HOUSE MUSIC
Adrian Goldberg interviews Pete Astor about his new album Time On Earth.
AG: It’s five years since you made a record, and it feels like the wait it has been worth it.
PA: I probably write maybe 50 songs a year or something like that. These songs are whittled down and some of them were started a ludicrously long time ago. I think one of them started in 2008. I think it's nice to let them mature, like a good cheese or something…to get the best songs, the ones that encapsulate the most honest moments because that's what's most important for me.
I've got a huge amount of journals, boxes of them. And I was thinking a while ago that I must get around to burning them, because they’re no use to anybody. What I realised was that the songs I've written tell the story much better, much more briefly, and maybe a bit more entertainingly.
They [the songs] are an important part of my life. I'm really proud of this record, I've got an amazing band of people that play with me, who can articulate the songs really well.
I think I've learned to sing better – amazingly - over the years. I've been doing it a lot over the last few years - singing a lot, playing a lot, performing a lot. And I think that's affected the songwriting because it may not technically be my full time job, but I've committed to it in terms of the hours and days I spend on it much more in the last five years than I maybe did in the 15 years previously. So that's maybe a difference.
AG: You’re doing a lot of shows in private houses these days. Tell me more about that.
PA: Well, I’ve done some in France recently, France seems to have really taken to it. What it means is you cut out the middle person, so the person hosting it can get a percentage of the entrance fee, but the rest goes to me, which allows me to pay for everything and make the whole thing work.
I also have started to do a thing where I'll play two sets. I'll play my set and then I'll play a set of requests, which is also really fun and really nice to involve people.
The other thing that I'm really enjoying is the talking element because there’s an intimacy to it. And actually on my YouTube channel, I'm gonna put up what somebody in France recorded - just some of my talking stuff, which is quite fun.
So that's another part of the house show - it's a bit more of a conversation than just “listen to the songwriter” so it's something that I'm really enjoying, and it seems to suit the kind of music I do. There's an intimacy to it, which I think people really enjoy. And I really enjoy.
AG: And people are only there because they want to see you. There's a great tune by Ian Passey/The Humdrum Express called ‘The Gig Chatterer” and we're all familiar with that phenomenon. But are we talking about literally playing in people's living rooms?
PA: Yeah, it…one of the things in the UK that’s slightly more difficult is that a lot of people have much smaller places. But people can hire the back room in a pub - it's great, because then it can be a reasonably limited amount of people. And then and then you have that intimacy, and you don't have the person talking.
There was a bit of an argument on Twitter with Robyn Hitchcock, where he really laid into someone who’d been talking - and someone got very upset about him laying into them.
I think most people, me included, were like, “damn, right, Robyn, this is not acceptable for people to talk through your gig,” but it's a tricky one. I get I get the trickiness. With house shows, that doesn't happen.
AG: Fans and artists always think the latest record is the greatest record. But I think this IS your best record ever. This is an album that honestly and warmly embraces ageing and death.
PA: I was with Mark Riley recently and Mark said it was a ‘coming of age album’ which I thought was a lovely thing to say. Me and Mark are very similar ages - we're both 62, and you have to acknowledge that absolutely.
I love life, and I love all of its challenges and all of the things you do in it and knowing new things as well. I think that's really important.
I think my job is really key, in that I teach at a university, so I'm constantly engaging with 18, 19, 20, 21, 22 year olds.
I teach music, so I'm dealing with musicians, but also it means I can't stick my head in the sand. I don’t go on Tik Tok, but I can't sit in my box as a person that started making music in the 80s and say, “I’m not interested in what's happening now”.
AG: Mortality is a theme that absolutely runs through everybody's lives when you get to a certain point, but you treat it with dark humour – notably on a track called ‘Undertaker’. There’s a lyric ‘Let’s go down to the undertaker and put what's left of you in the incinerator.’
PA: The songs just kind of come, and then it's like, “what have I got?” With that one I was quite shocked with myself.
With mortality and bereavement and death, people will often go into ‘Hallmark greetings card’ mode, and I find that not very helpful. Hopefully, it's useful to write about mortality and bereavement in a way that is truthful - and sometimes the feelings are very complex. They [the songs] are full of love, but they're also full of distress and all sorts of things.
When I look back on what I've written, I was quite uncomfortable on some level. I thought ‘now I need to sing and play this’ because it's a feeling from a place that isn't just the obvious.
AG: There are dualities that intrigue me. One of the things I love about Springsteen is that there is an overblown quality to his music at times; there's an almost bombastic quality, which I know is off putting for some people, but that comes with a kind of an epic grandeur. What I love about your stuff is that there is a lovely understatement. You can like two things which are, in some ways, the opposite ends of the spectrum. And you can hold both of them close and love them dearly.
PA: Oh, that's good. Yeah. I mean, it's just that I don't have that big rock thing. There are probably times I've flirted with it, and it's never really sat right with me. I’m proud of pretty much everything I've done, but there were a few tracks from years ago, where it's almost like I was trying to be bigger than I wanted.
One thing I realised with music, is that the idea of “address” is really important – like Bono, and this is no criticism, every song he writes, addresses a large audience. Even in the rehearsal room, even though there's only four of them, on some level, he's talking to a stadium.
What I love about Bruce is that he sometimes talks to a stadium and sometimes he talks to a small group of people. I'm definitely someone who in my “address” is never imagining myself at Wembley Stadium. That was never part of my thing - I've always had a more intimate “address”.
I think that fits with the house shows, in that you're not taking that big stage. I can hold the big stage, but at the same time, I think sometimes it's nice, not having to worry about holding a big stage of being big and noisy. It's about being honest to who you are.
Time On Earth by Pete Astor is available now.
This interview is an edited version from my Brum Radio show.