From the beginning they attracted some impressive collaborators.
The band’s name is a hybrid of one of their favourite films, The Squid and the Whale, and that film’s director, Noah Baumbach. He dropped out after a few months citing ‘boredom’ and stayed in Manchester further honing his impressive array of songs.īack in London, by early 2007 he recruited his brother Doug on drums – ‘except we were called Johnny Hat Racket back then,’ says Fink helpfully – with fiddler Tom and bass player Urby completing the settled line-up.
He started playing guitar and writing songs by the age of 12, spent a gap year traveling before taking up American Studies at Manchester University. Some of my friends who are religious interpret a religious slant on the lyrics, although I’m not explicitly writing about that.’įink attended a Catholic primary school in Twickenham and shrugs ‘I guess at an early age I vaguely believed in something, but it was never been forced upon me’. But I’m not trying to be conclusive with these songs and, thankfully, people read lots of different meanings into the lyrics. The album effectively examines love, death and time and how these things can compromise each other. ‘Once I had discovered a proper subject matter, the songs just fell out. ‘I only started to write songs properly after I had traveled across the Mediterranean and India that I had something to write about,’ says Fink.
As 5 Years Time makes clear, Fink is looking towards an optimistic adult future, not dwelling on a mythical childhood past. In fact, throughout the album there’s a palpable quest for adventure, exploring both the wider world and big universal themes.
#CHARLIE FINK INTERVIEW TV#
True, Peaceful, the World Lays Me Down is unlikely to impress Enter Shikari fans, but Noah and the Whale aren’t cultivating innocence or nostalgia for kid’s TV programs. Nevertheless, anyone found using handclaps, triangles and, yes, those pesky ukuleles will inevitably be dismissed outright as insufferably ‘twee’. The flipside is Radiohead’s building an album entirely in the studio and that’s what I’m also into.’ These were all going back to an essence of songwriting that’s something I want to tap into. ‘The key to it all is actually having a basic form of songwriting,’ says Fink, ‘I think people like Daniel Johnson, Jeffrey Lewis and Jonathan Richman. And anyone who can turn whistling and ukuleles into this summer’s ubiquitous hit surely has a knack for spotting big possibilities in the slenderest of premises.įor Fink, this is all about getting ‘the right balance’, between rudimentary ‘anti-folk’ and studio-harnessed grandeur, between the intimacy of threadbare lo-fi and the warm embrace of mainstream pop. It’s simple stuff, but no less magically affecting. As anticipated, the band’s skipping breeziness, arching jangle and sunny élan soars high, but Fink’s frequent bouts of downcast gloom offers a rather more absorbing journey than the perky singles suggests. The other consolidating element is the release this week of their debut album, Peaceful, the World Lays Me Down. With any luck, these will help cement their steady ascendancy from world-of-mouth buzz to mainstream stardom. We’re in a noisy café in King’s Cross near to where Noah and the Whale are rehearsing for forthcoming live shows. ‘Yeah alright, it feels completely bizarre,’ he says emphatically, ‘to be honest it all just seems weird, especially when, after I wrote it, I’d never envisage it having any cross-over appeal. With a top ten single, 5 Years Time, engraved into the playlists of radio stations everywhere, Fink’s display of stoic modesty eventually gives way to an incredulous grin. Whilst a lot of young people his age would be negotiating post-University repayment loans, Fink is negotiating the final running order and guest slots for when he and his band headline The Roundhouse in Camden tonight. Charlie Fink, the 21 year old singer and songwriter behind sunshine folk outfit, Noah and the Whale, is doing his utmost to appear unfazed by his current and rather glorious predicament.
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