Guy Garvey and Elbow stream live album

Guy Garvey: 'Music is the glue that holds us together'. Elbow have live streatmed their new album, Live at The Ritz An Acoustic Performance and are due to play rescheduled gigs in Scotland in October. Picture; Paul Husband Photography

Music is lifting my spirits every day,” says singer/songwriter, musician and radio presenter Guy Garvey.

“Music is the glue that holds us together so, even though we can’t share our favourite music together physically, we can still share it through the radio.

“Communication has never been more important and, for a lot of people, including me, the radio is a way of feeling part of something bigger.”

Garvey with his wife, actor Rachael Stirling in 2016

We can add the internet to that as his alt rock band Elbow, the musicians responsible for the BBC theme for the nation-unifying 2012 London Olympics (First Steps) bring forward the release of their latest album. Live at The Ritz – An Acoustic Performance, is on streaming sites now [go to https://Elbow.lnk.to/LiveAtRitzPR for all links].

Released in vinyl and CD on 17 April, it’s a recording of the band’s gig last October at the Manchester venue where Mercury and Brit winners Elbow have been playing and watching music since they were teenagers. It includes acoustic versions of favourites and tracks from their last, eighth studio album Giants of All Sizes, which like the previous two went to No 1 in the album charts at the end of last year.

A bear of a man, Garvey’s voice is a comforting deep rumble down the phone line, Mancunian vowels as flat as a slice of white, and I’m being simultaneously soothed and engaged by the conversational tangents he leads off on. It’s the same rich combination his BBC Radio 6 Music fans can hear even more of as his Sunday show, Guy Garvey’s Finest Hour expands to another finest hour.

For the moment, Garvey is broadcasting from his home in south London, “in his pjs” where he’s in lockdown with his actor wife Rachael Stirling, and their two-year-old son Jack. When he’s not doing his show of 13 years, how is he going to spend his time?

Garvey presents his BBC Music Radio 6 show on Sundays and on iPlayer.

“Me and Rachael are going to teach our son to read,” he says, “and I will keep broadcasting on 6 Music. I think that’s really important at the moment. I really mean it when I say 6 Music has been lifting my spirits.”

Garvey’s not one to panic, and if he were, the straight-talking Stirling would simply tell him to pull himself together.

Star of The Bletchley Circle and Capital on TV, and the film Their Finest Hour, Stirling is the daughter of Diana Rigg, who has been karate-kicking her way through the decades since her 1960s black leather catsuit days in the New Avengers up to the last season of Game of Thrones and her latest film, due for release this year. As if that wasn’t enough of a kick-ass pedigree, her Scottish great-uncle David Stirling was responsible for founding the SAS.

Both being performers works for Garvey and Stirling, giving them an appreciation of how integral their creative careers are to their sense of self.

As well as the live acoustic album, Elbow will be playing their latest studio album, Giants of All Sizes, along with old favourites on their rescheduled tour, which is due to come to Scotland in October. Above, live on tour in 2014. Picture Stuart C Wilson, Getty Images

“It’s part of who we are and therefore our happiness. She knows I’m a grumpy child if I don’t get to write on a regular basis, and if she’s not had any work for a while, she’s not her happy self.

“Our worlds push against one other, but are different enough to be fascinating to one another. I love her work ethic, she’s got her mother’s work ethic. Rachael was making a short film with Tara Fitzgerald, Electric, that picked up loads of awards when she had two weeks to go before Jack was born.

“She also has a matter-of-factness about her work that I like. She doesn’t shroud it in mystery. One of her favourite expressions is ‘it’s called a play, not a serious.’”

But more than that, Garvey and Stirling’s work is the reason they know each other in the first place.

Elbow have been together since they met in college in the 1990s .Picture: Paul Husband

“We met at a wedding, Benedict Cumberbatch’s. She’s known him for years… he’s a more recent friend of mine because he was an Elbow fan.”

Stirling was already a big Elbow fan, having watched them play live, but this was the first time they had spoken.

“The first thing Rachael ever said to me was ‘you put the word shindig in a song, and I think that’s marvellous,’” he says.

This was a first for Garvey, some of whose previous girlfriends claimed they never listened to his music.

“It’s some kind of power play,” he says. “I never assume anybody knows what I do because for one thing I’d be bitterly disappointed on a regular basis, and also don’t think it elevates me in any way, I’m just f***ing really lucky.

But Rachael led with it, you know. And now Shindig is my nickname, not just with Rach but with all of her family, which is lovely, isn’t it?”

The pair married in 2016 in Manchester – Garvey wrote Magnificent (She Said) about her on their honeymoon – and their son Jack was born in 2017.

LIFE

Now for the first time they are working together, on a TV programme for the BBC. Called LIFE, it’s written by Mike (Dr Foster) Bartlett and is the stories of four families living in a single housing block, starring Alison Steadman, Adrian Lester and Stirling. Due to film this summer for broadcasting next year, Garvey is working on the soundtrack.

“Yeah, me and my wife’s work has converged, because she stars in it. So she’ll be getting subliminal minor chords if she doesn’t do my bidding,” he says and laughs.

Of course their finest creation together is their son Jack Stirling Garvey, rising three, with whom they’re hanging out in isolation.

“He’s a lovely boy. A proper eccentric,” says Garvey. “I asked him for a hug this morning and he said, “‘one hug, OK? And another one tomorrow’. Rationing his affection already. He realises the power a cuddle has. He rules the roost. He’s had various nicknames, but my favourite one is The Chairman, because he just sits there, giving it out.”

Garvey does Jack’s voice, small but sure and commanding, ‘I would like a little bit of telly, just a little bit.’

Giants of All Sizes

Aside from “the joy of that wee man and my brilliant wife who’s my best mate,” Garvey had a sad time in the run up to the eighth album, Giants of All Sizes and it’s darker at times than previous records.

“When I was making that I delivered two eulogies and carried two coffins in eight days, and the national backdrop of everything that was going on [with Brexit] makes for a more challenging record. I think generally speaking it’s a little bit less sunny.”

Bleak at times, there’s also hope and an uplifting quality to Elbow’s music and lyrics. There are the big existential questions we all ask in the middle of the night, as well as the small familiar quotidian moments. Does Garvey agree that his lyrics capture intimate little thoughts and details, at the same time as asking massive questions?

“I think that’s right,” he says. “I also don’t think it’s unique. When I finished the record I thought I’m singing about things everybody experiences, particularly by the time you get to your mid-forties. You’re very, very lucky if you’ve not lost someone significant by then. I hope it doesn’t sound like I consider I’m the only person on earth that’s gone through this stuff.

“But mortality does make you contemplate the big stuff. There’s a paradigm shift, a shift in your thinking of your own importance, when you lose your father or a contemporary. My sister said it happens to women with childbirth, that they contemplate mortality for the first time.

“When the dust settles, it’s refreshing not being the point, not being the centre of my universe any more. It makes me appreciate every little thing about my life. The reverse side of loss is you really appreciate people you still have. And I’m determined to live life for all I can get from it.”

Moments of all sizes

Top among his daily experiences before the current lockdown was walking Jack to nursery, chatting about the world and the respective sizes of their feet as the conversation meandered.

“The other morning, out of nowhere he said ‘I love walking to school with you’ and it’s like ‘oh my god, that’s all you need’.

“We were looking at the frost on the grass, where it had melted and where it hadn’t, just pointing out stuff; there was a puddle he thought was the shape of a penguin. And the same plastic fork from a takeaway left lying months ago. Every morning he says, ‘the fork’s still there’.” Garvey laughs, delighted with his boy. “I love the questions, I love how his brain works,” he says.

Now 46, Garvey’s life has changed a lot in the five years since he met Stirling, and even more since they had Jack.

“It’s funny, my choice of recreation has changed so much. I’ve gone from weekend benders in Manchester to walking me kid to school as my preferred way to spend my time.”

Elbow Room

Benders with the band might be binned, but he still loves hanging out with them making music. They’ve played together since 1990, forming Elbow in 1997, with Garvey (lead vocals and guitar), Craig Potter (keyboard, piano and backing vocals), brother Mark Potter (guitar and backing vocals), Pete Turner (bass and backing vocals) and drummer Alex Reeves who replaced Richard Jupp.

“The time I spend with the band now is pure joy. It always was, but there was always a goal on the horizon. It’s difficult to get a career in music off the floor, and you have to think that way to get there. But now it’s like I get to see my oldest pals and we get to play music, here and on the other side of the world. We love our job. We’ve just headlined a show in Mexico for the first time and it was brilliant, and a little tour of California. You get to do that. It’s astonishing, amazing we’re on tour, amazing we’re still at it.”

Lyrics

Key to Elbow’s success are Garvey’s voice and lyrics, an ability to say something familiar in a new way that catches the attention like ‘a song snaking out of a door’. What comes first for him, the music or the words?

“It varies, but more often than not, I have a piece of music – one, all, a couple of us have made, and I’m left putting the words together. And I suppose, not to go too boringly deep on how I do it, I listen to it and make noises. Then I listen to the noises and see what’s coming out my mouth and there’s usually a couple of words alluding to something I’m experiencing or feeling, and off I go. I sort of tap into my own… I tell myself what I want to write about really. I think...”

Rescheduled gigs

Elbow’s forthcoming tour will have them playing theatres rather than arenas as they’re a band that like to be able to see the audience enjoying the gig.

“A lot of bands like to play into a void, but I can’t perform unless I can see the crowd. It’s like that’s the reason we’re there, you know?”

Garvey’s sense of wanting to be part of something could be traced to his upbringing as one of seven in a big extended family from Bury, Lancashire.

“I’m like my dad,” he says, a proof reader, father of the chapel for his union, who became a Catholic late in life.

“I like a community and I like to be of use in that community. After Thatcher squashed the unions, when she’d decimated every community in the country, he found himself rudderless for quite a long time. Then he became a Catholic and immediately became chairman of the local social centre, where he could be of use.”

Around that time Garvey’s parents divorced. “I’m proper Shirley Valentine/Educating Rita generation,” he says. His mother really is called Shirley, and she did go back to university.

“She became a clinical psychologist until her retirement,” he says. “She’s also very active in the community,” he says. “So whatever I do, it’s about being part of something with others.”

As well as Elbow, Garvey has a soundtrack company with lifelong pal, Peter Jobson (of Manchester band I Am Kloot) and the composer Paul Saunderson. The trio did the score for ITV drama Cleaning Up starring Sheridan Smith.

Garvey is also “very tentatively” working on a children’s book, having discovered the format through Jack.

“And when I found out Julia Donaldson used to be a songwriter, I thought right! I’m a huge fan, so’s me son. Actually Diana [Rigg] voiced The Snail and the Whale and we all went to the premiere. It was Jack’s first time in a cinema, and when he heard Grandma’s voice he was transfixed. I was awash. Awash! Both Grandma and Wife were looking at me like, ‘hold it together man!’. He laughs. “He’s got that for ever you know?”

He’ll also have his mother’s films and his father’s music, the fact his dad’s band opened for the Stones – “I love saying that,” says Garvey – as a legacy of their desire to connect with others.

Songwriting is a medium where the soul is often laid bare so does Garvey ever feel over-exposed in his music?

“Yeah recently, ‘cos I was really tired,” he says. “Whenever we play the song Weightless, which I first sang to Jack about my dad, I introduce it by saying Jack’s arrival made dad’s death part of something rather than the end of something. At a radio station in LA I started the introduction and it was too much and I ended up crying and having to leave the room. I immediately phoned Rachael who was of course in a different timezone, and her response was “Woman the f*** up and grow a pair of ovaries”.

He hoots with laughter.

“That’s why I married her.”

Living in Lockdown

With the nation in lockdown and gigs postponed, music and the arts are more than ever Garvey’s glue holding us all together. For him, that’s the point.

“What you want to do is emulate human responses to the world, evoke emotions, to shock, delight, console…

We’re geared to arts and those experiences because we want to feel, we want to connect. It’s about connection, about community, it’s about people.”

Like the man said, “Communication has never been more important.”

Live at The Ritz – An Acoustic Performance is available on streaming sites now – go to ttps://Elbow.lnk.to/LiveAtRitzPR for all links. Vinyl and CD releases, 17 April.

Elbow are due to appear at 02 Academy, Glasgow, Thursday 1 October, and Usher Hall, Edinburgh, 15 and 16 October. April tickets valid. More details at www.elbow.co.uk

Guy Garvey’s Finest Hour, BBC Radio 6 Music, Sundays at 3pm and Mondays at midnight, www.bbc.co.uk

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Guy Garvey and Elbow stream live album - interview

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