He became the lead singer for Maximo Park after one of the bands girlfriend’s heard him singing in a club, the band ended up being nominated for the Mercury prise and had two of their three albums go double platinum. After ten years and three studio albums Paul Smith is going it alone with his debut album Margins, a European tour and a photographic book entitled ‘Thinking in Pictures’. I caught up with him ahead of his first UK show to discus the tour, the album viewing the world in a magical way.
How’s the tour going?
It’s going really well, we have just come back from mainland Europe and we played 6 shows in Germany, three in Italy, three in Switzerland and Brussels, Paris and Amsterdam. It’s been fun being on tour with a whole bunch of new people and just experiencing it all again, its like starting again in some ways, its been quite exciting doing something that I’m not really used to but you have to challenge yourself at various points in your life and I’m really enjoying this one.
How does doing a solo tour compare to gigging with Maximo Park, does it feel a bit more exposed?
Yeah it does but I think the songs respond to it. The places that I’m playing and the way I am playing the songs are just stripped down, just me and my guitar and it feels appropriate to the songs. I realise that with Maximo Park, when I’m on stage I respond to the songs and because the songs with the band are very energetic and full on, my behaviour and performance was in keeping with that. The songs on Margins, are quite different, so with each one I try and approach it afresh and try and do the song justice to connect with the emotions that are inherent in the song, for me its been more exposed but not in a bad way, it feels like the right thing to do.
There is a vulnerability in the way you sing on Margins, was it a nerve racking experience taking a different direction?
I think so, for me the songs on the record where made with a sense of enjoyment, actually getting things out of your system and singing in way that you don’t usually gives you a freedom and a kind of relief. When it comes to playing those songs live and recreating that intimacy it has been a challenge. Doing something that is quite different sort of empowers me more and I realise that I can do that and I can sing quietly on an evening and people are still going to enjoy it. It’s been quite a fulfilling experience without sounding like some sort of self help book; it’s been cool.
Has there been a gig that’s really stood out as your favourite so far?
We were talking about this on the bus as I have brought friends of mine to play the things that I cant play. The guy who plays the drums on the record Andy Hudson who helped me produce the records, Rachel Lancaster playing the guitar and Claire Adams from the Leeds based band Beards on bass. We were just saying what is the best gig and everybody agreed that the German ones were amazing; we played in Hamburg at the same place as the Beatles used to play in at the Indra Club. Watching people be quite and really enjoying the songs was amazing, when it came to my choice I choose Middlesbourgh which is the first concert that people had paid money to come and see us, I grew near there so just realising that if things went wrong on stage it wasn’t the end of the world. If your in front of those people who are used to something else, the album had just come out on that day so I knew people wouldn’t know what to expect or might except something similar to Maximo Park which put the wind up me and that show went really well, people seemed to enjoy it and for me that was brilliant, it just gave me a lot of confidence and the desire to keep doing it. Each night of the tour you feel a little bit stronger, playing the guitar and signing at the same time and singing in a different style I didn’t really know if I could do it I just thought I would give it my best shot and once that first show was out of the way I just felt really good about the whole thing.
Becoming a front man wasn’t something you pursued but more fell into, do you feel quite lucky?
Absolutely, for anybody to have released three records that have reached a lot of people and I now having done a record on my own label by myself and put that out, everyday I think its quite weird. Its such a strange set of circumstances, so chance ridden to be in the position I am in now where I feel like a fully fledged songwriter, that’s my vocation in life and I feel comfortable doing it. I am very lucky and the other side of it is that I have worked hard once I was in the position that I realised things where getting good in Maximo Park. Writing songs that I thought other people would want to listen to, I just forced it as hard as I could just as everybody else did in the band. We worked so hard to play songs to people and talk to people about our music to make sure that everybody heard it. Once you get that break and realise that you can be good at something like signing you just try to work hard at it.
You studied art originally and were an art teacher at one point, it that something you would ever go back to doing?
Its difficult because at the moment my main focus is now music and it was always my main obsession but because I wasn’t a performer or songwriter it was part of peripheral vision and in front of me I didn’t really know what I was doing. I was teaching art just before the band signed a record deal and it wasn’t what I wanted to be doing you don’t get to draw much or paint much when your teaching your doing lots of red tape stuff and filling in forms and sharing your knowledge. Once the band kicked off I have been so lucky, everyday I think I should be writing a song or doing something that could feed into a song or doing some sort of creative activity and I realised that I had got loads of photographs that I had taken over the last five years, Polaroid photographs so alongside the album there a book called Thinking in Pictures which has a selection of 74 of the Polaroid’s I have taken over the past few years which is an art book really, not a band on tour larking about. Things that I enjoyed looking at and other people might like. The sum of my visual investigations over the last few years, without sounding too weird.
Is that something you would want to do again?
It depends if I felt the need or I felt I had something worth sharing I think that is my only impetuous about putting this book out or putting records out. Do I think its good enough for other people to listen to; do I think it would enhance their lives in some small way? Like the music or the books that I have I my house, maybe it’s a bit of arrogance, if someone has an emotional impact and wants to put it out. All the songs on margins I’m really proud of and they are my cup of tea so I thought lets put it out rather than I need to make money. I do need to make money but the records are made with just the pure love of doing it in mind and hopefully I am trying to connect with other people. Yeah if something else came along that felt like it was good enough to put out, whether it was a book of drawings or more photographs, if the time was right and I have made enough things that are good I would see if anybody is interested in releasing it out. That what I’m doing really just going along and seeing if anybody likes any of the stuff that I am up to.
Quite a few of the tracks of Margins are quite romantic, are you quite a romantic person?
Yeah I would say so, I have always tried to view the world in a magical way and tried to see the things that happen as positive things. Even the bad things that happen, you end up thinking melancholy is not such a bad feeling after all. A lot of the sad songs people listen to, in the words of Elton John ‘they say so much’, but for me I feel like romance is something to be proud of. If you’re romantic you should try and be positive about very ordinary things and relationships with people. When I write songs I try to lyricise those moments and try and remember the spark between two people, like on the song the tingles. It’s about that moment when you meet somebody and you find the weird tingles going up your spine, that song also deals with a bit of an argument between two people and I think the album is a collection of small moments that maybe other song writers don’t deem important enough to put in a song but I feel really are very romantic moments.
Published in Yorkshire Evening Post and Metro
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