Words: Sally Churchward. Photos: Bella Briscoe.
Multi-instrumentalist Charlie Barnes launched his new solo album, The Heart of the Home on Friday. He is also a big part of the Bastille Presents & project, which brought him to Southampton for a show at The 1865. Sally Churchward caught up with him ahead of the gig.
On Friday Charlie Barnes was on stage in front of a sold out crowd at Southampton’s 1865 (18/10/24).
He was one third of the on-stage presence of Bastille Presents &, promoting the latest Bastille album, out tomorrow (25/10/24), in which he also had a significant hand.
It’s a relatively low key release from Bastille who already have three number one albums under their belts but there’s still a fair bit of fanfare: a tour including European and US dates, a run of Candlelight Sessions and the record store out stores, one of which is responsible for Friday’s gig, with music press and broadsheet newspapers carrying stories about the release. Tickets for many of the dates sold out in minutes.
Meanwhile, another album was released on Friday – and it was Charlie’s: The Heart of the Home.
Charlie is a bit of a one-man band in all senses. He writes and records his own music, publishes it, sorts the distribution, books his own gigs (when he does them), runs his own social media – the works. He didn’t actually do the artwork for his latest album but he outsourced it pretty close to home – it’s the creation of his preschool son. Meanwhile his wife, an art teacher, is responsible for much of his other artwork.
But he is also most definitely part of something bigger. Rather than a multi million pound record label at his back, he has what he describes as a few handfuls of fans, and those fans have got his back. The album was funded through Patreon subscriptions – the vinyl sleeve features some of the names of fans/supporters whose contributions made it possible.
And it is for those fans, and himself, that he created the album. If anyone else likes it and listens to it, that’s great, but whilst he loves what he’s created, he’s way too self-deprecating to be confident that anyone will.
It has to be said, Charlie is not wildly keen on self-promotion. He makes music because he loves it, and it’s how he wants to make a living. He releases it because he wants to share it with others. He’s not chasing fame and fortune, more contentment.
So it follows that, having had some teething trouble with the distribution and streaming platforms for The Heart of the Home, he gave out a link, letting people listen to it for free, without those listens being measured or being paid for them in any way.
“Generally speaking it just all feels pretty positive to not have the external pressures of selling loads of copies,” he chuckles.
“It means I can just be laughing my head off when none of the distribution has worked like it should have – it doesn’t matter does it?
“It will all be sorted out in the next couple of days, and if people really want to hear it, obviously I’ll just give them a link to it because it’s fucking amazing that people would even care to! So that’s quite fun.”
Charlie explains how the album came about: “ I made The Heart of the Home on my own in my home studio with a couple of friends helping out, mostly by email.
“I set out to make something where I wasn’t really considering its success. I thought, ‘I’m only really going to worry about this community of Patreon subscribers’ and the people who were already listening.
“‘I’m just going to do whatever because I think these guys are going to enjoy it and I don’t need to worry about it in terms of career.’
“After I’d got some of the way through it I slightly changed the approach with the track that became the opening song, The Shakes.
“I pulled that one apart a bit and turned it into this much more atmospheric, melancholy floaty kind of thing.
“That made me realise maybe I’m going about the album the wrong way, and rather than making something that feels like it’s sort of two albums shoved together, which is usually been the way it usually is for me, because I can’t make my mind up as to what I want the sound to be, I thought maybe I really needed to dig down into this specific sound that I found, and that informed how the rest of the album was made.”
The sound is very different from Charlie’s previous albums as well as his ‘day job’ as the fifth member of Bastille.
Subjects include family life, becoming a dad and his changing relationship with alcohol.
“It was The Shakes that made me realise that I could show some restraint, which has not been my strong point previously, and dig a little more into the stuff that is a lot more like what I actually listen to these days,” he continues.
“With the other albums, because I was working with one of the guys from Oceansize [who Charlie was a huge fan of as a teen], I was chasing this teenage dream of making alternative rock-based wall of sound kind of experimental music, that was sort of like Oceansize and Amplifier and all those sorts of bands, but pop. I think I managed that to an extent, but that was a dream from when I was much younger.
“I’ve realised that I’ve satisfied that urge. These days I don’t listen to that kind of music all that often, other than when I’m listening to my favourite stuff from my teenage years, so I wanted to make it something that sounds like the music I listen to now.”
Charlie’s path has often been rocky. He lost his mother in his teens, a loss that has loomed over much of his adult life, he has experienced further personal tragedy and struggled with periods of low mood and disappointment.
But now there is a sense of settling down and contentment, which feels like it’s spread from his personal life into his creative output. It’s right there in the name of the album, The Heart of the Home and felt in tracks such as Kitchen, which celebrates simple domestic joys and feeling like you’re where you should be. I wondered if part of the change in Charlie’s approach stemmed from a wider shift.
“Yes hugely,” he agrees.
“Kitchen started out as a sort of vast anthemic thing with empathic trumpets on it.” he adds.
“It was once I got The Shakes into the right place and played Kitchen live a couple of times acoustically that I started to think that maybe I’m going about this the wrong way and that’s when I slowed it down and eventually tuned it down a lot as well.
“One of the big changes with this album is that I had sort of accidentally been going down this road for years of doing the super high belty singing. Doing The Shakes and getting into the right sound kind of made me realise I don’t necessarily want to be singing right up the top of my range all the time because I don’t actually enjoy it much anymore, so with quite a few of them I was dropping down in key.”
Charlie has talked in the past about how he threw a lot of time as well as much of his inheritance at chasing the dream of being a successful solo artist, which didn’t come off the way he’d hoped. It left him struggling emotionally for a while and he felt the contrast between his role in Bastille – initially as a touring musician and increasingly part of the behind the scenes furniture as well – playing sold out arenas and what he described previously as the “total fucking failure of my own career.” The ghosts of the career he’d strived for haunted him for years, but now it feels like they’ve been put to rest. I put it to him that it feels like he is now happier in himself, more content and striving less.
“Yeah, definitely,” he agrees.
“There’s definitely been a shift over the last however many years, of like, music is very nice and it’s fun to do, but it’s not the be all and end all, and if I’d stopped doing it altogether, that would be OK.
“It’s not like I don’t have ambition anymore but I’m just really happy with what I’ve done, how I’ve done it, and just feeling content with not needing to strive for anything more.”
It feels like he’s stopped judging himself through some external lens and measures of success and found his own sense of what matters in his life.
“Yes exactly, that’s it,” he agrees.
“Like I always previously felt like the website is who I am, or the band, now it’s just a bit of it. It’s probably a fairly standard growing up thing as well – settling down, family, all those things, getting over all the silliness,” he laughs.
“But none of this is in a defeatist sense. It’s like…there’s a bit of being realistic about it but it’s not like being downtrodden.”
Charlie is so enthusiastic about The Heart of the Home, does he think it’s his best work yet, compared to albums such as Oceanography, More Stately Mansions and Last Night’s Glitter?
“Oh easily, it’s the best music I’ve done and the best music I’ll ever do,” he says emphatically.
“I don’t mean that to be a doomy thing to say. It’s not to say I feel like I’m giving up or anything like that, it’s just so many things fell into place, some intentionally, some accidentally, and the way that it’s all worked out with timings and where my head’s been.
“I just don’t feel I’ll likely have the freedom to do something like this again.
“It feels like I’ve hit on something that’s authentically who I am and it kind of ticks off so many of the boxes of what I really like about music and my favourite kinds of music and I don’t feel any desperate need to try and better it.
“When I started out making this one, I was just like ‘do the songs and don’t worry about how they hang together.’
“But in the midst of making this, I felt like I was getting to what would be my definitive work, so maybe I should work a bit harder on it, take more time and all that.”
Charlie decided to release the album on a significant date – the 20th anniversary of losing his mother. I mention it cautiously as I don’t want grief to catch him out – we’re chatting in a dressing room with minutes to go before the band are due on stage and I don’t want to take him to a difficult headspace at a point when he won’t have time to process it.
“It’s sort of breezed past,” he says of the day, which was spent unloading the band’s van into the venue, setting up, sound checking and diving to Wagamama for a hurried meal ahead of the show.
“Five years ago was the one that really did me in, because that was the point where I realised it was more time without my mum than with. It was also in the year when something really horrible had happened which I will be going into at some point but I’ve not got the words for it yet (the topic of the song Good Morning America). That whole year I was f**ked basically because we’d had this horrible thing happen and then I was just away the whole time. In October we were in the US and mostly I was a f**king zombie. Like I threw my bass across the stage in a rage over seemingly nothing at one point. I was in a really bad way.
“Since then the anniversaries haven’t had quite the same impact. This does still feel like a big one, but it’s nice to do something a bit more positive with the day,” he explains.
“Not that I needed to shift the focus onto me, or anything like that but it was maybe me saying I can sort of allow that date to stop being such a huge thing to beat myself up with.”
In an echo of early in his career, when his first album came out, and as he sees it, bombed, as he started rehearsing with Bastille, he was also glad to be on the road with Bastille Presents & on the release date.
“Being on tour means I can’t get too deep into thinking about it, which is kind of helpful, especially with wanting to be realistic about expectations (of how the album will do).”
Which takes us onto Bastille Presents &. Charlie has been involved with Bastille for several years, and was one of the key collaborators who helped Dan Smith bring the album together. So how much involvement did he have in the finished product?
“Quite a lot,” he says.
“It was funny really because Dan and I were talking about the things we were working on at the same time. When I’d update him on how this was going I’d be saying ‘oh I’ve slowed a bunch of them down and tuned them down quite a few keys because I wanted to not sing up there,’ and he was like ‘oh I’ve kind of done exactly the same,’ so we were sort of going, I think, in a similar direction at the same time, of just trying to do things differently.
“When the recording was happening I essentially dismantled my studio at home, drove that down to the studio we were in, set it up in one of the side rooms, and kind of beavered away.
“I did quite a bit of piano arranging, coming up with parts for guitars and that sort of thing. It was a mixture of the normal process of being in a studio, where you all hear something that’s missing and you fudge around and find it together, and then there were a lot of other moments, because we had the luxury of being in this place where there were lots of different rooms, it meant that, with the track that closes the album, for instance, I could just sit and work on that for day, getting the piano arrangement right.
“It was very collaborative but the various people involved often had time and space to go and chip away at an idea for a bit. There was so much being done in such a short space of time, it meant that sort of by default it had to be like that. I often work best when I’ve got a bit of room to think and try a few things out, and then bring something to the table.It was a pretty idyllic process.”
Charlie played two sold out solo dates at the beginning of the year, and his album was due out shortly after, with further tour dates promised. But while Patreon supporters were given a link back in spring, it’s taken until now to get the album semi-officially released, with issues with the digital distributor causing headaches. So is & to blame for the lack of live shows?
“No, not at all,” he says.
“I hadn’t got round to sorting out the release of the album and I didn’t want to book anything without having released it and seeing what the reaction was like.
“I want to gauge the reaction and build things up a bit on line, so it gets to the point where if I say I’m doing this gig and the tickets are on sale, there might be more of a chance that people will buy them and it will be worthwhile.
“I hope I will manage to do some stuff next year but there’s a lot to consider. Id I think about the younger me and how I approached music compared to the older me and how I approach music now, the younger me was just kicking down everyone’s email inbox to try to get gigs and would happily do anything and like I spent a fortune just playing everywhere and not making any money out of it – but then that ended up opening all the doors that got me in various ways to where I am now.
“Now, being able to make a living from it most of the time, still entertaining the idea of having solo projects, but in the context of being a parent with much bigger responsibilities, I can’t just muck around and go and play some gigs and not make any money out of it.
“Which is sort of horrible and goes very much against who I am and how I feel about music, like I don’t really want to be the guy saying ‘I’ve got to make some money out of this,’ but fundamentally, I do. I need to make sure I’m doing places where I can realistically sell them out.
“It’s not that I don’t want to do it again because it went so well at the start of this year, like almost alarmingly well, so we’ll see. Hopefully early next year.”
In the meantime, we can carry on catching Charlie on tour with Bastille Presents &, with an entirely sold out tour, including a date at Shepherds Bush Empire, as well as taking part in a charity Christmas show at the Royal Albert Hall.
We end the interview – and Charlie really should have joined the rest of the band at the side of the stage by this point – with a brief discussion about vanity and creativity. I know it’s something Charlie’s struggled with and suggest he’s being unfair on himself – after all, why is someone who is hugely successful less vain when they send their work out into the world than someone whose audience is much smaller? Isn’t it all about making meaningful connections, sharing, feeling seen?
“Fundamentally any creative endeavour is [vanity publishing],” he agrees.
“I watched an interview with [Cure frontman] Robert Smith the other day. .He was saying if just playing guitar in your room on your own was enough then of course we wouldn’t be doing it, but you do want people to hear it, you do want people to like it. It would be totally pig-headed to pretend otherwise.
“But for me it’s just a realistic working out of what it is I’m aiming for or something like that.”
He concludes: “There’s always going to be a bit of vanity in it and I think I’ve found that a bit hard to accept.”
Charlie’s new album is available on streaming platforms – click here for links.
You can support Charlie on Patreon and get access to loads of private content – click here.
Follow Charlie on Instagram at Charliebarnesmusic.
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