Rag’n’Bone Man’s big year
A best-selling debut album, a Brit award, and a baby. Rag’n’Bone Man tells Jack van Beynen about the year he made it.
Rory Graham is late picking up the phone for our interview. He apologises; he’s been changing nappies. Graham, better known as his musical alias Rag’n’Bone Man, became a father in September last year.
Fatherhood wasn’t the only big event in Graham’s life in 2017, however. It was also the year he released his breakthrough debut album Human.
Human, led by the hit song of the same name, became the best-selling male debut of the decade in his native UK, outperforming the likes of Ed Sheeran and Sam Smith’s debuts. It won the BBC Music Award for British Album of the Year, and Graham won British Breakthrough Act at the Brit awards.
Ahead of his visit to New Zealand to play three arena shows in Auckland, Wellington and Christchurch, Graham, 33, told us how a decade of hard graft got him to this point.
This is your first time in New Zealand – how are you feeling about it?
Pretty f...ing stoked to be honest. I always wanted to travel, but I never really got to travel that much, now I’m doing it through music. I get to play to people on the other side of the world which is magnificent, really.
Do you actually get to see much of the places you’re touring?
It’s hard. It’s kind of annoying sometimes, because you’re like, ‘‘Wow, you want to Tokyo, what did you see? Well... an airport and a hotel’’. You know? Sometimes you’re in and out. But hopefully this time around, I’ll get to spend some time taking in the sights or whatever.
Do different countries react differently to your music?
Everywhere is totally different. Places that you think are going to be amazing, aren’t so good, and then you go to places where you have no idea what it’s going to be like and it completely blows your mind. So, you know, there’s really random places that we’ve been to, like Poland, where I was like, ‘‘I’ve never played here before, I’ve never been to this country’’. But they were like the loudest, most enthusiastic crowd we’ve ever played to. It’s nice when it takes you by surprise, like you have no real preconceptions about it.
People talk about 2017 being your ‘‘breakthrough’’ year, but does it feel like that for you?
Yeah, it does. It also feels like it’s been a long time, because, like I guess to everyone else who hears you on the radio or whatever and it’s the first time they hear you on the mainstream, maybe they think you just popped out of obscurity and suddenly appeared. But for us, it doesn’t really work like that, I’ve come from 10 years of playing gigs for no money and beng signed to different underground labels and stuff and making my way to where I am now.
How has your music changed over that time? You’ve worked in a few different genres.
It’s changed at every point, really. When I first started, I just wanted to play acoustic blues music, I just wanted it to be me and my guitar and that was it.
My very first record in 2011 was like a raw mix of acoustic blues and some kind of more hip-hop style stuff. And then I moved like directly into straightup, old-school hip hop sound, with a kind of soul tint to it. And then I was like, ‘Oh f... it , I don’t really want to do that any more, I want to write songs on the piano and stuff’, so I decided to do that. As long as your music truly represents you at that time, you can’t really go wrong.
Do those experiences in different kinds of music inform your songwriting now?
You kind of go about it differently each time. When I was doing stuff with straight-up hip hop beats, I would write songs like a rapper, you know? But going in to writing songs on the piano, I listened to a lot of what I consider to be really good songwriters, people like Jackson Browne and Willie Nelson and Johnny Cash. It’s cool to like, you know, if you think you want to break in to a certain style, it’s good to have a sort of influence. I go out of my way to listen to stuff as near to what I want to do as possible.
Is there a risk you’ll go too far in one influence’s direction and just start copying them?
I don’t know, really. As long as you’re not making music that concisely, like, ‘I’m gonna make this type of music because it’s going to sell’. If you’re doing that, you’ve done it for the wrong reason in the first place. Music’s meant to be fun. As long as I’m having a good time in the studio making music and it feels good, I don’t think you have to be too concise about it.
Was making time?
It was killer. It didn’t take that long, but some of the songs on it, they span like a four-year period – which is kind of strange. I was writing songs before I was signed that ended up on the record, so you know, it feels kind of strange, but then they’re kind of made up of completely different periods. It was kind of made in the same place with the same people, you know, around the people that I feel very comfortable with, and not being surrounded by any kind of ‘‘Yes Men’’. If you do something that’s s... they’re going to tell you it’s s ....
Rag’n’Bone Man plays Christchurch on April 3, Wellington on April 5 and Auckland on April 6.
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