There is so much to like about British singer/producer John Newman. What we know already is his voice is like no other – powerful, yet vulnerable and emotional, with his music uplifting, compelling and the perfect marriage of classic grooves and future pop.
However, in a 15-minute interview, the BRAG found out that there is so much more to the 23-year-old lad from the small English town of Settle, Yorkshire. Newman reveals the strategy behind his transformation from ‘the voice on those Rudimental songs’ to be known in his own right; the highly personal story behind Rudimental’s ‘Not Giving In’; and that he will be letting fans inside his head at his Hi-Fi performance on Thursday May 1.
The name John Newman first entered the global music scene’s vocabulary when British production crew Rudimental released the song ‘Feel The Love’in 2012. It went to number one on the UK singles chart and number three here in Australia. Newman’s collaborations with Rudimental also included their other UK Top 20 single, ‘Not Giving In’. However, Rudimental’s success came at the cost of Newman’s identity as a solo artist.
“We have worked very, very hard at building up my identity because I was a bit of a faceless character at first,” says Newman. “There was a little bit of an identity crisis with us all because no-one really knew who it was making this music that everyone was listening to. For Rudimental’s team around them, their management and their label, it was really important that I wasn’t sitting in their interviews, so people quite quickly worked out who they were. So to my management and team it was very clear that we needed to be doing a lot of in-person interviews to get my face out there.”
Despite the efforts by Newman’s and Rudimental’s representatives to separate the identities of the two acts, the reality is that Newman and the London production quartet shared a much more organic relationship.
“For ‘Not Giving In’,me and Piers [Agget] wrote it in Piers’ bedroom when I was living at his house,” Newman says. “It is about a really close friend of ours that was going through a really tough time and we wanted to write a song about him, and that was ‘Not Giving In’. I fully wrote the lyrics.”
Eventually, Newman emerged as more than just an extremely talented vocalist for Rudimental to lay over their heavy bass-rooted production. A DJ and producer in his own right, Newman discovered music during his childhood in Settle (population 2,421). He got into DJing at the age of nine and was sampling his own vocals, guitar and piano over the top of established dance tracks by the time he was 13.
“I had a little set-up in my mum’s house and I was sampling my own stuff. How I became a producer was that when I spoke about how I used to DJ [and] play house records, all the young lads in the town were doing the same thing – it was the new thing to do. So the way that I wanted to be different to everybody else was by making interludes and remixes of tracks and intros, and that’s how I began producing. I would spend many man hours in front of a computer screen, tweaking and integrating my own recordings.”
Ultimately, though, Newman knows that a good song is about more than executing all the tricks of production.
“I think nowadays people cover up too many things with what they can buy from a music shop, and forget that there is a really important thing in making music – that songs have to be well crafted. You have to be able to perform a song on a piano and still sound good. It can be fun to add in all these cool effects and synths, but the thing is, when you start adding so much electronic stuff you lose the charm of what music can be; that is, the charm of the swing of a musician or how a musician sits back off the beat. To use musicians is the way forward, man, and obviously that doesn’t cater for synths.”
If Newman thinks effect-based music is a fad, what about the dubstep-like breakdown during ‘Love Me Again’, his mammoth single of 2013? “Yeah man,” he laughs, “the middle eight of ‘Love Me Again’was on the half-time dubstep thing because that is what I felt like at the time. I will do anything if it feels right at the time.”
Anyone who’s seen the film clip for ‘Love Me Again’,or who witnessed Newman’s performance on Australia’s version of The Voice (he was a guest at the series final) will know that his stage performance is impassioned and theatrical. This bodes well for fans looking forward to his tour.
“Live shows are so, so important to me. I don’t understand how people can’t put their all into every gig. The thing about the live show is that my stage set is related to the album artwork design that I was involved in. The lighting is really important, so I keep a close eye on that. You walk into the gig and it is basically the inside of my head.”
