Here is the first part of an interview with British musician Thom Carter. For this series, I tried something new and edited the actual audio from the zoom footage. You can find both the audio footage and transcription below. Feel free to follow along with the audio as you read the transcription. :)
London Penny: I'm Kimberly Pool of London Penny Music Mag, and today I will be chatting with British musician Thom Carter, who's a multi-instrumentalist. And he has made an abundance of music throughout the years under many different styles and different names, including March Rosetta, Cave Lions, Black Crown, and Minimal States.
So Thom, if you could describe your music or yourself as an artist to somebody who may not be like, as familiar with your work?
Carter: That’s a very hard question to answer. I think some of my music is songs, folk, some amount of rock, and weird stuff. And then some of it is more synthesizers, electronic music. Usually, without words, yeah, I got into doing both. And it's sometimes combined, but often split apart. So hence the many different artists names that it goes under. But it all sort of comes from the same place, just sounds different. (laughs)
London Penny: What was the first time that you knew what music was?
Carter: I suppose, you know, you hear songs sung to you, you hear nursery rhymes, you know. You go to nursery school or kindergarten and you sing “The wheels on the bus go round and round”, stuff like that. But I don't think I had any interest in it as a thing other than just sound for quite a long time.
I think I was in my teens, and I remember sharing an earbud with somebody out of a cassette player. We would listen to, you know, things that were there in the 90s like Nirvana, Pixies, Radiohead, bands like The Offspring, Green Day, and it was all pretty kind of mainstream stuff. But at the time, it really affected me; it really made those walks to and from school a good experience, and it made a bond with whoever you listen to that seemed to go sort of on, you know, quite deep.
So I guess around then, yeah, just listening to music with other people. Just going places, you know, sitting on the bus or walking. Going into shops - there is a shop in England called Woolworths, which was like a chain store. It's long disappeared now. But I remember going in there, and looking up at the show, where you see the tapes, because it was cassette tapes, that was the thing. And realizing that you could actually take a piece of that music home, and I had no idea what I was buying at the time. So I'd come home with like, one day Kylie Minogue and one day Genesis, you know, just whatever picture looked interesting, or, you know, whatever. So I guess yeah, middle teens 15, 16. And it made me really want to have that feeling more.
So you get into sort of wondering how: how and what goes into making music. And how you can try and try your hand at it yourself, I suppose. A long time ago it feels, but good memories.
London Penny: Would you say that that made you want to record your own music in a sense?
Carter: Um, I think it gave me a love of recorded music. Because, you know, it wasn't till I guess, a little later on - in England, they call them A-levels, like after you go through school - that I wanted to start gigging and, you know, you realize that you can go and see gigs, you can go and see bands. And, you know, your own sort of school band with your mates can also get gigs.
But I think, for me, it really struck a chord that it was recorded music, and I had no idea until much later how you would do that, you know. I ended up with a laptop and a very simple setup and realised that you could record and that got me working out every corner of it, trying to figure out how to do what I wanted to do with that setup. But yeah, gave me a total lifelong love of recorded music, recorded sound of anything, you know if it's well recorded. And then a love of live music and bands, and seeing how that was two halves of the same coin, you know, two sides of the same coin.
London Penny: I’ve noticed on some of your albums that you put out, you put them under like (I don't know if I'm gonna pronounce this right) like Verlaine Records or Self Released Records. Is there a story?
Carter: Not really. I think I became aware there was another Tom Carter. So I changed my name to have an ‘H’ in it. And I became aware that there was a Tom Verlaine. And so it's just, you know, a not very funny joke on that because I couldn't think of anything else to call it. And then I sold the catalogue of the Verlaine Records stuff to a distributor label, so I thought, well, I'll just do my own self released stuff after that. And that was just, again, just a convenient name for it. But you know, to call it a record label is kind of probably pushing the boundaries of it.
But it meant a lot to me. It means a lot to a lot of artists at the moment because there was no record label for most of the stuff that I recorded by myself. It gave me the freedom to sort of use the Internet and places like Bandcamp, I mean, especially Bandcamp, but other sort of distributor sites, you know, you could get your music into the same shop, quote, unquote, as it were online, like iTunes, like Spotify, as anybody else.
I watched that happen, and I think it's nothing short of life-changing, revolutionary for people to be able to make music in their bedroom, or their front room, or a very low budget studio and actually put it up against artists who have got, you know, real labels and real budgets and real kind of, you know, a workforce putting their music in front of you.
So, yeah, that that was my desire to actually call it something, I think, ‘cause I just could see it happening back then that the internet really opened up and still has made, you know, just such a great leveling of who can access music and who can access your music if you don't have a PR team and an advertising budget and all the rest of it. So, yeah, but they don't mean anything more than that. (laughs)
London Penny: What has had the biggest influence on you as an artist?
Carter: I think just growing up, just family life. Not particularly one artist or another for the love of it and not particularly one gig or one record or another. But just coming to appreciate my family very much, after not getting on with them so well when I was growing up. And coming to really like try and temper my anger at the world sometimes, you know, put that into music. To try and take the sort of unequivocal love of a family and the help that they give you, however small, or however much they don't understand what you're trying to do. But coming to appreciate that so much as I get older.
And also just the places that one finds oneself in, you know. I lived in London for a long time. And I found it very hard to feel really at ease and at home. I had a lot of friends and played a lot of bands there; but it wasn't till I moved to St. Leonard's in England on the coast that I really felt I could be myself I suppose. Now I don't live there anymore. But that influenced me enormously to be away from home [and] to be around people who were kind of doing the same thing as me, but in a very small town so you have lots of opportunities to just jam with people and gig and make music and make your own music and have, you know, again, like going to school with people listening to music, living in a place making music with people, I think it's very influential, very inspiring. And that as a whole I think shaped me more than any particular record or song or, you know, learning a particular chord or something like that. So just the people, people in the place gave me freedom.
London Penny: Do you think it is important as a musician to listen and experiment with as many possible genres?
Carter: Yeah, I think genres only really, for me anyway, they come after the fact. You know, I'll just sit down and make something and then I put it in a folder, because it has to go somewhere in your computer. And, you know, then you start thinking, “Oh, well, you know, it's more like a song”. Or it's more like some, you know, bleeping synthesizer. So, in that respect, yeah, it's categorized and genres, you know, are important for that.
But I find when I'm not in that editorial mindset, trying to think, “What is this? How do I categorize it?” And the same with listening to other people's music, it's just all blurring into one, it's just all coming from the sort of same place, it's just whatever's given you some feedback at the time: like, if it doesn't work on the guitar, I just get up, go and play the piano, and then some weeks won't touch that, and then try and make something on my phone out of a synth or something, just wherever you feel like you've got a bit of a place to go, where it seems a little bit more unknown. And then the genre or the style or the name, sure enough fits in later. But for me, it's still just one big mixture at the start. And that's kind of the best place, that's the place I like to be the most I think.
London Penny: Have you had any struggles as a musician?
Carter: Not like struggling like, you know, living on the street. You know, like some musicians really find circumstances so against them. I've always just always just held down some job and funded it through that. I’ve never had any massive struggles, like, you know, other musicians just go down the plug hole of sort of too much excess, too much hard living. And I enjoy that in proportion. But again, I think I've got quite a good kind of, like, way of saying goodbye to all that stuff, and I know it's gonna wear me out and it's gonna get in the way of making the music, so not struggles like that.
I mean, all the time. I think your mind is struggling to not do things too easy. I think that's something which some people I think have quite a formulaic way of writing things, or they have a song that they want to sort of copy. And I don't understand that or do that. I think it's more the struggle to find a focus on something, find a way of collecting all the stuff that's actually in your own life, not someone else's or some other influences, and try and make that stick somehow trying to keep the attention span on it enough and not get distracted by some other new thing that's there or some other instrument that's calling you, but that I struggle with.
And I think my output was much more prolific 10 years ago. You know, now I'm older, I'm sort of not struggling but I enjoy life outside of music so much. I used to be afraid to leave the piano store, you know? Compared to now, you know, I don't mind going to have lunch with a friend or spend a day walking or go camping or something on the weekend. It doesn't make me so worried, I suppose, to have a guitar, not to have an instrument nearby.
So I wouldn't call any of that a struggle. (laughs) It's just figuring out my own quirks and my own problems and trying to live some sort of social life around that. So yeah, but no headbanging struggle. No, I try and live a very simple life, and keep all the struggle stuff out of the way of it, I can see it coming a mile off, and I suppose I go the other way pretty quick, I'll get out of its way, try and keep all of that bad situation stuff far from me. Because, yeah, it doesn't help with life or work or anything.
London Penny: What would you say is your greatest achievement as a musician?
Carter: I don't know if that's for me to say, you know, I haven't won any awards. Or reached, you know, a generation of people and I think that would be an achievement for any musician, but I'm just, you know, a minute part of music, and I don't know if my achievements compare to anybody else's.
If I can make a song someone else listens to and takes something from it, rather than hit the next button for the next song, I guess that's some achievement.
But I think with music once it's out of your hands, that's it. You can't do anything about it. And I've actually forgotten a lot of things that I’ve done, you know. When you asked me to do the interview, and I look back at things I’ve done, and I thought, you know, I'm glad I did that or listened to that or I’m glad I did that. But you know, like I was saying about influences, I think the achievements in life for me are not so much music first. I'm just enjoying, you know, the landscape around me, nature, the animals, my dog. Just not being an absolute awful person I think is the way to go. I don't know if it's an achievement but trying to get on with people and not to, you know, hurt people with needless negativity, needless negative emotions. But now, I don't have a great CV achievements, I'm afraid, just to cut the songs.
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