Fiona Shepherd

Far from trading in heavyhanded rhetoric, Creed’s distinctive style is to create plaintive rhythmic chants or make basic linguistic juxtapositions with enough space for the listener to make their own connections or head off on their own tangents. His latest stuttering utterance is the naïvely philosophical What the F*** Am I Doing? accompanied by a cleverly calibrated video of Creed walking the streets around his Brick Lane home reflected in a selection of mirrors.

“A lot of the songs start in my head while I’m walking,” he says. “It’s like a little mantra-type thing I do when I’m walking along. I feel you can keep words more in your head, tunes have to be sung out. Maybe that’s why it starts with the words because those are the things that keep bloody coming into my head.

“I’ve found that if I write music on an instrument then I can only write what I’m able to play. It can end up being conventional because you play what’s easy to play, and so that’s a reason to try and write off the instrument and you write in a different way, more to do with ideas.”

Creed is keen to keep that spontaneity running through Words and Music. The danger with any kind of residency is the inevitable temptation to fall back on a pattern, whereas one of the pleasures of interviewing Creed is that his random ramblings are wholly engaging.

“I don’t know how you can be fresh and new with material that’s old,” he says. “In the last six months I’ve been trying to get back to basics so I’ve been working at home a lot on my own. I don’t know how healthy that is – in fact, I’m starting to think it’s quite unhealthy... But there’s too many levels of polishing or thinking about it or putting up a front.

“If I feel fake then that’s a terrible feeling. I’d rather die onstage trying to be true than put up a front.”