‘Getting divorced felt like being run over by a train’
He’s known as an actor, but Laurence Fox has poured real emotion into his third album. Guy Kelly reports
There are some musicians who refuse to be drawn on the real-life inspiration for their songs, no matter how obvious. There are others who are happy to entertain theories, but would rather the themes stay universal, thanks very much. And then there are a few, like Laurence Fox, who will just shrug and tell all.
Fox is, of course, far better known as an actor – both in his own right, playing DS Hathaway in Lewis for nine years and as Lord Palmerston in Victoria, and as a member of the Fox dynasty, which includes cousins Emilia and Freddie, brother Jack, father James and uncle Edward – than as a singer-songwriter, but believe it or not, he’s about to release his third album.
Called A Grief Observed, the record diarises the last four, traumatic years of Fox’s life, which started with the breakdown of his nine-year marriage to the actress Billie Piper, with whom he has two sons, Winston, 10, and seven-year-old Eugene. The eventual divorce crushed Fox, who went on to move house twice, eventually settling with the boys near several family members in south London (Piper lives elsewhere with her new partner, the musician Johnny Lloyd, and their baby daughter Tallulah). Then, last year, he lost his best friend to a long illness.
“What is it they say?” he asks, “Moving house, getting divorced and losing someone you love – those are the big, hard things in life. Well, I’ve had all three in the course of a few years.”
Fox, 41, is excellent company: a publicist’s fever dream, but charming and energetic enough that I expect they forgive him. I’ve interviewed him before, around the time of his second album in 2015. It was, I remind him, at his marital home – Piper opened the door, toys were scattered… it seemed like happy chaos. “Really? That would have been close to the end. The…” He mimes an enormous explosion with hands and sound effects.
I didn’t sense it at the time, I say. “No, well, who did?”
That second album had allusions to trouble. “Don’t fall in love if you don’t want a gunfight,” one song began. “Yep, and it was like that for quite a long time,” Fox says. “People can be your muse but also be, you know…”
A Grief Observed is every bit as honest, and, as a result, easily his most accomplished record. There are a couple of guest vocalists (one is the actress Laura Haddock, who stars opposite Fox’s hippy drug dealer in Netflix’s forthcoming drama White
Lines – the reason for his temporary scraggly blond hair extensions), but many songs feature just a guitar and Fox’s gravelly baritone; think George Ezra with a hangover, or perhaps Bruce Springsteen by way of finishing school.
The first, Say Goodbye Properly, is directed at an actress with “an emptiness inside”, who leaves abruptly.
“That one was written in a dressing room, literally the day of the life change,” he says, looking at the tracklist. “Die on My Feet was early on. Shaky times. It’s weird, looking back.”
The album’s title comes from CS Lewis’s collection of reflections on bereavement after the death of his wife, Joy, in 1960. Fox was given it “by someone who cares about me”, when he was at a low ebb after the divorce.
Piper isn’t dead, of course, but studying bereavement as a means of coping with the sudden upheaval in his life has helped Fox.
“It’s grief for what a family is. It’s an irrevocable change, so there is a sort of death to it, in a way,” he says. “A woman
from one of the boys’ schools described it brilliantly to me. I was probably looking pretty ropey at the gates that morning, and she said, ‘The thing is, Laurence, you’ve been run over by a train, and you’re f-----. But you both get run over by that train, it just happens at different times.’”
He brightens. “It’s so true. You’re the one who gets smacked over at the beginning, but further down the line they’re hit, too, when they realise their life has also changed, even if in the moment they felt strong and empowered and mended. But everyone has their own process [in divorce]. The only consistent thing is it takes 18 months to two years before you go, ‘Wow, it’s actually sunny and nice out’.”
Are you both at that point now? “Yeah, I think so. It feels calm now.” After the initial venting – and the “Oh my God, what the f--- am I going to do?” – the rest of the album concerns Fox’s resurrection. Songwriting replaced counselling, the sharpsounding financial implications of the divorce were finalised, he threw himself into co-parenting and, it seems, calmed down a bit. He’s “sort of ” single.
“You’ve got to take a bit of responsibility for yourself,” says the man who was expelled from Harrow in sixth form for smoking, womanising, and being a jack-the-lad. “It’s like Type One and Type Two fun, as my brother Jack [currently Sir Edward Denham in
Sanditon] calls it. Type One fun feels really good when you do it and f------ dreadful after, like a massive night. Type Two fun feels f-----dreadful when you do it and really good after, like going on a run. My life was quite a lot of One, now it’s Two.”
Winston has just started secondary school, while Eugene flogs to a primary in north London. Will either go to boarding school, like their dad? “No, no way,” Fox says, before remembering it’s not entirely his choice. “Oh, well you never know, but I doubt it.”
There’s one more song I’m eager to hear about: it’s called The Distance, and seems to be about free speech.
“Ah, that one’s because I’m sick of all the censorious people in the world, telling us how to live. People say I’m Right-wing and believe in Brexit, but I don’t, I didn’t vote and don’t care about it, but I do care about how we’re no longer a democratic country,” he says.
“And I’m sick of being told by Lewis Hamilton that I should eat vegan. I’m like, ‘maybe you should give up your private jets?’ It’s an elitist class who say they know better, but they don’t have to live by those rules, we do … And I know this is all pretty rich coming from the son of an actor, but I hate hypocrites, and it’s probably because I am one. We hate in others what we see in ourselves.” He stops, and soon bounces up for a cigarette. School pickup time’s approaching. He asks how he seems, four years on. Like you’ve been through it a bit, I tell him. He takes a long drag. “Well I have. It was f------ dark. But I can see it’s sunny now. And in a weird way I feel better than ever.”
‘I hate hypocrites – probably because I am one ’