Having
stormed the stages of Folk on the Dock Fest, Kendal Calling, Green
Meadows
and many more in 2016, Alex Hulme comes banging on our door in early
2017
with his latest single, ‘Family Tree’. We spoke to Alex about his new song and
began by asking him the most crucial question…
Your bio mentions you wear
odd socks. What’s behind that?
That
came about entirely by accident when I was starting off when I was 16 or 17
years old. I was playing in a lot of bars or clubs where they weren’t
necessarily up for acoustic music and I was playing in one that was
particularly empty and a big hen party came in and they immediately came in and
there was this lone person, playing guitar. The club was empty as it was quite
early in the evening and they turned round to leave and they’d all had a fair
few to drink and one of them turned around and said ‘look, he’s wearing odd
socks’ [after] which] they stayed for one song and then the entire night. So I
thought if it was going to work once it was going to work again! I’ve worn them
ever since.
Your new single is called
‘Family Tree’. How would you describe it?
It
comes out at the end of this month, this Friday. It’ll be available on Spotify
and all those sort of places. The track is in the indie-folk / new-folk
bracket. I’m really into bands like Seafret, Kodaline, and Bears Den, it’s all
in that similar vibe. It’s slightly more left-field than straight
singer-songwriter pop like Ed Sheeran, but not as far as alternative as real
proper traditional folk.
Lyrically it’s quite a
personal song; was it difficult for you to write and perform?
Yeah,
[and] it still is. A lot of the tracks on the EP coming out next month (Family
Tree is the title track) are revolving around my nephew, who sadly passed away
when he was only four. It took me a while to finish the song. I tend to write the
guitar and melody first and add the lyrics later, but this song felt like it
was the right vibe and feel to talk about the topic. It was hard and it is
still hard playing [it] now. I have three or four songs that revolve around a
similar topic and even though I’ve performed them a lot they’re still hard to
sing at times, but I feel that’s what a good song should be, from experience
and from the heart. I hope people can connect with it in some way or another.
The single is taken from an
EP; when is that out?
The
EP is called the Leaves EP – you can see the link with trees and leaves (I’m a
big fan of trees) – and that’s out on the last Friday of May. ‘Family Tree’ is
the title track of the EP and there are another three tracks on it, all of
which will be coming out as singles over the next two or three months. It’s all
really exciting! We’re just in the middle of the regional tour at the moment,
now in the last week of the North West in the UK. Over the next couple of
months we’re jetting around the rest of the UK which should be really exciting!
The video is out now and is
very dramatic in its use of light; was it fun to be involved with that?
It
was wonderful! A couple of my old family friends – the Pace Brothers – are now
professional wildlife photographers: they work for the BBC; they travel around
the globe – they’ve just been up in Norway doing a documentary on the fjords.
They said that they want to get into the music video game and whether I’d mind
being their guinea pig, to which I said ‘yes please!’. Both of them are ex-army
and we went really far into the Northern Highlands, up towards Angus county. We went on a two-day hardcore off-road video
shoot, and they had me up at 4 in the morning and threw me in the sea in
October in Northern Scotland! There are some dolphins in the video that we came
across. We went on a two-day hike essentially and we were dragged through
streams and scrounged for food. It was a crazy experience but wonderful and
brilliant to be part of!
It’s even been picked up by
the local tourist board; do you think it will be encouraging people to visit?
That
was fantastic and really good to be part of. I’m getting messages from people
asking where it was shot as the locations look so ridiculous. If you’ve never
ventured up, it’s worth [going].
You did lots of festival
stages last year; what was that experience like?
It
was a really good experience. I’ve loved doing the festival circuit for the
last couple of years. Normally we’d do a set of festivals then take a break for
a year, alternating year-on-year. I’ve got some good ones in the pipeline, in
Liverpool, Stoke on the Dock, which is an awesome festival. I should be down at
Green Meadows in Peterborough later this year. I do quite a bit of touring over
the Isle of Man as I was fortunate to make a connection over there. They’ve got
a big festival over there in August that I should be a part of.
How’s the current tour
going?
It’s
been really, really good fun. This month has been my home and regional tour so
I’ve been doing a lot of the venues that I’ve done over the past few years.
There’ve been some really good turns up. I’ve been blessed to have a really
strong and committed fan base who come to a lot of gigs and they get a lot of
EPs and know all the words. I tend to do a lot of singing at my gigs; I’m a big
fan of sing-a-longs!
How would you describe your
live sound?
It’s
often very hard to capture what you do live on the recording. I’m a loop
station artist; I don’t have a full band with me. I do everything vocally and
on guitar. I have a stomp box which is essentially a giant piece of wood that I
stamp on as a bass drum, and I do a lot of live layering and looping, so it’s
all very loud, and pretty much what you hear on the record, except instead of
drums it’s guitar beats. I tend to use the guitar to fill out the other parts
like the banjo as sadly I can’t do both at the same time, as cool as that would
be! My show is similar but not with a full band. The aim will be at some point
towards the end of the year to get a band together to do a short set of gigs,
which the full sound of the records. I love doing the tour with just me; I get
to meet other people and make lots of noise!
What are your future musical
plans?
I’ve
yet to do my debut album yet. That’s something I’m hoping to get round to
doing, finishing recording it at the end of this year, and then that’ll be
released next year. Basically my aim this year is to get as many singles and
tracks out there as physically possible so there will be definitely another couple
of singles after this EP towards end of the summertime and the autumn. I’ve got
a backlog of songs now that I’m dying to get used, and if I don’t use them now
they’ll get buried under new ones, so I want to get them recorded and get them
out there! There’s plenty of new music coming from me in the next six months.
Finally what are your big
ambitions for the rest of 2017?
Just
more touring and gigs really. I’m desperate to gig as much as physically possible
this year. I’ve had an eight or nine month break from heavy gigging whilst I’ve
been recording all these tracks. I’ve been dying to play them live, and that’s
probably my favourite part of the job. I want to get out to as many places as
possible and travel the full length of the UK. I do a lot of jumping between
London and the North West, that I tend to miss out the midlands, though not on
purpose! I’ve just not been able to find as many connections there, so my aim
is to hit every major city across the UK. That would be awesome!
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