Catch Newton Faulkner

By Rodney Edwards

What’s that sound? It’s acoustic guitar like we’ve never heard it before. It’s things done to six strings that will boggle the ears and eyes. It’s a throaty but gentle blues croon that speaks of backwoods and beaches over the top of delicate strumming – and his name is Newton Faulkner and he’s great.

Until recently Newton Faulkner was as unheard of as postal strikes. But now, like the bloomin’ pickets, he’s popping up all the time and causing disruption (but in a good way) at a shocking rate. His debut smash hit album “Hand Built By Robots” capitulated him to major stardom earlier in the year, and caused mayhem to the previously sanctimonious sugar coated and dreary music biz.

Faulkner’s fantastically refreshing single ‘Dream Catch Me’ earned him the sort of success that musical debris Shayne Ward and Lisa Scott Lee crave for in between their shifts at McDonalds. So, it’s quite a simple equation really; Newton Faulkner equals good but rubbish pop and those striking posties equals bad. And now, he’s become something of a musical mastermind, as his profile just keeps on rising.

It’s his inventiveness that makes this 21-year-old from London one of the most buzzed-about DIY artists of the year. With no promotion and bugger-all money his first release, last spring’s ‘Full Fat’ EP, reached Number One on Amazon’s singles chart in 2006.

The shuffling beats; Faulkner’s laidback scat singing and gutsy holler; the chewy blues riffs; the ‘tapping’ of strings – these had (pardon the pun) struck a chord with anyone who had stumbled across his shows in the England, causing the low-key release to sell-out its 3000 copies.

With his wonderfully nimble approach to guitar, Faulkner is as exciting to watch as he is to hear.

‘Tapping,’ explains Faulkner, ‘is prodding the strings really hard with your other hand, your picking hand. You can have stuff coming from both sides of the strings. There are certain frets which work really well – you get two notes and they harmonise with themselves. It sounds like there’s more than there actually this. You’re getting stuff out of both sides of the guitar.’

But Faulkner doesn’t want to go on about his guitar too much, even if he does play his handmade guitar (‘it’s been built to take a hammering’) with proper affection. He just wants to move us, and himself, with his music. Which is why prefers writing while he’s touring rather than while sitting at home. ‘Everything makes more sense on the road,’ he says. ‘When you’re not gigging you write stuff that’s for you in a way that you don’t when out doing gigs in pubs. If you’re doing gigs whilst writing you know what you need, you have a clear understanding of what people like and want – which I can’t seem to remember when I’m at home. Which is really stupid,’ he says with a grin, ‘but it’s just how it is.’

He spent his teenage afternoons teaching himself the guitar after picking one up for the first time aged 13. He progressed so fast that by age 16 he secured a place at the prestigious Academy Of Contemporary Music in Guildford. Aware that there would be some serious players also enrolling, super-focused kids who’d been playing since the age of four, this three-year veteran – well, novice – spent the summer before enrolling with a guitar round his neck from dawn to dusk, working on his skills.

His diligence paid off. Under the tutelage of the college’s Head Of Guitar, Faulkner rapidly developed. ‘It was Rock School,’ he admits. But while other students were seriously into ‘heavy metal shredding,’ he was pushing on with his own style of rhythmic, percussive playing.

A stint in a teenage wannabe punk-rock band came next. ‘I knew we really were a Green Day tribute band when at one gig we played the whole of Dookie, in order.’ He played in another outfit called Half Guy – ‘everyone else was playing angry metal in church halls so we thought we’d be perverse and be the happiest band in town. My guitar was pink…’ But the responsibilities of being, effectively, the band’s manager, soon took their toll. So, Faulkner started writing and gigging on his own. A publishing deal and a record deal quickly followed. His second release, the UFO EP, came out at the end of last year. The lead track, a co-write with his brother, is a rippling, infectious tune that had earned him cult status.‘UFO’ was closely followed by first single proper ‘I Need Something’ which propelled Newton straight onto the Radio 1 Playlist for the first time.

Follow-up ‘Dream Catch Me’ became a much coveted Jo Whiley Record of the Week while full scale nationwide support slots for James Morrison and Paulo Nutini helped send his MySpace into meltdown with over 300,000 plays in less than four months.

This entry was posted on Thursday, October 4th, 2007 at 1:18 pm and is filed under Music. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.