Tour helps Nick to reach new levels

AFTER a sell-out tour earlier this year, including London’s Royal Albert Hall, Nick Mulvey is back on the road with a solo tour that ends at Nottingham’s Rescue Rooms this weekend:

This tour comes over a year since the release of your second album, Wake Up Now, so are these dates rounding off the campaign before you go away and work on the next record?

Well the old cycles of working – taking time off to write, release, tour then repeat - are changing. People are consuming music in smaller amounts and artists are staying engaged with their tribes through social media. But albums and album cycles aren’t gone entirely. So I am indeed at the end of the Wake Up Now campaign but don’t expect me to disappear entirely and reappear much later. I’ve got some interesting recordings and things brewing.

What made you decide to go out on your own rather than with your band?

My listeners. They’ve been asking for it..

You have been playing dates that most touring schedules never see, such as Buxton and Pocklington. What made you choose towns like these?

I’ve done a fair few tours up and down the UK and normally you hit the obvious places but there’s so much more than that. So I’m varying it this time. Also, I wanted to reach some of special venues.

You become a father for the second time earlier this year. For Wake Up Now, you said you wrote the songs in parallel to your wife’s pregnancy with your son. Have you had a similar approach to writing new tracks in the build-up to the arrival of your daughter?

Not with tracks but my daughter, Honey, was born a similar amount of time - 6 weeks - prior to my last tour, as my son, Inka, was born prior to the recording of Wake Up Now in 2016. And once again I experienced a rapid increase in productivity and creativity. I think it’s mostly accountable: I slow down for a few months in anticipation of the birth, I drop my Nick Mulvey project and life gets very simple. Then there’s the actual cathartic experience of the birth and the welcoming of the new being. Maybe it’s no wonder when I re-engage and go back to the studio or out on tour that I feel I reach new levels. You released your Dancing For The Answers EP earlier this year. Is this a taste of new music to come or rather tracks you still had from the

Wake Up Now sessions?

I’m keeping shtum! Let’s see what the new music / new directions want to be and where they want to take me. I get superstitious about defining it too early. Certainly I’m proud of the Dancing For The Answers EP and it was vital for me to let out some of the wider breadth of music I have inside me - not just songs and song forms but to let it all flow... and take whatever shape it wanted to take.

■■ Nick Mulvey plays the Rescue Rooms, Goldsmith Street, Nottingham on Sunday. Sold out.