It would be hard to argue that the winner of this year’s best British breakthrough Brit award is anything other than a very 2019 kind of pop star, and not merely because his route to success was bolstered by regular appearances on that noted barometer of public taste Love Island. The last series of the reality show deployed so many of Tom Walker’s songs on its soundtrack that he might as well have been stalking the contestants around their Mallorcan shag-pad, popping up from behind bushes and out of wardrobes to serenade them.
He also seems to fit perfectly with at least one hugely important aspect of our era. We live in a world of recommendations cooked up by algorithms and data-crunching, of “inspired by your recent activity” playlists, of “for fans of”, where the idea that your mind could be blown by something completely out of left-field, something that runs contrary to your established taste, seems to have been eradicated like smallpox. And there’s certainly a distinct hint of “if you like that, you’ll love this” about Tom Walker.
His backstory comes complete with tales of busking and sleeping rough, not unlike that of Ed Sheeran. He shares with Sheeran a co-writer – Steve Mac, of Shape of You fame – and a predilection for a percussive style of guitar playing, vaguely hip-hop beats and rap-influenced vocal cadences that ensured that his single Fly Away With Me was played not just on Radio 1, but 1Xtra. He also has a distinct hint of Sheeran’s willingness to step into musical areas that common decency has long declared off limits, safe in the knowledge that public taste seldom chimes with what rock critics decree permissible: while Sheeran lucratively dabbled in Oirish fiddle-de-dee on Galway Girl, Walker’s song Blessings sounds suspiciously like white reggae.
And, as on Sheeran’s debut album +, the songwriting on What a Time to Be Alive tends to bullish assertions of Walker’s own talent in the face of apathy and adversity (“I’ll be dead before they change me, my guitar’s the only one that ever paid me”) and empathetic I’m-your-mate vignettes involving booze, drugs and lean times. Walker’s gruff voice means that the empathetic vignettes are rendered more in tears-of-a-tough-guy mode than Sheeran’s patent aura of sweet-natured older brother expressing concern.
In fact, Walker’s vocals are one major point of difference with Framlingham’s most successful musical export. He has a very good voice if you like your furniture artfully distressed. He sings in a variation of that growly, slurry, prematurely aged, woke-up-this-mornin’-and-my-woman-was-gone-from-our-halls-of-residence style popular with everyone from George Ezra to Rag’n’Bone Man, a style he further decorates with eyebrow-raising swoops into a Sam Smith-y falsetto, as on his duet with Zara Larsson, Now You’re Gone. Another is his vastly more expansive production style. A raft of big-name producers have worked on What a Time to Be Alive, all of them clearly commissioned to come up with music designed to fill stadiums. They take a variety of approaches to fulfilling this brief: Arctic Monkeys circa AM grind on Cry Out, EDM synths on My Way, echoing U2 guitars on How Can You Sleep at Night? and cinematic orchestration on Fade Away.
At the risk of sounding cynical, if you were an A&R person, you would probably sign him. In the current climate, where mainstream success feels predicated on fitting in, he seems like a sure thing, an amalgam of current styles: everything on What a Time to Be Alive sounds like a hit, in that you can imagine it slotting smoothly into the singles chart without ruffling any feathers. In an age obsessed with pop stars being as ordinary as possible, he has everyman appeal, underlined by the album’s cover, a drawing of Walker, made up of other people: thousands of tiny figures depicting the singer, in beard and beanie.
He’s also skilled at writing songs that adeptly push emotional buttons without scaring anyone off: the fact that his big hit Leave a Light On is about drug addiction didn’t stop it being used on an advert for upmarket TVs, or re-recorded with skirling backing by the Red Hot Chilli Pipers, kilt-favouring winners of BBC1’s talent show When Will I Be Famous? You can scoff at that as a minor skill if you want, but let’s check Tom Walker’s bank balance in 18 months’ time and see who’s laughing then. Perhaps it wouldn’t seem like such a guaranteed success if it felt in some way risky or adventurous. As it is, the sense that absolutely nothing here has been left to chance – and that What a Time to Be Alive might have been a more interesting album if it had – is a tough one to avoid.
This week Alexis listened to
Big Thief: UFOF
A song about alien abduction where the abductee sounds positively delighted to be kidnapped, this taster for Brooklyn band Big Thief’s third album is hazily sunlit and beautiful.
