
But I think my own personality is a bit more fluid. I think I'm chasing notes that I don't want them to be stuck in a certain idea of like, this is a rock song and this is a rock context, or this is country music, this is acoustic music. I have to say with electronic music or dance music or noise, whatever you make of it, there's a more influential element that comes from the actual hardware from the machines. I have to say that synths and drum machines definitely lock you into certain styles or certain patterns. The machine takes over more than with guitar or piano. It feels just like notes and sounds, it doesn't lock into just being one particular style unless you want it to.
And I think it's why I love listening so much to the Grateful Dead, how they can just in one song go from country, blues, into deep experimental territory, and then funk and then bring it back to where it began again. It's like liquid to a band like that. And I've never been able to achieve anything like what the Grateful Dead are doing. I wish that I could, I admire it so much. But I think just in terms of making lots of different styles of music, there are many facets to your personality and many places that instruments can go and I just don't feel I belong to one tribe of music makers. Yeah, I love the rock scene, I love the rock culture. But also folk and traditional music, classical music, and good electronic music. It all has a place and world music as well. I listen a great deal to that, especially music that goes outside of the western scales, traditional Western methods of composition. Western scales are useful and as fascinating as they are, I love to hear what other cultures have done with music. All of it is good and I try all of it myself.
It’s even like that on your albums like, I'm just gonna focus on the Cave Lions stuff just because I've been making the lyric videos for that. Even on like the Breadhead album, it kind of starts with a more rock sound and then midway it gets more acoustic. So even on your albums, it’s kind of like a melting pot of genres in a sense.
That's right. Yeah, I definitely flick from artists to artists and start a style with what I'm listening to and there is no template. Really, for me, I don't think about making a record and go and write a number of songs and record them. For me, it's more like I just record anything and then try and put it in certain folders for later. And then when enough of it seems to have a similar push or a similar vibe that goes through it, and it sounds like a good contrast to another, then it seems to make its way into being an album. I really miss having my computer and my music because I can't do that of late since I don't have the old sleeping, unfinished material to dip into. It’s just the nature of traveling, isn't it? You just have to be very sparse with what you carry.
When you first started making music, did you think you would have put out as much as you have now, for songs and albums?
That's a good question. No, I actually slowed down a lot for various reasons about how much music I've put out. And in some respects, I wish I could go back and rewrite or redo certain works. So I just choose to leave it all out there as it was when it came out because that was me at the time. And that was what I was happy with at the time.
But no, I don't think I plan to put out a lot of material. I think I could have put out double the amount if I wanted because there's just tons of stuff on my computer. But like I said, in some ways, I could have been more judicious and put out less and had spent more time, but I was just working on my own for solo stuff. I never gave myself a long time.
As it reached the end of putting songs together in an album, had I worked just like as a duo or had I outsourced certain jobs like mixing and mastering to a third party, I think I would have put out much less. And you can tell just by like the output of bands compared to solo artists. How much longer that makes the process. With Keylock, I wish we could have just recorded everything we had in a week and been looking to put that out, but all bands that I have ever played in gestate so much more slowly. And things just happen in terms of literally years for recording and writing and dealing with the after effects of that. And I always made my own music as the antidote to that. So I suppose playing in bands which I thought was slow (but it just sounds that that is the speed that they go) made me release and make a lot of music but it was never the plan. It was more just a reaction to being in too many rehearsal rooms and recording things which I felt were great with bands, which they sat on and didn't release and took ages to release. So now I just think everything I've done on my own has been an escapism from life and from the slow process of band recording.
I phrase this question weird all the time, this happened during the one interview with me, you, Aaron and Jonnie. I said, Do you have any last regards? I was gonna phrase it like that but it sounds better as, ‘Do you have any last comments?’
Oh, well, as you know, music is always so exciting. At the moment, I'm trying to educate myself a lot more to the modes which are just scales but you just start at a different point. Because with the Grateful Dead, I want to know how they made that sound and how Jerry Garcia played the way that he did. I figure [since] he does it every gig, there must be a method that must be way behind it. And MixoLydian mode is the way behind it. So I'm just learning about that. And it's always just so fascinating and exciting.
Hopefully come next year, there'll be some way for bands to start gigging again and that live aspect of it. I don't know if audiences are going to be sitting down and there'll be like five people at tables when we get out. But live performance is always exciting. And I hope at some stage to get a few more instruments and a bit of a better recording setup out here in Spain, so I can continue my own albums. I've been trying to do it on my own phone, but it can be a little bit too simple for anything more than demos. So it's always exciting, always fun, life. No matter what's going on in it, it's always good, at least it should be. So no last regards, just anticipation of good things in the future and more projects of mine, more collaborations with other people, more playing with the Keylock band and anyone else who drifts in and out.
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