About this Event

TOM WILLIAMS & THE BOAT

UNCLE LUC // LEE MARTIN



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It happened when Tom Williams heard Mos Def improvising around a version of King Creole. The phrase “Easy Fantastic” jumped out at him and, in a flash, it seemed to encapsulate the very thing that excited him about his favourite music, his favourite art, his favourite anything. “It’s there when you see Bob Dylan playing Like A Rolling Stone in 1966,” he explains, “It’s definitely there with the application of a pallet knife in the hand of an abstract expressionist painter. Those moments that appear to be effortless, and that’s what you love about them – but also, you know that it took years and years of intense application to get to that point. That’s Easy Fantastic.”



Tom Williams would be the first to tell you that he’s by no means at that point. But every artist needs to punch a destination into their creative sat-nav. And even a cursory listen to the third album by Tom Williams & The Boat reveals that this is a band dramatically waking up to new possibilities: a band surveying the good things that came to them with 2012’s Teenage Blood album – the blanket support of BBC 6 Music; their growing reputation as an incendiary festival act – and allowing their self-belief to grow a little stronger. It’s a change audible within a few bars of the opening song Hurricane. Like much of what follows, this jut-jawed love song sees Williams circumvent sentimentality for the elemental vernacular of great rock’n’roll. “I’ve been dreaming of you babe,” he declares in All Day as the lean rhythmic whip-crack succumbs to the release of well-executed powerchord. With a mixture of surprise and almost proprietorial pride, Williams talks about moments during the recording of these songs – Change Of Heart and Satellite being cases in point – when he would find himself taking a step back and marvelling at his band’s ability to lock into an irresistible groove. With a synth inspired by Bruce Springsteen’s Streets Of Philadelphia, the latter song manages to scale emotional heights from the most unpromising of beginnings: “I started writing that when I was house-sitting for a friend and I had their puppy nipping at my feet while I was trying to record the demo.”



If there’s a sense of new creative pathways being forged on Easy Fantastic, credit must surely go to the increasing role assumed by the group’s lead guitarist Anthony Vicary. Almost a decade has elapsed since Williams first met Vicary at an acoustic club in Tunbridge Wells. Vicary, who grew up on a nearby farm, had grown up on early 90s indie-rock. “Ant was the first person to play me Bandwagonesque by Teenage Fanclub,” beams Williams, “And however many years later, I’m still obsessed by that record.” Having played with Williams throughout the early years of the band, when the singer was shuttling between Oxford (where he studied fine art) and his hometown in Kent, it’s also Vicary who lit the touch paper on some of the best new songs to bear the group’s imprint. At the centre of Easy Fantastic (or the end of side one of the vinyl edition) is the smouldering 25: “I went to a jazz club on my brother’s birthday,” says Williams, “There was a saxophonist on stage who had played with Louis Armstrong in his younger life and, here he was at 85, sounding incredible. Once in a while he’d do a solo and at, at the end of it, he’d exclaim, “85 and still alive.” For all of that, the voice singing “25 and still alive,” utters the words more in beleaguerment than triumph; an exclamation mark replaced by a question mark because, after all, who, at 25, knows how their story is going to pan out?



In the face of such uncertainty, all you have to fall back on is instinct – and instinct has a huge part to play in the way many of these songs came together. “There are moments on the album where we just flew by the seat of our pants,” says Williams. You could almost drop the needle randomly onto either side of Easy Fantastic and hear something that bears out his assertion: sense of a band pulling away from their inhibitions on Eskimo; the way hammond organ and simmering female vocals lock into David Trevillion’s imperiously laid-back groove on Change Of Heart. It’s also evident on All Day: the track which to impartial ears sounds most like a timeless radio hit but also happens to be the song which threw him into a tailspin of self-doubt: “I was the last person to understand the appeal of that song,” laughs Williams, “But everyone around me, from Stephen Moshi (label head) to my girlfriend Sarah thought it was the best song.” In a funny way, it was only through moonlighting as a guitar teacher, that Williams came to a better understanding of the song’s allure. “When you’re teaching Katy Perry and One Direction songs to eight year-olds, you come to a renewed appreciation of songs where the melody is constantly reinventing itself over the same chord progression. And then you actually realise that it’s also the same thing that draws you to songs like Sweet Jane and Love Minus Zero/No Limit. But what really sealed the deal was finally playing it and seeing the reaction it got from people who had never heard it before.”



Similarly swift to establish itself as a fan favourite has been Suzanne: “It sounds nothing like Leonard Cohen’s Suzanne,” explains Williams, “But the line that stays with me from [the Cohen song] is this intoxicating image of the tea and oranges, so I wanted to bring something of that sense of being lured into a strange, sensual place, hence opening with, ‘I first met you in the woods/Hiding in the green.’” From thereon in, however, what follows couldn’t be further removed from Cohen’s oeuvre: a raucously life-affirming clatter which also benefits from sterling Mick Ronson-esque guitar work from Vicary. Here and on the declamatory clang of Caroline, Williams looked closer to home for inspiration. “Those songs also share their names with two of my aunts. Actually though, it could be anyone’s aunt, but I was just trying to reimagine those names in a new context, as these amazing young women that might rip your heart out and treat you like shit.”



Abetted by the steady hand of seasoned producer Ian Grimble (Siouxsie & The Banshees, Manic Street Preachers) and his vintage Trident mixing desk (Williams: “That detail is important because, from Goodbye Yellow Brick Road to Aladdin Sane, there’s a top end you can only get from those desks”), prolonged exposure to Easy Fantastic compounds a sense that what you’re listening to is a love letter to the records that shaped Tom Williams. It’s a list that has been slowly growing ever since the watershed moment at school in Kent when his sports teacher – sensing that music had supplanted football in the career plan – gave him a good luck present. “I had just started smoking, which obviously isn’t great when you’re playing on the wing and relying on speed. When my teacher heard that I’d started learning guitar, he bought me three albums: Transformer, Bringing It All Back Home and a best of Jonathan Richman CD. And to this day, I can’t think of three records that I adore more.”



Every band who has aspired to make great rock’n’roll has felt that they have a debt to repay – and Tom Williams & The Boat are no exception. On the liner notes of The Go-Betweens’ first single, Robert Forster set out what sounded like both an apology and the band’s raison d’etre: “Last Train To Clarksville has been written and we are left with our own imperfection.” There’s something of that sentiment here. “You see old friends zooming past you and going onto become a success in their chosen field,” ponders Williams, “I look at our band and how much they believe in this, and I realise we’re in deep.” It’s that sense of a pledge mutually undertaken that informs the final song on Easy Fantastic, Everything Will Change: “Somewhere in there is something I wanted to say to the band. Just keep faith. And, in a funny way, you can hear their response in the way they play. Completely live. No click track. Those are the moments you do it for.” Well, quite. It’s a delight to report that Easy Fantastic is generously endowed with them.