‘Pop is way too nice at the moment’
New sensation Tom Grennan talks to Alice Vincent about putting the rock ’n’ roll swagger back into music
It’s late January, and Tom Grennan is walking through the corridors of his old secondary school, in yellow Ray-bans and a delightfully preposterous leather jacket. The scruffy schoolkids half his size pause, and ogle: he is Bedford’s returning local hero. “Now, everyone wants to be my mate!” Grennan scoffs. Four years ago only a handful of his friends “fully believed” in his ambition to be a musician. “Everyone else took the p---, asked what I was doing. I told them, ‘I’ll show you.’”
Grennan, 22, is riding high right now. When we meet he is mere hours away from hearing his new song, Sober, debut on prime-time Radio 1 and he’s still jet-lagged after signing a US recording contract with Columbia in Los Angeles a few days ago. “Mad. They made me sign my name on this wall,” he says, exhaling cigarette smoke, “and Pharrell [Williams]’s autograph was on there. So crazy.” Last year, he sold out his first headline tour, landed on the BBC Sound Of list, and had his single, Found What I’ve Been
Looking For, chosen for Sky Sports’ Premier League theme tune. Major labels have been championing new soul singers for years – Sam Smith, Hozier, Jack Garratt and James Bay to name a few – but what sets Grennan apart from these bland, torch song pin-ups is his raw voice and a roughedged, ballsy attitude that harks back to the Noughties indie scene, like a soul version of Pete Doherty. His forthcoming debut album, Lighting
Matches – a raucous collection of big-hearted, stadium-filling singalongs primed for a car stereo – brims with it.
Yet his career almost never happened. Most pop stars usually emerge from a childhood love of music, or a hunger for the spotlight; Grennan grew up with neither. Instead, when he was 18, he was a random victim of a brutal assault that left him in hospital for weeks, and emotionally scarred for years. It was during his recovery, he says, that he “realised I wanted to get out of my hometown, and I wanted to write songs about it”.
The attack happened one night outside KFC in Bedford where he was having a cigarette on the street. “All of a sudden, I just had all these people around me. They held my hands down so I couldn’t do nothing, and then I just got punched, once, and I felt my jaw break,” he recalls, tousling a barely controlled mop of curls. “They operated on me straight away but I was in hospital for two weeks. It really shook me up, in my head.”
His attacker was caught and charged, but “it didn’t give [me] any closure”. Instead, Grennan went into “this mad, deep depression”. He was left asking himself, “Why was it me? What did I do, for someone to do that?”
Despite being in the middle of his A-levels, Grennan barely left the house for four months. “Before that, I was outgoing, I spoke loads, I loved being out.” But afterwards? “I just thought the whole world was against me. I was so angry. I took it out on everyone.”
But the attack prompted something in him. He’d been part of a covers band for a few months, but before that, had only sung while doing housework, alone. The first time he sang in public was when he was 17 and drunk enough to join in with karaoke at a party. “I never thought to myself, ‘Oh, you’ve got a good voice,’” he says. “It was just something to do when I was hoovering.” The songs started once he was discharged from hospital. “I just had loads of thoughts in my head, and I didn’t like talking about them, so I kind of just sung about them.” He had been contemplating going to America to play football, but a place on a physical theatre course at St Mary’s University in Twickenham offered him the chance to get away from the site of the attack, and the time to try to cut it as a singer. “My goal was to get signed before I left uni,” he says. “Because if I didn’t, I’d have to go home and work.”
His strategy worked. Avoiding nights out drinking with his fellow students, in favour of open mic sessions around London – because “I wanted to take over the world” – he eventually had the A&R men flocking after he posted a demo online. He signed with Insanity Records, an imprint of Sony, halfway through his final year.
It’s a bit of a departure from his middle-england childhood. Grennan grew up in Bedford, the son of a builder who came over to the UK from Offaly, a tiny village in Ireland, when he was 22, and a teacher, whom his father met on a ferry. His parents are “big time” supportive, perhaps because he struggled so much at school; Grennan hates academia, and wasn’t diagnosed with dyslexia until he was 12. “Everyone just thought I was a naughty, disruptive kid,” he says. “It took a while to get the nod. I didn’t do any work for four years, basically.” Given the opportunity, he would “100 per cent” be an ambassador for dyslexic children, to show them that “there are always ways around it”.
His musical influences while he was growing up were scant, and he describes grime as “his first music love”. An attempt at a rap career was short-lived – “the wordplay and all that is just crazy for me. I’ll leave that to the professionals”. Instead he aspires to the rock ‘n’ roll swagger he sees in Arctic Monkeys frontman Alex Turner. “There’s only a few proper rock ’n’ roll stars,” he says. “I think it will come back – there’s definitely room for a bad boy or bad girl. It’s way too nice at the moment in pop, everyone’s got to be so nice.”
Grennan says that with Lighting Matches he “wanted to make a classic record, like Amy Winehouse, like Ray Charles, like Adele. With real instruments, with no reverb, no hip hop or breakbeats.” He lists his ambitions as if they were groceries: “I want a number one record, I want to be travelling the world, I want to be playing in front of thousands of people.”
Despite all that – and his image, all silver earhoops and chain around the neck – there is nothing starry about him. His enthusiasm for tour buses sits somewhere between boyish and David Brent: “It’s like a hotel moving, innit!” he exclaims. “It’s sick. You’ve got your mates there, you’ve got your band with ya, you wake up in different venues. I don’t know what you wouldn’t love about that.”
After he’s played, Grennan will hang around for up to three hours individually thanking the fans who have turned up. That’s not, I suggest, particularly rock ‘n’ roll. “I don’t give a f---!” he retorts. “You’ve gotta thank, man. You can be a rock ‘n’ roll star with manners.”
His music has broad appeal, and Grennan is proud of it. “I’d rather people bought my record in Tesco because then you know you’re earning!” he says with a laugh. “My music, it’s hitting the real people. It’s hitting the mums, it’s hitting the blokes and the lads, it’s also hitting the kids and the people my age.”
He was back in Bedford for Christmas, and going to the pub was tricky. “It does get a bit crazy”, he admits. What his local fans don’t realise, however, is how much more Grennan has planned. “People in Bedford are like, ‘Oh you’ve made it!’ But I haven’t done anything yet.”
Lighting Matches is out 18 May. Tom Grennan’s UK tour starts next Friday, March 16. Details: ticketmaster.co.uk
‘I had loads of thoughts in my head and I didn’t like talking about them, so I just sang about them’