‘If you don’t like my face tattoos, don’t look at me’
As he releases the follow-up album to his best-selling debut Human, Rag’n’bone Man talks to Nick Duerden about being an unlikely balladeer, why he hasn’t written a break-up album and going ‘too far’
Rag’n’bone Man talks to Nick Duerden about being an unlikely balladeer, why he hasn’t written a break-up album and going ‘too far’.
Halfway through Rag’n’bone Man’s new album Life by Misadventure comes its climax, a great sweeping ballad called Alone, which seems to focus directly on the turmoil in his private life of late – not from his perspective, but rather, intriguingly, from his former wife’s.
“You’re married to a man that has other desire plans for life,” he sings. “You didn’t think you’d end up here… [that] you’d be more than somebody’s wife.”
Since his commercial breakthrough in 2016 with his two million-selling hit single Human, and, a year later, an album of the same name, Rag’n’bone Man has undergone all sorts of transformations, personal and professional alike: he has become famous, garlanded with awards, and rich – and, in 2019, he married his longterm girlfriend, with whom he has a young son. But they split less than 12 months later, which left him reeling.
The man born Rory Graham looms in the computer screen over video call. He explains that Alone is not about his divorce at all. “But I kind of get why you’d think it,” he concedes.
“The song is about empathy. It’s about family, and the pressures women get to start families, and to settle down. When you’re at a certain age, maybe your late 20s, and going to family functions, you have that question asked to you: ‘When are you going to give us grandchildren?’ It’s a pretty archaic way of looking at things, and it still happens today, but only to women, not men. It’s something men mostly don’t have to face. I thought that was interesting and a subject worth exploring.”
The song’s sense of keening is far more in sync with the rest of the album than its lead single, All You Ever Wanted, which is so buoyantly propulsive that it makes you want to drive down the M1 like it’s Route 66.
Recorded in Nashville, Life by Misadventure is a profoundly pensive affair that teems with existential melancholy.
On the track Fall in Love Again, for example, he drags his vocal up from the bottom of a well to conclude that, as it happens, he would rather never be romantically inclined again, while on the duet with P!nk, Anywhere Away From Here, he comes across as the saddest man alive. One lyric runs: “There’s so many pressures with the world at your feet.” Another: “Sitting on top of the world, trying to figure it out.”
It is not, however, a breakup album, despite him having ample cause to have written one. “That’s not to say I don’t have those sad songs in my locker,” he says, “but I just didn’t think people needed to hear that kind of thing from me, not at the moment.”
It is a significant step forward from his debut, and its unambiguous commercial drive suggests that Rag’n’bone Man is now ready
to become one world’s biggest pop stars. “That idea excites me,” he says, wincing, “but it also terrifies me.”
The 36-year-old was born and raised in Brighton. Though neither of his parents were professional musicians, his mother loved singing folk songs, while his father played mandolin in pub acts.
Never much good at school – “I sat at the back of the class, head in the clouds” – he decided, at the age of 13, that he wanted to sing for a living. In his early 20s, he was an MC with a drum and bass outfit, content with being an outsider.
Though he always had a formidable voice – think Barry White on the back of a motorbike – he didn’t quite look the part. At 6ft 5in, heavily bearded and tattooed, he seemed less likely to compete with Harry Styles for chart action than serve as his bodyguard.
“Sometimes people were slightly taken aback by the stature, and so I surprised them when I started singing,” he admits of his early career, which, looking back now, he concedes, “was probably a good thing."
At the beginning, I got a lot of: ‘Oh, I didn’t think you were going to sound like that.’ They expected to me to be heavy metal or maybe a rapper. They didn’t expect me to come out with a ballad.” Appearances, he points out, can be deceptive. “I like to think I’ve always been fairly gentle.”
Big, lugubrious ballads soon became his stock-intrade, tapping the same vein Adele had found: intimate songs that resonate. He always was a sensitive soul, he insists, “and I’ve always known that I wasn’t intimidating.”
Success, when it did come, came swiftly, and by 2017 he was huge pretty much everywhere except for the US. (His current duet with P!nk – whom he hasn’t met; they recorded their vocals on separate continents – was chiefly arranged to introduce him to a US audience).
Yet, the more famous he became, the fewer places he found to hide. Camouflage isn’t readily available to you when you’re as big as Hagrid.
He quickly learned, as the newly famous tend to, who his real friends were. “Things have happened fairly recently, supposed friends telling stories about me in the press.”
He sighs. “That was quite sad, actually. You get to a certain age, and you have a group of friends you thought you could really trust, but…” he shrugs. “What can you do? I have a smaller group now.”
If his marriage appeared to bring him some much-needed solidity, the subsequent divorce suggested otherwise. The pressures of life in the spotlight, presumably? He shakes his head. “No. I was with my wife before all this happened, and then afterwards as well, and it was really a very understanding relationship, actually. So that didn’t play a part in it.”
He declines to say what did go wrong, adding simply: “I’m very protective of my family.”
He has since moved to a small hamlet north of Brighton where, by dint of its general remoteness, everybody always practises social distancing, Graham keeping only those he loves most close.
“We live in a world where people just want to be seen with someone,” he says. “They don’t want to talk to you about your music, they just want to put a phone in front of your face. And when they started doing that, when I was out with my son, I just had to say: ‘No.’”
He shrugs. “There’s a reason I moved here: there’s no one around to bother me.”
While he clearly values his success, and craves more, his general air is of one who wants to conceal himself as best he can. I wonder whether that is why he has quite so many tattoos. He has been adding to his collection of body art for 21 years now, and after filling up most of his chest, arms and neck, he has moved to his face, where he has three: above his eyebrow and below, and one on the cheek.
He says they have not gone down universally well. “The moment people saw them, they went wild. ‘Oh my God! He’s gone too far!’ But I like them, and that’s my individual choice. I don’t comment on how you dress, or how you wear your hair, do I? So if you don’t like my face tattoos,” he says in a moment of wishful thinking, “don’t look at me.”