Everything for Guy Garvey begins with a story. Even this interview. “I’m in my home studio,” Garvey says when I call him on Valentine’s Day. “Otherwise known as Cloaky Cloaky studio, a purpose-built studio with a lovely view of the garden,” he explains.
“It’s called Cloaky Cloaky studio because my mother-in-law, the late Diana Rigg, spent her last months in our house. She and I became very close. I didn’t have this studio. I had a writing room in Brixton, so I was walking in every day during the lockdown. And one morning she said, ‘Darling are you going to work? Come in here.’
“And I went into her bedroom and she started miming a shrouding motion with her hands and she said, ‘I shroud you with the cloak of inspiration. May it resist mediocrity and bring you artistry. Go, go, wear the cloak.’ Very, very theatrical, very funny.
“The following day on my way to work I stuck my head around the door and said, ‘Can you do that thing again, Diana? I’m off to work.’ She said, ‘What thing?’ ‘The shroud of inspiration.’ And she went, ‘Oh, cloaky cloaky, off you go.’”
He laughs at the memory. “I have a big neon sign that says Cloaky Cloaky Studio. My darling D.”
Guy Garvey, broadcaster, father (to seven-year-old Jack), husband (to Rigg’s daughter Rachael Stirling, herself a formidable actor) and, of course, front man with the band Elbow, is, it should be clear, a man who likes telling stories. He has a stock of them. When the Dairy studios in Brixton take on a new intern every September, he tells me, said intern is introduced to Garvey and told, “This is Guy. He’s only got 21 stories.”
The implication is that the intern will hear them all.
There are worse fates. The reason we’re talking today is that Garvey’s band Elbow have a new album, Audio Vertigo, out. It sounds, I would suggest, very Elbow; a big-hearted, warm-hearted squall of noise and spiky sentiment, animated by Garvey’s lyrics and his bear hug of a voice.
This is the band’s tenth album and it comes as Garvey turns 50, as do his fellow band members Mark Potter and Pete Turner. Garvey was just 16 when the band began, so they have a history that stretches back more than 30 years.
Their fourth album The Seldom Seen Kid, released in 2008, was the one that cemented Elbow’s position in the nation’s heart, winning the Mercury Music Prize, a Brit and two Ivor Novello awards. The album’s stand-out track One Day Like This quickly became a summer festival singalong favourite.
The last time I spoke to Garvey was in 2017. At that point fatherhood was fast approaching.
How has the experience changed him?
“Well, all the cliches are true. I love what it’s done to my wife. Because you really don’t know what kind of parent your partner is going to be until they start doing it. And she’s f****** amazing at it. The three of us laugh constantly, so it’s a beautiful security.
“It’s anchored me geographically. It’s anchored my soul. Approaching 50, of course, you’re looking at the end as much as the beginning and to have a new joy in my life just as there is more salt than pepper in my hair …”
His son has already given him his review of the new album: “He said, ‘Daddy, your lyrics on this album are so random it’s out of this world.’ Thanks mate, that’s a great review.”
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The lyrics - random or not - are full of love and fear and memory. Oh and knife fights. Well, one knife fight. Witnessed some years ago by Garvey in Istanbul. A true story?
“Yeah and the weirdest thing about it is I didn’t think about it for years. Maybe didn’t want to think about it.
“As it says in the song, I was in a place called The Little Wing Cafe in Istanbul. I’d been there all day. And these two guys, probably in their late fifties, were talking with their arms around each other like old pals. And it started getting heated and the lad who ran the place leapt over the counter like he knew it was coming. But he didn’t get between them before one knifed the other.
“And, of course, all I’m thinking selfishly is, ‘Turkish prison, Turkish prison.’ He hoofs them out and I’m just in the midst of a complete meltdown. All my adrenalin kicked in and I didn’t know what to do. After what felt like an eon, but was probably about five minutes, I scooted out the door and they were stood in the street, one of them clutching his side, pissing themselves laughing, waiting for a taxi to hospital.”
That could be story number 22, I say to Garvey. “It is!” he acknowledges gleefully.
Garvey’s past is as present as the present on Audio Vertigo. On Very Heaven he contemplates his 17-year-old self. As the title suggests, he looks back on that time fondly.
“I left home at 17 so it was the wild ride of my life. It was a real adventure. My ego didn’t let me think this for years, but I did very well in the bedroom department on account of having a bed.
“No 17-year-old had a house without grown-ups in it. The boys I lived with were a couple of years older and they had loads of amazing actress friends and every now and again one of them would sneak in, swear me to secrecy and sneak out in the morning. So it was amazing. Mindblowing.”
Very Heaven was also inspired by a couple of older men he met back then. “Not to be trusted around girls. Both of them had something of the exotic about them and both of them delighted in having controversial opinions which is the hallmark of the c***. Both men were fond of a crushed velvet jacket.”
If they are still around now they’ll be in their element. We live in a world of cartoon masculinity right now. How do we combat it?
“The internet is an open sewer,” Garvey argues. “And we’ve just got to keep it away from children. You are inviting the worst self-regarding elements of human nature into your home if you give your kid a screen. So, first of all, cut off the source.
“I’m all for freedom. I’m not for censorship. But the whole thing needs regulating. You’ve got to make the people who make money out of this stuff responsible. Tech giants should be accountable.
“It’s like we’ve thrown a whole generation under the bus.
“I talked to my son about bullying a couple of months ago. I told him two instances when I was his age when I fell into bullying someone without realising. And I said when I saw the look on his face I realised I didn’t want to bully people because his hurt was my hurt and I felt ashamed.
“I think kids who bully each other over the internet don’t see the reaction. They don’t see the pain. They don’t see the hurt, which is why it’s like an awful war zone.
“So, my answer to your question is turn the net off.”
Wait until Jack wants a phone, I say. “I’m hoping by that time there will be child phones.”
It’s Valentine’s Day, I remind him. We should talk about love, “If me and Rach are right I’m walking on air. When we’re right then the world’s a beautiful place and we’ve never been happier. And when we’re wrong it’s head-clutching hard and we both feel that way. It’s a very passionate relationship."
“It is something you work at. When it’s right then you’re bigger than the sum of the parts, just like being in a band.”
Finally, has he been at a wedding when Elbow’s anthem One Day Like This has been played?
“In person? Yes. I think I have. Or have I? Almost on a daily basis somebody tells me they’re having it at their wedding.
“Which is why we’ve never licensed it to an advertiser. My best friend Peter Jobson from I Am Kloot, he’s a Geordie and a wise man. And he was in my house once and my manager phoned up and said, ‘You’re not going to like this.’ I said, ‘What?’ He said, ‘Hovis want to give you a million quid for One Day Like This.’ “And I went, ‘Oh my God, tell them to f*** off.’ So Pete said, ‘What was that?’ And I said, ‘Hovis want to give us a million quid for One Day Like This.’ And he was like, ‘Hovis, it’s a historic family business. For as long as I can remember their music has been Dvorak’s New World Symphony and nobody’s calling him a c***.’ He laughs that big, barrel-chested laugh of his, before continuing.
“Never say never right, but I can’t bear somebody’s wedding song becoming a bread advert or a Corn Flakes advert or something. It’s such a hugely flattering thing that people have it at their weddings or their funerals.”
Audio Vertigo by Elbow is out on March 22. Elbow play Glasgow OVO Hydro on May 11
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