Youth = Martin Glover: Happy to be Challenged

For many years, an interview with Martin Glover, commonly known as "Youth," has been on my "must do" list for Tape Op . With the release of Gina Birch's debut LP, I Play My Bass Loud , which he produced for this former member of The Raincoats, I got a chance to pick Youth's brain about life in the studio, playing bass in Killing Joke, remixing, collaborating with Paul McCartney (The Fireman), and even co-producing Pink Floyd.

How did the album with Gina Birch get going? I assume you knew each other from a number of years back.

Oh, yeah; on and off. I saw her do a show at the Idler Festival in 2018. She was going on; she did a double header with Vivian Goldman. I'd already started working with Viv on her album [ Next is Now ]. I saw Gina do her show and was totally knocked away. That's still one of my top ten gigs I've ever seen. It was so visceral and disarmingly honest. Right in your face, no filter. Pure expression and dealing with difficult subject matter. Immediately after that show I said, "I'd love to work with you." She took me up on it and started sending me some demos a couple of years later.We did one in lockdown, "Feminist [Song]," which I did remotely. She sent me the stems and I and added bits to it while I was in Spain. I mixed it and sent it back. It was good fun. After lockdown we got together in London, and I started going through all of her home recordings and demos. We based most of the album on those, and we did a few new ones at the same time. It all was very much a home recording situation. I've got a nice home studio here. I've got my 22-year-old son, Jake [Glover], living with me who assists. He's a music maker. It was still a bit of lockdown, but I didn't have an engineer. So, I had my son assisting, and then I did the rest of the engineering and recording. At the end of that, I got Michael Rendall, my main go-to engineer and mixer in, and we added a few other little bits. Then I mixed it. It was really straightforward. I enjoyed it, because it took me back to the '80s. I'm 62, so born in 1960. In the mid-'80s, I was just the right age. I'd gone through punk as a teenager. I'd gone through Killing Joke. I'd had a fair amount of recording experience and production, and I'd been programming Fairlights [CMI (Computer Musical Instrument)] for another producer. I'd just set up my first home studio around '84 or '85 in my spare bedroom with a Greengate [DS-3] sampler and Iconix software on an Atari [computer], a couple of keyboards, a couple of basses, and a little 4-track. I started writing songs there. The serial number on my Iconix software was 0015. I was only the 15th person who bought it. I was quick off the blocks with that technology.

Was that early MIDI?

MIDI was a bit earlier. I remember recording Killing Joke's first couple of singles, and it was pre-MIDI. We had to do the sequences with a slap delay. But then there was MIDI, so I could start using MIDI and I got an [Akai] S900 sampler a few years later. With that, I was writing so much and making beats. And I immediately started a record label, WAU [What About Us]! Mr. Modo Recordings, and producing projects in my bedroom. That was the beginning of The Orb [with Alex Patterson]. Some of that equipment I shared with Jimmy Cauty from The KLF. We'd been working together in my previous band, Brilliant. We quickly started having hit records with those home recordings. I found a great management company, Big Life, and they immediately started getting me to work with Coldcut, Yazz's first album [ Wanted ]. The first single we did with her, "The Only Way Is Up," was number one for 13 weeks. The phone didn't stop ringing. The remixes I was putting out on WAU! Mr. Modo was kind of proto-Goa trance, acid house, or proto acid house. DJs like Andrew Weatherall, and some certain Goa DJs, were picking up on them, but they weren't that commercially successful. They were so good that people were asking me to work with them and do other work. In hindsight, I think a lot of that was because I was one of the first kids doing that and I was quite young. That led to me doing a lot of remixes, mixes, and productions. Then, around '91 or '92, my manager, Gordon "Jazz" Summers, said, "Oh, you've done enough of this electronic dance music. We want you to work with this band, Crowded House." I was like, "Why? We're doing so well with the dance music." He said, "Yeah, but dance music's not that well respected. "

You start off playing in bands, then you become this proto remixer, and then you're producing bands!

Yeah, it's a strange journey. Also, I didn't stop doing dance music. I expanded my spectrum of what I could do. My manager was a visionary. Most producers are narrow gauge. They do one kind of music, and they just hammer that. I didn't do that. I was doing folk, classical, and all kinds [of other genres]. Initially I got a bit of a problem with that. People thought I was a bit of a jack of all trades, master of none. When I started having success in so many different genres, I got repped for being a successful producer. I got offered loads more range in what I was offered to work on. It was great. I understand that if you're going to be an international producer of respect that you can't just do electronic music or one tiny niche. You need to go into a bigger league. Certainly, working with Crowded House and [Paul] McCartney and people like that elevated what I was doing. That peaked at the end of the '90s with the Verve's Urban Hymns , especially the hit "Bitter Sweet [Symphony]", and many others in between. It's been fantastic. I've always tried hard to retain a naivete about what I do. I read a thing about Charlie Parker saying that he knew he was ready when he could play three jazz songs in every key. I totally admire that level of musicianship. I admire Glyn Johns' [ Tape Op #109 ] level of engineering and those amazing engineer/producers. But I've never aspired to that. What I like about what I do, and I sense a big part of what other people like about what I do, is the punk aesthetic of naivete. When I say punk, I mean more like Syd Barrett, really.

Sure.

A post-punk aesthetic, where things are stripped back and simplified to their essence. Doing things that are wrong, making mistakes, featuring them, and putting the wrong drums with the wrong bass. Experimental. That's where I'm coming from. Despite all the success I've had, I still retain that naivete, mainly from still being a fan. I still buy records and go to gigs. But, also, I've never wanted to get so involved in deep with the engineering or the technical elements where I forget what I'm doing with the song, or what I want to hear as a fan. That's easy to do as an engineer or producer, getting lost down those rabbit holes. It's a perennial rub with my engineers, because they're intuitively trying to up their game technically. I'm like, "Well, sometimes when we do that it doesn't always sound 'better.' Sometimes it's better when we keep it simple and raw." It's about finding that balance. But I've worked with Pink Floyd, co-producing The Endless River , so I know what exacting perfectionism is. I like that; I like working with artists and engineers who go that deep sometimes. I also like riding that wave of cutting-edge; what's going on now.

If you put Gina's record up next to TheEndless River , they're completely different sonic worlds, right?

Absolutely. But not if you put her record up against a Syd Barrett solo album. Syd and early Floyd were almost a proto-indie aesthetic. That's what I was going for. Gina was a central pillar of post-punk and an influential artist. I wanted to honor that by not overproducing it.

We saw that era of late '70s and '80s, where records could get a little too slick.

When I worked with The Orb, there would be 200 or 300 tracks; it was like Pink Floyd! That's definitely the other way. Even with The Orb, sometimes we did things simply. It's wherever the song is demanding we go that I tend to follow. I try and rein those things in, because I did go through the '80s, and I had major deals as an artist with producers spending five days on a snare sound and recording all the drums. By the time we'd get to put bass and guitars on it, I couldn't tell what it was. We'd never heard it played with everything. We'd only hear it finished when it's mixed. It used to drive me nuts. They'd always say, "Oh, we're doing this to get better separation." It actually just made the producer's life easier to do it like that, because he wouldn't have to move the mics. He could do all the drums in one go. I've done that myself a couple of times and regretted it. These days I go back to a '60s template of people playing in the room; we go for that performance with the engineer, and we cover it. We've got a good signal; everything sounds great, and we can replace it if we want to. Essentially, we're recording that invisible magic performance that you can't replicate afterwards with overdubs. Having said that, I love Steely Dan. I love [Pink Floyd's] The Dark Side of the Moon . I love albums that have been made meticulously in that way. I've only worked with Trevor Horn [ Tape Op #89 ] once, and he's legendary for that. It's a bit like I love Sergio Leone movies, because he never recorded sound on set, and he always had [Ennio] Morricone do the soundtrack first. That allowed him to sound design the soundtrack properly in a studio, where every sound and every Foley sound he could push up or down. Control. I get that.

I always felt that a lot of inspiration for the way you work comes from dub mixing. Experimenting, muting, and taking parts out.

Absolutely! From the age of 16, living in West London, surrounded by Jamaican sound systems and dub sessions, that was an absolute revelation for me. It went hand in hand with punk at the time. It all fit the aesthetic and vibe. The deconstruction of dub, courtesy King Tubby and Lee Perry [ Tape Op #136 ], absolutely revolutionized it. Also, at seven years old, my dad brought back [The Beatles'] Sgt. Pepper's… , and I got totally immersed in that. Those were the records that showed me what one could do with sound in terms of facilitating an inner cosmic journey.

Taking the studio to another place, instead of just capturing sounds.

Yeah, and it bled into conceptual art; the whole deconstruction and creating by taking out elements. They say art is generally 20 or 30 years ahead of music, in terms of where they're [both] at. Like now, we're still getting our heads around sampling, which, when it happened, was radical. Today people accept those concepts fairly readily in music; but in the '80s, it was very controversial.

Do you feel like doing remixes allowed a freedom to apply that experimentalism?

Absolutely. It was just, "Reimagine this song in a way that you want to hear it." It was all about me being the audience, and asking myself, “What do I want to hear?” An orchestra without a conductor, or even a conductor that's a committee, can be absolutely awful. You do need that one person at the top of the pyramid saying, "This is the vision." I enjoy doing that. I have got a vivid imagination, and I can visualize what I want to hear and then be able to create it. Also, I work a lot with random processes, where, in some remixes, I would randomly pull out six records and go into the studio without even looking at them. I'd get to the studio, I'd find a sample from all of them, and I’d start constructing a track out of that. Those were the cards that came up that day. I like that.

We all need limitations of some sort to make a project move forward.

Yeah, it's a very Zen thing of limitless possibility or a strict discipline and limitation.

With Gina's record, you were taking raw materials from her recordings she'd done at home. Was it similar to doing a remix?

A little bit, although she'd already defined the direction a little bit. I was exaggerating that or developing that. Sometimes it was more arrangement and getting the beats right. A lot of the songs were long narratives that didn't have choruses. Finding the chorus, then creating a chorus around that phrase, or getting an arrangement that allowed you in and kept your attention. Sometimes when you've got a very strong narrative, you're working with artists like Gina where the lyrics are meant to be heard, like Leonard Cohen or someone. The arrangement's super important, because with that amount of concentration on the narrative, I find it creates fatigue in the listener's ability to retain a focus or a connection. Arrangements become important, where we'll have a little instrumental refrain, or there's a chorus that we've come back to before that lets the listener know where they are. All of that can help keep them engaged.

You mean information overload, lyrically?

Like Leonard Cohen. I don't always listen totally focused on the lyrics when I listen to music. At some point, I will follow that narrative; but, more often than not, I'm listening to the sound of it and the emotional vibe. I'll navigate from there. Once I'm in there, what I am listening to is like reading a book. It's fatiguing on your concentration levels. When you're listening to the vibe of a song, like "Breathe" from The Dark Side of the Moon , you don't have to listen to the lyrics. The lyric is there. It's the sound and the atmosphere that envelopes and carries you along.

There's space between the words.

Yeah. You can have long instrumental passages and it doesn't matter. With someone like Cohen or Gina, it does matter. You do need to be paying attention to what's being said, as well as the atmosphere. The arrangement becomes critical then, because if the arrangement doesn't facilitate that then it puts the listener off, and they stop listening. What Gina does is almost like spoken word. She doesn't even have a melody, sometimes. It's just the narrative. I've been working with Allen Ginsberg recordings recently, for the Ginsberg Estate, and I did this epic piece, "Iron Horse" – this 40-minute spoken poem. I did an imaginary soundtrack to it. Especially with Ginsberg, which is very amphetamine poetry, I had to breathe this in, where your mind could go into neutral for a moment, cruise, and then go back to the narrative. I've worked with a lot of poets, so I have my theories about that. The John Sinclair album [ Beatnik Youth ] I did was similar, where he was doing beat poetry, but, again, I had to arrange it so that we had choruses that were sung with backing singers to give a break from the narrative.

Right. Speaking of breaks from the narrative, Pink Floyd's The Endless River had one traditional vocal-led song on it, and a lot of instrumentals. What was that process like? I know Phil [Manzanera] and David [Gilmour, Tape Op #138 ] had sorted out parts before you got in.

Well, that's right. Phil had been on it for a few years. The album was in four sections: four ten-minute tracks. They gave me the multitrack of the first part, which I thought was the whole album. They said, "Arrange it. Do what you like with it." David's brief to me was, "Make it sound like us," because it didn't really sound like them at the time. It was the '90s recordings that actually sounded a lot like The Orb in a weird way, using sequencers and loops. I got rid of all that, and I turned that ten-minute section into a 40 minute album. When I played it, David said, "That's great, but that's only the first track!" They still laugh [about that], actually. We ended up using lots of sections from that and developing those sections into other tracks. It was a recurring issue, the vocal thing. Nevertheless, two of my favorite Floyd albums, Meddle and Obscured by Clouds , were very experimental and free. I was thinking of that. It was hard to get the one vocal that we did get. In the end, David was like, "That's fine. That's all we need. That's all I want." We left it at that. My inclination would have been, "Let's get some more vocals!" I quite like that we didn't, in the end, because it made it a bit more intimate in a way.

It's like an elegy or a coda.

I think it's a requiem to Rick [Wright, Pink Floyd's keyboardist], because it's all featuring him, mainly. It was an incredible experience for me.

I imagine.

And I've always been a bit hard on myself, so even when I was having a lot of success in my 20s, I thought, "Oh, I don't know how I'm getting away with this. I don't know what I'm doing. I'm faking it. I'm making it up as I go along." Of course, now I see that as my greatest strength. My naivete, again. Back then, it gave me a lot of insecurities and paranoia, because I've never been trained, musically. I've learned a little bit of music theory at school. I learned trombone a bit. I started writing songs. I could play guitar at 13. But I never had done the academics with the engineering or production or anything. It was only when I worked with Pink Floyd that I thought, "You can call yourself a producer now."

It only took a few years to get there. [ laughter ]

Now everybody's a producer, so it doesn't matter! I like that. I love the Joseph Beuys idea that everybody's an artist. Everybody has that within them, and it's a great quest to find it and realize it if that's what they choose to do.

True. Speaking of collaboration, you did The Fireman project with Paul McCartney.

Again, that was a real privilege. It wasn't a Paul McCartney album. It was a Fireman album, and I was in the band. It meant I could go a little bit further than my remit as a producer and really direct it. We could go very experimental. On the first album [ Strawberries Oceans Ships Forest ], you’d be hard to ever work out it was Paul McCartney unless someone told you. He's playing 90 percent of the parts on it. That's in the tradition of him and his avant-garde history. By the time we got to Electric Arguments , I was like, "Well, we've done all that. Let's do that, but harnessed to some improvised, great songs." We would write, record, and mix two or three songs a day, and it would be a six or seven hour day. I'd start early. I would get in at 9 a.m. and create four different soundscapes: Usually beats, basically, like a hip-hop thing from samples or whatever I felt. He'd come in at about 10 or 11, and he'd go, "What have you got?" I'd play him four things and he'd say, "Oh, I like that." We'd start developing that, build it up, and then I'd take the sources out, if there were any, and develop them further. He'd go, "What about this one?" He'd get straight on it and do another. We were doing cut-up lyric techniques, sampling lyrics from Ginsberg poems. I'd bring books of lyrics in and say, "Pick a line, we'll write it down, cut it up, throw it up, and see if it suggests a song." We made it like a game; we made it fun and quite naive. It took away the, "You're Paul McCartney, one of the greatest songwriters in the last 100 years" pressure. Let's have some fun, see what happens, and see if some magic comes out. He'd end up finishing the lyric in 15 or 20 minutes. Especially that third album [ Electric Arguments ], people say it's some of the best work he's done since Band on the Run . Those songs are incredible, and so different and innovative for him. It was a real blessing for me. It was under the radar, so we could experiment, but I could still deliver classic McCartney material at the end.

That's pretty perfect. There's such a pressure for artists to stay in their lane or, "Write another 'Yesterday,' Paul."

That can weigh heavy on an artist, especially on an artist like McCartney. There have been fallow periods when he's made albums that haven't been so good. In fact, 90 percent of those great artists from the '60s and '70s stopped making great albums 20 or 30 years ago because they don't have managers. They have employees for whom it doesn't matter if the record's successful or not. They're still getting paid. There's no manager who's saying, "If I don't make this a hit, I'm not getting paid." That can be a massive problem. Often the people around them are just yes men who don't have the courage to tackle that on a creative level, or haven't been asked to, so the artists don't have a backboard. Nobody's saying, "That's not good enough."

Do you feel you've ever been brought in to shake somebody up who's in a state of that fallowness?

I'm sure. I'm known as a challenging producer, or so my manager tells me. [ laughter ] I get asked to work with artists who are difficult to work with and who get stuck in their ways. I'm quite happy to do that. I like being challenged and I'm happy to challenge an artist. I feel confident about the criteria and philosophy that I'm approaching it with.

Are you building up a loops, or beds, as a song instigators on a lot of projects?

Sometimes. Maybe not as directly as that. I'm constantly writing and making music on my own, but not necessarily for me. Little sketches. I might have a new artist come in, I’d say, "Oh, I've got this beat. Perhaps you’ll connect with this. What do you think?" It might be a good direction. They'll usually say, "Oh, yeah. I love it. Give it to me. Let's do it." I'm happy to do that. But I'm happy also when I'm working with artists and just producing their songs. I may very well say, "Look, this chorus ain't good. Let's get another chorus." Or, "We need a middle-eight. Let's write a middle-eight now." I'll encourage them to do that.

With Crowded House were you doing that, or was the music pretty well-formed?

Yeah, they all wanted to collaborate and write. I didn't want to come across as a hustler-producer. I didn't push it, and it didn't happen in the end, but it would have been great. After Together Alone , Neil Finn did a solo album [ Try Whistling This ] with one of my programmers, Marius de Vries. It was all loops and the sort of thing I would do, normally. But I didn't like it! Sometimes that happens with artists. They all want this cutting-edge new sound, and I want to do a traditional classic-sounding record. I don't want any gimmicks on this, even though I'm a producer and producers really love gimmicks. Sometimes I have to work away from what they're doing. I get asked to do a lot of Britpop bands these days. I did do The Verve, Embrace, and a lot of music like that. But I always try to make it sound as much unlike Britpop as I can. That makes it sound good, because it still comes up sounding like them. Part of my remit for myself is to make definitive records with those bands. Even if they're experimental or different. They've got to define not only the band, but the band in the time that they're in. Even if I want to make a classic-sounding record, or a retro-sounding record, it's still got to sound of its time, in the time when it comes out. It has to be relevant to that. Otherwise, it won't work. People make records that sound well ahead of their time, and that's almost as bad as making records that sound behind it. It's got to be in sync with it. When we do actually make an absolutely beautiful record, there is a Grail-like journey towards it. How that happened can often remain a mystery to those who have made it as much as it is to everybody else. The timing has to be right. It's so important. And the timing has to be right with the influences and the whole aesthetic of what we're doing. It has to be of its time, even if it's retro or future sounding. It's a weird contradiction, but we have to embrace it.

At the same time, it's wonderful to hope that something is timeless as well, that it'll still be appreciated 30 years later. It's a funny balance.

It's the magic of it that often works in paradox. People want to be seen to be making original music, but the more you try to be original, the more of a cliché you sound like. Conceptually, it's changed now so that it's more important to be authentic than it is to be original. People have unpacked original and realized that there isn't anything original, so to be authentic is important. Authentic to the sources. When you do that, then you get something that really is original. The more authentic you get to it, the more original it becomes. In fact, that's what The Beatles and the Rolling Stones did in the '60s. They tried hard to be authentic to their influences. The Beatles may have been trying to sound like Buddy Holly, but it doesn't sound like Buddy Holly to me. The incremental detail of Keith Richards nicking a Howlin' Wolf or a Robert Johnson riff, again it becomes something else. It becomes really original, paradoxically. That's the same with what we're talking about before, with the idea of timing and making a timeless record. Even if you try to copy a Beatles or a Stones record today, and you try really, really hard to make it sound like that, it will still sound like a modern record because there's no way it will sound like that. There are so many details that will make it different. I encourage people, "Steal it. Copy it." By the time it comes through the wash, no one will ever hear that, but it'll make the record sound, paradoxically, original or unique. It's a difficult one for a lot of young artists to get their heads around, because they're like, "Oh, I don't listen to other music because I want to be original." I just start laughing.

Those who don't know history are doomed to repeat it.

Yeah. Like I said, it doesn't sound original. It sounds like a cliché!

You famously came to most peoples' attention as a bassist in Killing Joke. But you got to play on Kate Bush's Hounds of Love . I'm jealous!

Unreal, yeah. Unbelievable.

Man, how did that session come around?

She's a fan! She got my number from my manager, phoned me up, and said, "Would you play on my record?" On "The Big Sky," I'm doing a slap bass on that. That's the last thing you'd do on a Kate Bush record, but it really drives it. It's got this kind of punk Killing Joke thing with the tribal drums that works really well. It was odd, but she loved it. I had J Mascis [ Tape Op #27 ] come up to me at a festival once and say, "I was listening to "Wardance" just before I left on 7-inch, and the bass, man, the bass! That bass sound." Again, there's a naivete to it, because I'm not playing the bass like it's a bass line, more like it's a guitar part. It's also fuzzy. I think that's because we shared a rehearsal room with Lemmy [Kilmister] and Motörhead. I was always trying to get louder than Lemmy and do riffs like he did. He played it almost like a guitar. I remember seeing The Cramps early on, and they didn't even have a bass player. The guitar line was sometimes a bit like The White Stripes. The guitar will cover the bass somehow. I love that. I love riffs.

If you look at what Peter Hook was doing in Joy Division...

He got very melodic, didn't he? I love that. Amazing, incredible player. Again, there's a naivete to it, which I love. It's profound what he did. He's one of my favorite bass players.

Do you find yourself focusing in a lot on the bass player when producing? Like on Gina's record?

She's a bass player, but she did allow me to play bass on quite a few tracks. I played a lot of instruments on the album. There's one track where she's got five female bass players on it. You'd think with five different bass lines we'd have the bass covered, but I was listening to it and thinking, "No, there's a bass line missing here that I want on the verse." I asked, "Do you mind if I have a go?" She said, "Okay." Then she said, "Okay, we'll keep it, but I'm not crediting you on it!" I'm more than happy to acquiesce Gina's preferences, because she's such a formidable artist. Whatever she wants is cool with me.

Did you have to add drums to her original work? How did you build those tracks up?

Yeah, I built the drum tracks up like beats. It came a point where I said, "Should we get a real drummer on it?" She said, "No, I love the beats." She had written a lot of the songs at home on a laptop and put her own beats on, and little squidgy synths and little vocoders, so she wanted to keep that essence. Again, the naivete of that appealed to me. She was definitely directing it. She was more than happy for me to expand, develop, facilitate, and add choruses. She said, "We used to say, 'We don't want choruses' in The Raincoats." I said, "Well, Killing Joke's third album [ Revelations ] we said that as well, and it's the worst album we've ever made! Let's not go back there." Sometimes, you have to go there to know you don't want to go there again.

Yeah, that's important. What gear are you using in your space here?

This is my downstairs study in London, but I do a lot of recording in here. I've got all my acoustic instruments, tabla, and drums. My main music room is upstairs. In Spain, I have a state-of-the-art studio with a TLA desk, loads of outboard, and a designed acoustic space. That's Space Mountain. You can check that out at Miloco Studios' website. Here I got rid of my mixing desk about seven or eight years ago. We're in a modern set up where we're going straight in and using [Apple] Logic. I still have a lot of guitars and synths. The home space upstairs is great. It's a real nice pirate ship vibe.

Do you do all your work in Logic these days?

Yeah. I'm reluctant to go onto [Avid Pro] Tools. I did use Tools for a long time. I started off with [Digidesign] Sound Tools before Pro Tools, which was just a stereo editing version. That was amazing. As soon as Logic got HD I went back, because it's a much more intuitive set up. My engineers now are all on [Universal Audio] Luna, with the Apollo UAD. I'm still on Logic. When I'm working on my own on my laptop, I don't have many [extra] plug-ins. I'm happy to get what we get in Logic and a few other bits. I might add Eventide. Eventually I'll get great engineers in, and they'll do that. While I'm in the creative mode, I want it to be simple, functional, and lo-fi.

What about your own music?

I did a solo album that came out, Spinning Wheel , which is like indie folk. I took an inspiration from Jack White [ Tape Op #82 ], with his lo-fi approach, but approaching it from a '60s psychedelic folk angle. It was basically an exercise in recording songs with the hope that maybe some other people might want to cover them. Also, I put myself in the spotlight by singing them and being on the mic, which I'm terrified of, but it came out great. I got fantastic reviews, and we sold quite a few units. I'm starting to work on a second one, and I think I'm going to go more baritone. When I sing high, I can do like a Neil Young falsetto, and it's very vulnerable and beautiful. I quite like it, but I can do a big baritone as well. I can do a Bill Callahan. I love that. I'm going to experiment with that. All these things inform what I do when I'm producing other artists, because it helps me understand what they're going through having just gone through it myself.

I've told my friends that I love having a job where every day is different. A different thing to figure out or jump into.

Yeah. Outside of music, I'm into writing and painting, so those are challenging for me now. I set up South London Arts Lab five years ago. My thing is that I want to be as creative as possible. I want to exhaust all the possibilities. But I still feel I've only just started scratching the surface. Hopefully I'll have a few more years to get further and deeper into it. I'm not undermining the great work I've done, but I feel I've only just begun to understand what it is, if that is ever possible. I'm certainly excited about working with artists, and I still enjoy it immensely. At the end of the day, music doesn't let you down. Music's always been there for me. She's a demanding mistress, and if your ego starts taking over, she'll rub your nose in the gutter. But, essentially, she does reward you for your devotion. If you keep going and put your heart and soul into it, it'll come back and reward you. I absolutely believe that.

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@youthmartin