KING KRULE

Archy Marshall: Yeah.

I mean, it’s been pretty hardcore doing a thousand interviews this year. I’m pretty good at dealing with it, but it’s harder with this.

Your questions are quite direct in certain places. If it was some random person, I’d be able to skip to the next question.

Yeah. Like, ‘I’m not talking about that’.

Pretty much anything. I mean, if they talk about, ‘Does she like my music?’ I’m just like, ‘No, I think she hates it’. She does. She doesn’t hate it, she’s just like, ‘Turn it off’. Or if I’m playing guitar, she comes over and puts her hand over the guitar, and she’s like, ‘Shh!’ But then I get her to interact with instruments and sing.

Musical statues.

It’s about groove, as well! It’s about how your body reacts to it. I’m like, ‘Come on, dance!’ And the moves she was pulling out were crazy. She was doing all this mad stuff, and I’m like, ‘Whoa, that looks really good. You might be talented at dancing’. You know when you’ve got a kid that you’re just like, you are going to be a mechanic. You’re going to be Bob the Builder. You’re going to be an artist!

When anyone was a kid, you’ve probably done something in front of your parents or someone, and they’re like, ‘I always thought you were going to be an artist because you loved this’. And then they turn out to be lawyers and stuff like that.

In 2020, but I had loads of songs from before.

When the whole thing was written, my home really was just my sketchbook. That’s what it felt like.

Well, it came with me everywhere. It was really important to me to fill it with everything I could. Most of my sketchbooks, they end halfway through, or there’s loads of gaps between. This was the first time that I really felt I needed to do the paper a kind of justice of being like, ‘This is a part of me’. I really wanted it to be filled to the brim. So much so that I was upset when I had no more space left in it! But now, I’m like, ‘I have it still’, and it’s one of my main possessions. And my new one’s already getting pretty filled.

That’s a new one, from the start of this year, but that one’s getting filled really quick. It’s this one, with the Hello Kitty sticker on it. Probably about three or four times, I thought I lost it, and my heart sank into a cold unending pool. I never felt loss as I did then—well, I have felt loss, deeply, but it was a different kind of loss. So much of the record is in this book. Oh, there are some blank pages. Anyway, they weren’t right to fill, those ones!

Yeah, but don’t say that. Say, ‘It’s filled to the brim. Bursting at the seams’.

I couldn’t fill a page now because it just wouldn’t make sense with whatever’s in it already.

For every record, I’ve got at least three or four that represent the time, and there’s loads of work from that.

Depends. Not in New York, no. I felt like I needed to be there. I felt like I needed to be the best thing in the world at that point in time. I don’t think I was, but I tried. My ego was going, ‘I need to be a form of icon tonight, because this is a massive show’. As soon as I stepped onto the stage that morning, there was a nervousness. I could see it: We’d gone from smaller cap venues to a bigger one. Quite a leap. When I’m up there, though, it’s where I belong. That’s how I feel about a lot of it: I really want to be there. So, I don’t feel nervous as much anymore, but every now and then, it does catch me out a little bit—the nerves and the anxiety.

It’s different. I’ve lived with it for quite a long time now. Almost 15 years, so I’m a veteran of it. I don’t feel as much of that tension. All I feel is, I need to fucking do this. I feel a lot of energy, and I feel really capable. But then there was a night in Philadelphia when I felt like I was going to collapse. Up until being on stage, I felt like I was going to die. That was the only time on that tour that I felt any kind of nerves, and the nerves were just basically, ‘Am I physically going to be able to do this for two hours?’ It can be hard sometimes. You have to give something that exists between spaces, that bleeds between love and hate, that doesn’t echo reality but speaks of the traumas of the past.

He takes a lot of heat.

Yeah, I can stay back.

Yeah. The only thing is, musically, I have to keep everyone in check. If someone goes too hard and tries to flare out, they can let everyone down. Musically, that’s where it’s like, fuck that. You know what I mean? But physically you can do whatever you want.

No, I feel like I’m moving constantly still, because I’m going on tour. I mean, it’s constantly happening. It’s just nice to have a base again, but a base that’s not as far and isolated as Liverpool. To come back, fly to London, and have to go all the way up there would be quite painful. I’m very thankful and privileged to be able to actually live in London again.

The first night I stayed in it, I had like a temporary bit of fabric that I put on the ground, and I slept on the ground. It didn’t feel like home then, and I actually kind of regretted even renting it. I woke up, and it was super bright. It was horrible.

And a carpet in the other room. I got a big carpet. I didn’t really appreciate it until coming back from being away for a long time, and then just knowing that it’s there, it’s quite nice.

Not too much. People have come ‘round a little bit.

I have, but this year my cooking has gotten worse. Maybe my standards have gotten higher, so what I thought I was good at cooking is actually just shit.

Spaghetti bolognese and, like, fish. Fish is really easy to cook. You just bake it for like, 20 minutes.

Salmon and basa are my favourites. Basa is a Southeast Asian fish, you can get it in the supermarket. It tastes like chicken.

Because there was no reason to be there anymore.

Yeah.

I was living between London and Liverpool, so even when I was in this country, it was very much like I didn’t feel necessarily settled. Sometimes I would spend a month in Liverpool and not really see anyone during that time, and then come back and maybe spend a month down here.

No. More so the flat in Liverpool. But sometimes it would get lonely because it’d just be so far removed. On my phone, I’d see people were together doing stuff, you know what I mean?

Yeah, I think that was definitely the case. But I only realised that recently, in a way. I was just super tired from the journeying. The journeying was more of my home than anything else. That was always the feeling in the back of my head: that I needed to go back.

In the sticks. It was in the middle of nowhere, it was anywhere. In St Helens, which is near Liverpool. Hugged inside Merseyside. That’s where we lived and breathed. It made sense. It was good for me. I liked it a lot.

It was my first time living out of London. It was really good to have a different perception of the country and stuff like that. And I feel quite good for it. It definitely opened my eyes to a different world because London can be a bit self-centred. It’s just a bit pompous, and a bit of a platform, sometimes. And I’m from here. So it was hard to ever imagine living anywhere else. But doing it was great, it was really good.

It changed for multiple reasons. Becoming a dad was probably the main reason. Landscape was one of the most important things for me in the Northwest. Being able to see nature like that confronted with man-made factories and monolithic creations. The Fiddler’s Ferry gushing out towards the stars or the thousands of pylons that stretched from the east. That was quite inspiring. I found myself, a microscopic being holding love.

Well, home just becomes hers half the time. It’s filled with toys and stuff. It’s important, though, that she recognises a place that’s mine and hers.

I don’t know what to do with that kind of stuff. My flat in Liverpool was fully furnished, so I at least didn’t have to worry about getting rid of it all when I moved. But I did accumulate a lot of random bits and bobs whilst I was there. I don’t like it. I don’t like it at all. But I felt like I obviously needed more because it was an empty space. I had a TV from Liverpool, so I brought that down. And yeah, I was like, ‘I’m going to spend more money than usual on a sofa and a bed frame and a bed’.

It’s about space and space being empty or filled. I was filling space when it was being released, so—

I’ve been a hoarder for all of my life. I’m really getting away from that as I get a bit older. I enjoyed going to Liverpool because I didn’t have any of that stuff holding me down. I hoarded loads and loads of stuff over the last 20 years or whatever.

Yeah, all kinds of junk. Bits of equipment and stuff that I was going to fix one day and never fixed—classic hoarder behaviour. Old radios and stuff like that. And I fixed a couple, and then I just got bored, and then they were junk in my room. Also, I had a few people, close friends, who would be walking down the street and just turn up with something ridiculous. They’re like, ‘You might want this’. And I’d be like, ‘Yeah, I do want that. That’s cool’. And I didn’t want it. I ended up throwing it into a big trash heap where I’ll hopefully end up one day.

I take my bracelet. When I got to the airport in Minnesota, in Minneapolis, I had just gotten through two hours of waiting at customs. I looked down, and one of my two bracelets was broken. It’s the one with all the saints. I had that for years, and it had completely fallen apart. Luckily, it was slightly wrapped around the other bracelet, the one me and Marina made. I only had three of the saints left. A friend told me the idea was that the saints—they peel off, they fall off. And you get left with your patron saint.

I looked down, and I was like, ‘That’s not a good omen’. I really despise putting sentiment into objects because they can deteriorate, they can fall apart, you can leave them somewhere and think about them for the rest of your life. I really despise that. But with the bracelet, I couldn’t help it. So instead, I took my favourite saint—lucky that one was still there—and put it in the middle of this bracelet. This bracelet was the only thing that kind of grounded me.

Yeah, yeah.

No.

No. When I create, there’s nothing to do with my hands. It’s a let-down. I wish I was more like my family. My hands are the last point of call for the energy coming out. Or my face, or my ears. Maybe not so much my ears, because they don’t project; they consume. My face and my hands are the last point of release. I don’t see my hands as crafty hands. I see them as dainty, almost ghost-like beings that exist with me. And I felt that way about my body for years, anyways. It doesn’t really exist.

I think I actually have quite a practical brain. I just never applied it to anything, you know? When I was driving, I thought I was quite good—surprisingly good.

Well, I was doing lessons. There are quite a few things that, when I learn them, my hands do the right thing. Like rolling cigarettes or something, you know?

I don’t feel anything about that. No, no. I wouldn’t record the records if I felt that way. Sometimes in this record, the last one, I felt a bit like, ‘Shit, I’ve said everything really straightforward’. Sometimes I dart around with a lot of metaphors and play with words so that it’s a bit more disguised. But with this one, I was just like, ‘Why not?’ As a release, I needed to do it. I don’t know.

Not at all.

It’s just been such a long time that now, it doesn’t even feel like anything. It feels like it’s just part of what exists. But I’ve ruined relationships, friendships, because of the lyricism. Because of how open some of the words are. 

Yeah, to a degree. There are interviews where people get really pissed off because it’s written down forever. Whereas with the lyrics, it’s like there is ambiguity to a lot of it. And that ambiguity can be perceived by the audience, or people I know, or any kind of ears, as whatever they want to perceive it as. A lot of the words and a lot of the interpretations are not necessarily what I meant, but they’re still valid because someone felt that in what I was saying. And I quite like the openness, to be interpreted in a million different ways.

Yeah. Because you’ve got a lot of emotion and stories within every object. People are fascinating, aren’t they? All these strange, weird creatures who put hats on and bracelets on and carry around books. They’re just animals who have found their own kind of magpie relationship to stuff. I remember really thinking about it deeply a few years ago when my mum came in and was like, ‘I need cake, I’m going to go and get a cake’. And I was like, so weird that this woman is omitting time. This animal is going, ‘Oh my God, cake’. You know what I mean? I’m sat there, just writing furiously about nothing, and she loves cake. We make instruments. We make all these kinds of ornaments to drink out of and to smoke from and to sit on.

It’s really odd. In this country there’s a thing that you put your sliced toast on to serve it, and people do that in their own home! And even a boiled egg in the cup, like, an egg cup. What the hell! I remember someone trying to give me an egg cup and I was like, I never eat boiled eggs. But now I just have it in a box somewhere. You know what I mean?

Actually, I’m trying to get into Tai chi at the moment. That’s what I’m going to try and push myself to do.

At the moment, yeah. I do like the exercise of Tai chi. Breathing. I’m just trying to get more and more into it so I can channel different powers from it. Because it’s all about breathing. I’m trying to just centre myself and feel different energy in a different way.

You guys going to get me a drink then?