The Track: John Newman
Island, 2018
Since his debut in 2012 John Newman has scored scored three UK number ones including collaborations with Rudimental and Calvin Harris. In 2015, his endeavours came to an abrupt halt due to illness, but now John is back with new single Fire In
Me and a renewed passion for achieving pop perfection. FM took a trip to his studio in the Kent countryside to discover how the track was produced, and find out more about John’s love of expressive pop music.
It feels like Fire In Me is really personal to you?
“Yeah, every element, but the lyrics are the thing that especially captures something for me. The track is still climbing – I mean it’s just got a worldwide sync with a car company which is really exciting – but I’m not so concerned about its commercial success because it is such a personal track, and one that was intended to get people talking about me again.”
It’s surprising there was so much ‘ear candy’ in the track – it must be challenging to fit that into a radio-friendly pop mix?
“It’s 100% a challenge, and as soon as it goes through to any of the guys I use to mix it – Mike Spencer, Manny Marroquin or Mark Stent – they tend to turn those things down immediately. So then it’s the battle of trying to keep them in and explaining my reasons why. You have got to be careful not to use too much of that stuff, especially the bottom-end parts, like all the roars and things like that. They’ve got to be in the right place, but that’s what great mixers are for. So I tend to put the kitchen sink in and get a polished version working.”
You say Motown is one of your biggest influences. Is it hard to get that old-school sound into a modern pop mix?
“I think Berry Gordy would agree that they were actually breaking ground and they were trying to go for the most modern thing. If they were to redo Motown now they’d be trying to do what was new,
“What’s in my mind is that I took two years out and I’m starting things from the ground up, and it’s almost like I’m a new artist again”
they were using the new equipment that was on the market. So I think those influences are about the feel: how they sat back on rhythms, how they’d move forward on rhythms, what harmonies they used, using the Aural Exciter and things like that. I feel like it does bring an older element to the music, almost without people knowing that what it is. Again it’s all about feelings and I think that’s the most key thing to producing and making music – you’ve got to keep bringing out feelings.”
What is the major obstacle when you’re trying to get emotion across on records like this?
“An A&R man!”
Do you have a lot of back-and-forth with the label?
“I think any artist does. I think everyone has different visions. It comes down to the artist’s vision, they’re the person who has got to sing onstage and believe it and go for it. You can always see when an artist has been given free rein – I saw The Weeknd crying on stage the other day. That’s a huge American artist with a huge American label – he probably has to jump through about 500 hoops to put a record out, so it’s amazing to see that somebody still has so much attachment to something. I think that for me is
key. But even watching Ed Sheeran at the Brits singing
Supermarket Flowers about his grandma... it’s nice to see an artist on a major level who can still let the emotion come through. It’s really important to me that it stays in there, and I’m sure my whole team appreciate it.”
It seems like you essentially had a finished version of this song that you decided to scrap. What was that first version like, and what did you feel it was missing?
“Nothing at the time, I just had a new brainwave. I never look back on anything and think it’s bad, it’s not bad, it’s just that the new version is better. Like, I just had a new idea that I wanted to try and as soon as I did it, as soon as I started taking too much of the crap out, it started becoming a lot easier to take in. That was key.”
Did you get what you wanted out of the release?
“Absolutely, but I should stop looking at things [in such detail]… What’s in my mind is that I took two years out and I’m starting things from the ground up, so it’s almost like I’m a new artist again. To get millions of millions of streams and get played on prime-time radio and stuff like that, I think that’s an amazing thing.”