Hayden Thorpe has always taken the creative road less travelled, but an album based on an epic poem about a decommissioned nuclear testing site is probably not what you were expecting next.
Thorpe was formerly known in his guise as frontman of Wild Beasts, one of the most original, innovative and criminally underrated bands of the past 20 years. Since their split, in 2016, he has released two solo albums: the piano-led Diviner, from 2019, and the synth-pop-based Moondust for My Diamond, which came out in 2021.
For Ness, his third solo outing, he has adapted the prose poem of the same name by the English nature writer Robert Macfarlane, which was illustrated by Stanley Donwood, an artist also known for his work with Radiohead. Macfarlane wrote his poem about Orford Ness, an area on the Suffolk coast that was used as a test site by the UK ministry of defence through both World Wars and the cold war; in 1993 it was reclaimed as a nature reserve.
In many ways it’s an obvious partnership: Thorpe, the avant-garde pop songwriter, working alongside a writer who is a maverick in his own right. But Ness, says Thorpe, was “an accidental album that was made very deliberately”. Adapting a book was never on the cards, given that lyrics have always been “a potent part” of his make-up as a musician, “so to fill my mouth with someone else’s words is quite a leap of faith,” he says. “And I don’t think I’d be doing it unless I felt like I was working with a master.”
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The genesis of the project was at the 2022 edition of Kendal Mountain Festival, on the edge of the Lake District, down the road from Thorpe’s family home in Cumbria, where he had retreated during the Covid-19 pandemic. Macfarlane is a patron of the festival, and Thorpe basically wrote him what he calls a fan letter.
People go to Paris because they have a romantic sense of Paris. My romance, for some reason, was a nuclear desert on the Suffolk coast
“And, fortunately for me, it was one of those meet-your-heroes-type situations: Rob’s spirit and generosity really reinforced the feeling you get from his work,” says Thorpe. “So we improvised Ness; Rob did some spoken word from the book, and I got my baritone guitar out and started making this Morricone-esque cowboy music, and it was just a Eureka moment. Somehow there was this synergy with his very English, very Cambridge way of speaking, and me making this quite spooky desert music.”
Macfarlane has described Thorpe’s music for Ness as “like nothing else I know; born partly of the near-supernatural reach and timbre of his voice, partly of the deep strangeness of the landscape from which the project arises, and partly of the collision of traditions and trajectories that blasted the music into being. It’s hugely ambitious, original work; desert music for an uncanny eastern edge.”
Thorpe didn’t have a chance to visit Orford Ness until nine months into his work on the album, although he was equally inspired by Donwood’s images. “His depiction of this place has almost a kind of Gothic, dark mystery to it, and that gave me a really palpable sense of what it was like,” he says. “I think perhaps if you’ve been obsessed by a place before you go to it, you can often see what you want to see; often people go to Paris because they have a romantic sense of Paris. My romance, for some reason, was a nuclear desert on the Suffolk coast.”
The album was also influenced by the sounds and structures of Orford Ness. In his prose poem Macfarlane writes that “Ness speaks. Ness speaks gull, speaks wave, speaks bracken & lapwing, speaks bullet, ruin, gale, deception”. Translating its natural soundtrack into song form was part of the fun for Thorpe, who worked alongside the composer Jack McNeill and the choral arranger Kerry Andrew.
“Orford Ness has a sonic identifier,” he agrees. “You’ve got the shingle crunching underfoot. You’ve got the wind blowing through the shrapnel and creating all kinds of howls and whistles. You’ve got the echoes of the pagodas and the yelps of the seals and the cries of these rare birds. It has a whole sonic palette, so to translate the work into music was actually very easy.
“And the way Rob writes – especially how he wrote Ness – my reference point for it was very much Ulysses, where it almost has to be read in an Irish accent. It has to have that melody to make sense. So I already had a head start; in my mind these were lyrics on the page.”
Working on such an offbeat project has inevitably pushed Thorpe into new creative areas. “So be warned: there might be more opuses up next,” he says, laughing. “But I’m still very much a believer in the art of the pop song. Songs of less than four minutes have literally changed my life, and I really believe in that as a discipline. So that’s still very much going to be my focus.
“And that’s very much bound up in this record, too; it’s not like I’ve rejected that, but it’s kind of expanded my processes to what that song can be. For instance, there’s a song on Ness called She, and for me it’s very much a dyed-in-the-wool Hayden Thorpe song, kind of sensual and slightly Motownesque in its make-up. And when I played it to my partner, she looked at me stony-eyed and said, ‘Who the hell is that about? Something’s up here.’
“And I had to say, ‘You know it’s about moss and lichen?’” He laughs again. “It kind of blew my mind that the love song is much broader than the human experience; that if you perceive love as being part of the moving world, or consciousness itself, the idea of what a love song can be is kind of blown wide open.”
The arms race of having to come up with songs and presenting them to four strong-minded northern blokes, that is an acid test for any maker
— Thorpe on Wild Beasts
There is potential to expand Ness into a stage, performance art or perhaps other visual project; he nods effusively when I mention artists such as the late Derek Jarman as reference points and says that at one point he even set out to make this album a libretto for an opera. He is fully aware, too, that something so “strange and odd” will not be everyone’s cup of tea. Still, the longer he is in the music game – and he is not yet 40 – the more difficult it is to categorise Thorpe. He laughs ruefully but not without a sense of pride.
“I think in marketability terms, or even algorithmic terms, it would be useful to have a genre,” he admits. “But the more I’ve gone on, the more I’ve realised that the people I look up to and admire the most are always defined by the song itself. Nobody is asking Paul McCartney if he’s an electronic artist or a ballad-writer; he’s both. That’s not in any sense to bring any sort of Beatlesesque comparison to this,” he hastily adds, “but I have to tell you that it’s the harder road to tread.
“To stay on the path of exploration can be more challenging, but I think it’s a very beautiful path at the end of the day. So I think the reason why my records probably sound diverse is a result of allowing myself to be surrendered to them. If at the beginning of last year you’d asked me what record I was going to make, it wasn’t this one. Call it stupidity, call it vanity, whatever,” he says, shrugging as he grins again. “I just allow myself to get swept up in it.”
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When Wild Beasts split, it was the end of a collaboration that had begun when Thorpe was a teenager. Is that chapter now fully closed?
“It’s not closed in that I think about the guys every day, and the apprenticeship of being in a band still lives with me every day,” he says. “The arms race of having to come up with songs and presenting them to four strong-minded northern blokes, that is an acid test for any maker. But, also, I will forever be a four-headed being within myself, and I have different voices to reference things upon ...
“I don’t miss it, I have to say. A band is the most extraordinary way of arranging human beings, and it’s even more fascinating now that I’m not in one. But post-Wild Beasts,” he says, “I certainly feel like I no longer live in a cult.”
Ness is released by Domino Records
