Tom Baxter
Young buck: Walking in the quavering path of Jeff Buckley is a dangerous business: many a brave singer-songwriter has fallen to his doom trying to scale Buckley's emotional peaks and match his vertiginous vocals. One young man from Suffolk, however, is ready to take this Everest-like challenge and, judging from the word of mouth from his live performances, he's got what it takes to go all the way to the summit. Tom Baxter has a pretty ordinary name, but this singer has an extraordinary, expressive voice, reminiscent of ol' Jeff himself, but with a firmness and earthiness that stops it from flying off into a helium-filled orbit. He's also got some great songs. Baxter is signed to Sony Music, which is convinced they've finally found a worthy successor to the late, great Buckley.
Leading man: In Woody Allen's film The Purple Rose Of Cairo, Tom Baxter is a fictional character who steps off the screen into the real world. The real Tom Baxter also looks like he's just stepped off the Hollywood screen: handsome, slightly raffish, and with a voice to make starlets swoon in his arms. When he appeared on Later With Jools Holland recently, performing his song, My Declaration, he seemed completely in command of the camera. "My Declaration is a song I rewrote and turned into a positive sentiment," he says. "It's really about coming out the other end of a horrible time, and making a declaration to myself in how I wanted to make a change." It's the opening track from his début album, Feather And Stone, out on July 30th. A single from the album, This Boy, is out on July 16th.
Fawlty Towers: Baxter's parents were folk musicians in the 1960s, and Tom remembers growing up in a rundown old hotel in Bungay in Suffolk, with a ballroom and a nightclub, which his parents had bought and fixed up from the proceeds of their gigs. "I met so many characters living there as a kid," he recalls. "There were different acts on almost every night of the week." At 19, Tom moved to London, enrolled in music college, and started playing in bars, cafés and restaurants. When he wasn't singing for his supper, he worked as a painter and decorator, sometimes combining the two careers in the one venue. "In the day I was grouting the toilets, and in the evenings I was playing in the front bar."
Bush telegraph: Word of mouth built up around Baxter's live gigs, and when he played a residency in Bush Hall in Shepherd's Bush, the music industry was out in force to see this powerful new performer. It wasn't quite like Jeff Buckley's legendary Sin É gigs, when the limos were lined up bumper-to-bumper, but Baxter duly signed to Buckley's label, Sony, and was packed off to RealWorld studios to try and capture his intense live energy on CD. He's currently on tour supporting Jamie Cullum - isn't that like the sublime supporting the ridiculous?
Kevin Courtney.
