From the archives: Fiona Shepherd interviews Lewis Capaldi, January 2018
In early 2018 Lewis Capaldi had only released four tracks, but that didn’t stop Scotsman critic Fiona Shepherd picking him as her “one to watch” interview for the year ahead
“I’ve not been found out yet,” says Lewis Capaldi, with the pleasantly puzzled air of someone sore from all the pinch-me moments he has experienced in the last year. By his own admission, the 21-year-old Bathgate-bred troubadour has gone from an audience of eight to eight million in the last 12 months, with the illustrious likes of Chloë Moretz, Hailee Steinfeld, Ellie Goulding and One Direction’s Niall Horan – a particularly enthusiastic patron of his music – among that rapidly expanding fanbase. And all for a public catalogue of four songs, gathered together on the Bloom EP, which was released last autumn.
Thanks to the potential exhibited by these raspy pop confessionals, he ended 2017 as winner of the Breakthrough Artist at the Scottish Music Awards and begins this year on the list of nominees for the BBC Sound of 2018 title, which is traditionally a pretty accurate barometer of future commercial success.
“I’ve seen more places in the past year than my mum has seen in her life, and I’ve seen them from a very privileged point of view,” he reflects. “You go to see the skyscrapers of New York – I was getting to have meetings in these skyscrapers.”
Like most overnight successes, there is a pretty prosaic backstory of dues-paying graft. In fact, Capaldi has been gigging across the Central Belt and writing his own songs since the age of 12, he says “constantly chipping away, gigging every weekend, picking up a guitar every single day, really putting in the effort to be a writer. I saw playing in the pub to four or five people as my idea of being a musician.”
Capaldi credits his older musician brother with leading by example, putting in a word with local promoters. “Hats off to the people who let me come in and play when I was that age. For me, I feel most at home when I’m playing live.”
For a couple of years, Capaldi played in a band. “We just ripped off The View completely,” he freely admits. Then he went through a “Beatles phase” which led him to Joe Cocker’s big, bluesy version of With A Little Help from My Friends. It was a lightbulb moment for the teenager who started to cultivate his own raspy tone. Unsurprisingly, Paolo Nutini is another inspiration from closer to home.
Just as his brother helped him get a foot in the gigging door, his parents proffered their shed as a songwriter’s retreat. “I’ve got quite a loud voice,” says Capaldi. “Mum and dad were growing tired of having me shout the house down, so they exiled me...”
He is comically dismissive of some of his efforts down the years. “Terrible songs,” he remembers, “trying to be an insightful 12-year-old… But it was good to get the songwriting muscle working. The sooner you start writing songs, the sooner you’ll get better.”
His first keeper was a song called Headspace. Around the same time, he joined Hit the Road, a touring project for 14-19-year-olds which is run by the Scottish Music Centre, funded by Creative Scotland’s Youth Music Initiative and gives young musicians viable experience and training in all aspects of touring.
The breakthrough came a year ago when footage surfaced online of Capaldi performing the bare ballad Bruises in front of a capacity crowd at King Tut’s. The track became his official debut single and has since racked up 30 million streams on Spotify. He followed up with Lost On You, co-written with Fame Academy alumnus David Sneddon.
“It only feels really in the last year, maybe two years that I’ve come into my own as a songwriter,” he says. “For me I need the benefit of hindsight in order to craft a song properly. I wouldn’t have written Fade if I hadn’t written Bruises so all the songs have a knock-on effect to each other.”
This is an edited version of an interview that appeared in The Scotsman on 9 January 2018. Lewis Capaldi plays the P&J Live, Aberdeen, today and tomorrow and the Hydro, Glasgow, on 13 and 14 September
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