Interview - Ruarri Joseph

This was a nice chatty interview. We couldn't hear a thing in the venue as youthful punk act Whiskey Versus Faith were soundchecking deafeningly, so I was given free rein to carry out the interview somewhere else in the Mornington Crescent region. It's not a location I know well, and all the pubs seem noisy, so we slipped into the comfy plastic chairs of a nearby fast food takeaway, armed with water for Ruarri and a Fanta for me. Bit of an unusual place for an interview, but no-one seemed bothered, and it makes me smile when I walk past. And I have still never eaten anything from there...

Words - Suzy Sims
Previously published on Native.tv http://www.native.tv in July 2007
(c) Niche News & Publishing Ltd

Ruarri Joseph is very apologetic. He’s drinking a bottle of water. He’s sorry for being boring, but he can’t really drink something fizzy before a show. He’s also apologising for his swearing, which tends to come out when he’s not around his children, and he spends much of his gig telling the crowd he’s sorry for being a geek.

The ‘Who’s Jack’ night is presenting a selection of bands at Tommy Flynns for our listening pleasure. Currently, the opening act Whiskey Versus Faith is making a lot of noise as they soundcheck. It’s impossible to do an interview without yelling, so I take Ruarri to a nearby greasy chicken takeaway where he sips water – cleverly also avoiding food poisoning – and I am able to spread my question cards randomly on the table. No-one gives us a second look. This is Camden, where every second person is or was in a band. And every third is a media person following them about.

Ruarri (pronounced like ‘brewery’) is a casually dressed 25-year-old singer/songwriter. It’s a curious name, and a bit of research tells me the Gaelic version (Ruaidhrí) means ‘red-headed king’. There’s a bit of ginger in his beard, but he’s hardly Boudicca. Recently signed to Atlantic, Ruarri’s recently finished touring with Ben Taylor and is now doing the rounds at the festivals. He’s good-natured and talkative, and I feel a slight kinsmanship in that we’re both southern bumpkins who are strangers in North London.

The Ben Taylor tour was particularly good fun, playing to a couple of hundred people a night around the country. Ruarri hadn’t travelled too far from London for gigs before. “It was like the perfect crowd. ‘Cause I’m from Newquay I’m used to playing to drunken people and stag parties and things where it gets a bit aggressive, so it was nice to play to a sort of mellow audience and actually play the guitar instead of just whacking it, and sing instead of shout! No, I enjoyed it. As first tours go, I think I got very lucky, and had a good time, and it was cool.”

He’s just done at Glastonbury, and was still wearing his festival wristband. The mud coating his guitar case is a less savoury reminder. “Go and have a look, it’s plastered, it’s hideous. Glastonbury was amazing. Basically we were in the Leftfield Tent, they had a comedians’ slot and then I was the first musician on after them.”

Did people wonder why you weren’t telling jokes? “I don’t know! But what happened what it was chucking it down with rain so the Leftfield Tent was full. Then suddenly about ten minutes before I went on the sun come out, so everyone was like ‘Wahey! The sun’s out!’ So I didn’t play to that many people, but I had a great time and the people who were there enjoyed it.”

“One I’m looking forward to the most is the Ripcurl Festival, which is a mile away from my house, so I’m going to walk there and then I’m going to walk home afterwards which I think is really cool.” With your guitar and everything? “No, I’ll get a taxi for that,” he laughs. “I just like the idea of walking home. But I’m looking forward to that one. I’m looking forward to all of them. It’s just exciting, I think it’s just exciting. I get too excited if I keep saying the word ‘excited, so I’ll lay off it.”

Are you playing any festivals abroad? “No. Well, is the Isle of Wight abroad?” Ruarri jokes. As a mainlander, I’d say so. “So that one. I’m doing the Bestival at the end of summer.” He’s looking forward to the fancy dress party the festival is famou for. “Don’t they send out like an email or something which is a poem and you have to theme your fancy dress around the poem?” he muses I think I heard rumours it was pirates and flappers. “Quality. I’m from Cornwall, so that’s perfect. I’ll just go dressed normally.”

Ruarri isn’t quite from Cornwall. He was actually born in Scotland but his family made their way down to Callestick (“which has a cider farm and an ice cream parlour and that was it”) when he was about five, then later moved to Newquay. After a couple of years in New Zealand and a filed venture to London, he was back in the South West. “Just sort of within the last couple of years I’ve actually just fallen in love with Cornwall.”

He first picked up a guitar at the age of 11 or 12, and someone taught him a couple of chords. “I would literally sit in the garden shed for hours on end just playing those two chords over and over, different rhythms and singing stuff, making things up. And that’s about it really, it’s always been about making things up for me. I went through a phase of learning other people’s stuff but it’s much less fun.”

His first gig was at the young age of 14 in a Perranporth pub with a band called Oblivion. “My early years in music were fun. Now there’s pressure. Somebody goes ‘Write a song’ and you’re like ‘Oh God, this better be a good one’ whereas it used to be write whatever you like and hopefully somebody will like it. It’s quite fortunate because having had it as a hobby I’ve got quite a lot of songs that I can just go back to and say ‘What about this one, it’s quite cool’. So I’m not in a position yet where I have to write on demand, where they say ‘Right, we need a ballad’ or ‘Right, we need a Christmas song’.” Would you do a Christmas song? “Yeah, I reckon I would. I wouldn’t release it, but I’d do it and play it to my family and friends and say ‘Isn’t this a load of shit’.”

Ruarri actually ended up joining the first band he went to see, the Rhythm Doctors. After first seeing them in a pub, when he returned from New Zealand he found himself working in the same pub as the drummer. A few years later, and he was playing Glastonbury with them.

We discuss the music scene in Cornwall. It was pretty hyped the other summer, but the resorts are so seasonal, Ruarri explains pubs are not keen to book bands in the winter months because there aren’t the punters. Luckily the bands in the area tend to be friends and help each other out. “It’s just there’s so little opportunity down there. Last year, instead of going out on our own and doing pub gigs to nobody or to drunkards we thought we should all get together and organise a night where it’s music, people can come for free and we advertise it and get five bands in one night, so the music scene for that summer and a bit into the autumn was brilliant.

“And more and more Cornish acts are getting on the Ripcurl. When we first started it was big names and that was it, whereas last year the Hitchcock Rules played on it and Joe Francis and the Ammunition played on it, this year there’s like the Noel Prior Band, there’s me, there’s quite a few Cornish things going on. So hopefully that will kind of pick things up as well. Everybody’s close and we’re all friends but it’s not like a big, buzzing hyping music scene, it’s just a good fun one. It’s all about that kind of community thing, it’s very cool.”

The last band he saw was The Who, at Glastonbury. He left halfway through. “That sounds bad,” he adds, catching sight of my face, “but I’m really glad I did because we spent about three hours trying to get out of the mud in our car. So I’m pleased we left when we did because apparently the next day it was chaos. But on the same day I also saw Willy Mason, who I thought was brilliant, and Shirley Bassey, who was quality.”

It hasn’t always been drifting along happily in a life of music for Ruarri. A man’s got to earn a living, and this one has done so in pubs, strawberry picking, daffodil picking, a nursery, a nursing home, and a farm, amongst other places. The farm work was in New Zealand. “Here’s a little farming tip for you – if you don’t dock a lamb’s tail, it gets full of dags, and then they get poorly. So you have to dock a lamb’s tail.” I didn’t know that. I thought a dag was an uncool person. “Well, a dag is actually a lump of shit on the back of a sheep. So if you’re calling somebody a dag, that’s pretty offensive.”

“Since signing a record contract, (music is) my fulltime job which is magic. Because it means I can play a guitar all day long, and when (his wife) comes home and says ‘What have you done today?’ it’s ‘I’ve been working’. When I used to do that, I’d sort of feel guilty and have to lie: ‘I have done other stuff too, I didn’t just play my guitar’. But now I’m just doing my job.”

His job at the moment involves a fair bit of promotion for his debut album ‘Tales Of Grime And Grit’. Plenty of autograph signings mean he’s developed a beautiful signature. Because some of the songs on the album have been kicking around for about seven years, he says his influences have changed and some may sound ‘erratic’. He loves listening to Bob Dylan, Tom Waits and Django Reinhardt, as well as old and unpolished-sounding songs from all genres, but says just because he likes listening to these people doesn’t mean he thinks he sounds like them. On the plus side, the fact songs have been around a while mean there’s a variety of themes on the record.

“I am looking forward to (the release), but still can’t quite believe it. I won’t believe it until I walk into a shop and see it. I’m really pleased with it actually. I didn’t think I would be, for some reason I thought that signing a contract and making an album with kind of restrictions would be a really bad thing. But the record company have been amazing.

“Half of the album was recorded in my bedroom and just remixed and the other half was done in a professional studio, but they let me play all the instruments myself and they didn’t insist I got other musicians in. I produced half of it, and the other half I co-produced with a guy called Paul Reeve.” For us, standout songs are ‘Patience’, ‘Won’t Work’, ‘Tales Of Grime And Grit’ and the singalong of ‘More Rock N’ Roll’.

The rest of 2007 is looking pretty chocka, with festivals until September when he starts a solo tour, with a band tour in October and another solo tour is pencilled in for November. Ruarri’s eyeing a well-earned break in December. “If I can get three weeks off, I’d be delighted. But right now I’m just happy to be busy and working. That’s it really. That’s really dull though, isn’t it!” I’ll make something up; I’m a journalist, I promise. Incidentally, I’d like to announce Ruarri’s new extreme gigs where he takes his acoustic on all matter of adventurous activities while singing. The parachuting leg starts in October. “But I mean even if I wasn’t working it would be things like fix the fence in the garden. I’m a family man, I just do the family stuff.”

During our conversation I also discovered that Ruarri is ‘crap’ at surfing (“It’s the Scottish blood in me”), he doesn’t have a lot of time for hobbies but loves hanging out with his family and playing in the park, and his favourite milkshake is chocolate, though he prefers smoothies because “the only health I get is a smoothie.” We pause while Ruarri considers making a documentary on one particular brand of milkshake. “They’re like syrup. So heavy. They defy gravity. They’re evil. I’m going to make a documentary and drink 30 of them in one day and film it.” Like Morgan Spurlock. “Exactly. But better because it’s milkshakes. I’m going to live on milkshakes for a day. Then at the end I’m going to be very sick.”

Back to the gig at Tommy Flynns. Both Whiskey Versus Faith, with their miniature tattooed Elijah Wood-a-like frontman, and the fake blood covered second band Fucking Vagas are loud, brash and punky, with plenty of shouting and deafening keyboard samples. They’re with friends and all sat on the tables closest to the stage. After a 20 second soundcheck, Ruarri walks past and confides that he’s making minor adjustments to the setlist because the crowd is “more indie” than he imagined.

Everyone else is dressed in black skinny jeans, with baseball caps and hard rock band t shirts. In contrast, Ruarri is wearing layered t shirts and flip flops. But the punk kids enjoy their music, and years of playing to “drunken people and stag parties” means he has no trouble handling the crowd. He apologises for being a geek several times, and the punk kids laugh and say they’ll let him off because he’s from Newquay. They get him chanting Applecore, after their friend’s band, and make him bite a blood capsule, which he does with jocular embarrassment after plenty of egging on from his manager. In return, he gets them swaying and singing ‘sea-shanties’ for ‘More Rock N’ Roll’ and they stay behind to clap along for his instrument-less version of ‘Tales Of Grime And Grit’.

Ruarri shakes hands on the way out, and I spy his guitar case. It’s caked and splattered with Glastonbury mud. Grime and grit indeed…

Album ‘Tales Of Grime And Grit’ is released on July 9th through Atlantic and is preceded by single ‘Tales Of Grime And Grit’

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