In a quiet corner of an east London pub, Archy Marshall is plotting abdication. ‘I want to get rid of the King from the name,’ says the flame-haired subversive best known by the moniker King Krule, keeping his voice low lest the label and management powers-that-be propping up the bar get wind of his plans to do a Prince Harry. ‘When I was young I loved it because it was quite rockabilly, like King Kurt. Now I find it a bit cringey.’ He laughs to himself. ‘We should call it Kringe Krule. I just want to be Krule because it sounds a bit more arty.’
Marshall has certainly earned enough art rock credentials to become a one-namer, his generation’s Eno or Fripp. It’s been 10 years since the darkly petulant urban jazz and post-punk of his breakthrough 2013 debut album 6 Feet Beneath the Moon, cowled with his moody, lip-curled teenage baritone, was feted by Beyoncé and Frank Ocean. Back then he was an intriguing outlier; a broken down broken-home kid, the voice of a hounded and hopeless generation.
In the intervening decade he’s built a feverish cult fan base around the world with records (2017’s Mercury nominated The Ooz, 2020’s Man Alive!, this year’s Top 20 Space Heavy) that have shattered and remoulded alternative music in innovative new shapes and encapsulated — if not originated — the form-defying south London scene of Black Midi, Jockstrap and Black Country, New Road. Merging avant-rock, jazz, trip hop, post-punk and electronica into a spacious cityscape of sound, he’s not merely the new future sound of London but its modern mindset, too.
As an artist renowned for songs wracked with depression, romance, anger and urban disintegration, Marshall’s reputation as a surly, downbeat interviewee goes before him. He arrives at today’s photo shoot declaring himself ‘in a foul mood’ and, six lens hours later, takes to our pub table interview arena downcast and fidgeting. He plays with his trinket bracelet as he speaks, scratching at his lean cheeks, starts on rudimentary beermat towers.
Despite his unsettled air, he doesn’t seem distracted or dismissive. There’s deep thought at play, which brightens his eyes when we land on an engaging topic. ‘When I started [in 2010, aged 16], I remember being super depressed with the current guitar music,’ he says, a semi-smile flashing his gold front tooth as we pull at the roots of the south London scene. ‘I was so sick and tired of the sound of the guitar at the time. It needed to change. I don’t know if it created anything but what I was doing was what I needed because there were no guitar bands that represented the guitar any more. We’d come from the back of having The Libertines and Arctic Monkeys and The Strokes before that, and what they created. Then all of a sudden it got really synthy and twee, and it wasn’t cool to listen to that in south London. It just felt there needed to be something better.’
He tips his hat to the Eddie Cochran riffs, Pixies basslines, Talking Heads hooks and dub reggae grooves that he turned to for inspiration as a teenager, as well as ‘stealing my entire sound’ from his brother’s band, Words Backwards. ‘At the same time all these jazzers started coming out…’
Part of Marshall’s moodiness this afternoon is likely down to the dawn flight he has to catch tomorrow to embark on the second leg of a major US tour ahead of a run of UK dates peaking with two nights at the Hammersmith Apollo in October. America has particularly taken to the immersive textures and sodden emotion of King Krule’s music; the cult is strong there. ‘I find all over the world people have a deep connection to some of the stuff that I’m creating,’ he says. ‘But the country with probably the most support is America.’
I was paranoid of the police, paranoid of being robbed, paranoid of not having any money…
He was pleased with the tour’s first leg. The band clicked at a memorable gig at Detroit’s Masonic Temple (‘It was spooky… I was definitely questioning the purpose of some of the rooms’), and he’s enjoying the looseness of the shows, sometimes switching up and extending the songs mid-set. But with his years of after-show mayhem largely behind him (‘I don’t have a desire for that’) he finds lengthy tours a mixed emotional bag. ‘I’ve been doing it for ages so it just feels really comfortable. It just goes on for way too long… There’s been moments where you want to never play the music that you’re playing again. But then a month later you’ll be more excited than ever. So you have switches.’
Marshall’s has been a life in fluctuation. As a child, he split his time between his artist and costume designer mother’s house in East Dulwich and his art director father’s flat in Peckham, in constant limbo between the bohemian and the down-at-heel. He struggled with discipline, was frequently truant — his strict father would literally drag him to school — and was tested at Maudsley Hospital for a variety of mental health conditions, engendering a distrust of authority. ‘A lot of the time, the doctors and the psychiatrists and the counsellors and my social workers were plain wrong,’ he’s said. ‘Basically, I hated everyone.’
He describes his teenage London life as intensely paranoid. ‘Paranoid of the police, paranoid of being robbed, paranoid of ticket inspectors, paranoid of not having any money. I was on edge quite a lot. I really enjoyed it though. It wasn’t that bad but, if I look back on it, it felt like there was a lot of surviving in an all-or-nothing way.’
Via several schools for excluded children, Marshall eventually landed a place at the Brit School, where he overcame his discipline issues and bloomed as an artist. His 2010 releases as Zoo Kid — and particularly the minimalist and atmospheric ‘Out Getting Ribs’ single — were hailed as striking new noir twists on the tormented teenage experience and debut 6 Feet Beneath the Moon made him a global talking point. Beyoncé posted links to his songs, Kanye West and Frank Ocean were asking about collaborations. King Krule was handed a cultural sceptre, awaiting only his crown.
Most young acts, particularly with Adele’s label and management behind them, would consolidate such attention with further high-profile releases. But Marshall shrank away. For four years he released no new King Krule albums, putting out his second record, the hip hop-based A New Place 2 Drown, under his own name. It wasn’t that he was being protective of the moniker, its significance and its potential, he explains, but that he was struggling to feel worthy of it.
‘Everything I was making just wasn’t good enough,’ he sneers. ‘I was in a place where I was uninspired. The next record, The Ooz, didn’t work for ages. Nothing was working. I’d come off tour in 2014, I started recording straight away and all of it was probably alright, but something wasn’t right. I think I lost my way hugely from the journey that I should have been taking, the journey that I needed to take. It was jammy, jazzy guitar stuff, big beats, it wasn’t great.’ Was that a low point? ‘One of them, but I was really enjoying getting stoned every day and playing PlayStation, so it wasn’t that low.’ His face brightens with a chuckle. ‘It was pretty high.’
I lost my way from the journey that I should have been taking
He credits the addition of saxophonist Ignacio Salvadores and spoken word artist Beatriz Ortiz Mendes to his musical family (he feels, he says, ‘a bit like a football manager’ when he discusses his team’s on-pitch chemistry) for getting The Ooz back on forward-thinking track. And there was another new arrival, a daughter in 2019, to further alter his creative mindset. ‘Now I have a conscious thing when I write songs,’ he muses. ‘I know that now in the universe, there’s a new set of ears with a completely different relationship than anyone else will ever have to me, unless I have more children. That’s definitely shifted a part of my creativity for maybe the better because it’s made me more considerate.’
Fatherhood has been an enlightening experience, he says, reflecting his own childhood back at him and giving him ‘an awareness that the traditions and clichés of genders in this country don’t have to be repeated’. But it’s not behind the lowering anger levels that some critics have discerned in Space Heavy. ‘I just don’t agree with that,’ Marshall argues. ‘I still feel that there’s a deep anger inside a lot of the composition and a deep sadness that’s there.’ His trademark melancholia is certainly still evident; he’s haunted by a past lover on ‘Seaforth’, sunk in an emotional swamp on the title track and holding a mirror to his own inadequacies on ‘Tortoise of Independency’ (‘I just do everything super slow and alone’). What’s getting him down? His eyes lower. ‘Oh everything. Everything. Nothing.’
Though he’s written songs such as ‘Alone, Omen 3’ couching depression in terms of empowerment and survival, he shrugs at the idea of 10 years of musical catharsis helping dissipate his childhood issues. ‘Health is important. But…’ He pauses, selecting his words carefully. ‘Sometimes…’ Another long pause. ‘Sometimes you need to burn stuff down.’ To rebuild? He catches my eye, clearly troubled. ‘Just to stay warm.’
Of late, Marshall’s fluctuations have been geographical. The birth of his daughter prompted a pre-pandemic move to Liverpool, where he was ‘quite lonely’ but indulged his teenage fascination with turn-of-the-century British history. ‘You go to Liverpool and see the wealth that the slave trade marked on the city, and also the obsession the Victorians had with it. And then to see where it is now in its culture.’ By necessity, Space Heavy — an eclectic and experimental record inspired by Nina Simone and Brazilian composer Caetano Veloso — was written while ‘cutting through the country’ on trains between London and the north-west. The result, perhaps, was an increased sense of solitude; the space of the title refers to the voids not between stars but between and within us all.
‘Its character is the lonely guitar,’ Marshall explains. ‘The lonely instrument and the guitar and sketchbook are the forefront of the record.’ Yet there was something freeing about working in his studio up north, away from the pressures and expectations of the metropolis artist. ‘I can compare it to the sludginess of my mind and the swamps of creativity that the other records felt like for a long time,’ he says. ‘There was lots of pain in trying to construct something in a lot of the other records. With this one, maybe it was because I had this change of lifestyle with my daughter and then there was this moment where we were playing the best we were ever playing. I had so much creative energy at that point, and I had so much clarity, I was able to marry all of the elements that I liked about my songwriting and I was able to put it more cohesively into place for myself… The decisions were really clear and I stuck to them. I found a lot of strength in that.’
At 29, Marshall has no truck with Saturn’s return. ‘I look forwards,’ he says. ‘I’ve never really enjoyed looking back.’ What does he make of the angry young man of 2013? He says that was then; now he’s back in London — because ‘just circumstance, just life’ — loving living in Rotherhithe and eyeing up his next cultural breakthrough.
‘I’m gonna make a book of poetry,’ he reveals. ‘I want to feel appreciated by some kind of pomposity, some kind of intellect that doesn’t appreciate me yet. I don’t want to cheat and make songs, I want to make poetry.’ Is he ready for the withering critiques of the high-art intelligentsia? ‘Yeah, I wanna be judged by them,’ he says. His gold tooth flashes once more. ‘And they’ll probably laugh at it.’ It is, after all, an increasingly Krule world…
King Krule headlines the Eventim Apollo on 9 and 10 October as part of the Space Heavy world tour (eventimapollo.com)
