One True Pairing: ‘I’m forever walking a bit of a chasm’

The once Leeds-based, former Wild Beasts co-frontman’s new single is a double A-side, with the self-penned Golden Arches swapping the Bruce Springsteen-inspired heartlands rock of his debut solo album for twinkling synthesisers and loops. On the flip side he reworks Ever New by ground-breaking US singer-songwriter Beverly Glenn-Copeland.

“I’m forever walking a bit of a chasm,” he says. “If I fall left it falls into singer-songwriter territory and if I fall right it’s into synth and computer stuff. Golden Arches is way more down the electronic end. It was supposed to be part of an EP that eventually became the acoustic (Zero Vulnerability) EP and I sort of abandoned this track. I was really pleased with it but I wasn’t sure where it was going to be.

“I guess it’s a bit of a change of direction from the much more nakedly rock stuff that I did on the first record, but at the same time a lot of the synth stuff was there as well. It’s a bit skronkier and a bit less romantic, maybe a bit more widescreen, but a lot of the synthetic stuff is there on the record too.”

The mood of the song is escapist. Fleming says: “I don’t want to talk about lockdown music, but it was definitely the case that it was a journey after something else, and all the sonics reflect that. It’s a UK kind of road movie thing, straight roads and chain restaurants by the side of the road and that kind of thing, hope that you’re going somewhere. It’s vague but it’’s a journey that you’re experiencing is what I was hoping.”

He came across Glenn-Copeland’s work shortly before his 1986 new age electronica album Keyboard Fantasies was reissued. “I’d been listening to things like Harold Budd and Brian Eno, partly for interest and partly for what it was designed for, (feeling like) ‘I’m stressed as hell, I don’t know where my life is going, I want to listen to this music and drift for 15 minutes’ and that led me to this music,” he says. “I love those kinds of sounds anyway and it was such a beautiful, plaintive song and so at odds with the barbed stuff I tend to write that I thought this would work really beautifully. I thought it was so gorgeous.”

Having recently played his first live show since lockdown at Standon Calling festival, Fleming feels relieved to be back doing what he loves most. “Speaking personally, I need this, I need to feel like I exist, if somebody even in a small way is listening,” he says. “I’ve spent 15 years as a touring musician; the idea of just putting stuff out on the internet and nothing happens is very strange.”

Performing, he adds, is “a really important part of what I do”. “Obviously everyone wants to do it in a safe manner, no one wants to rush back, but at the same time it’s been very difficult – and not just financially for musicians but psychologically as well. It was like, what are we, what are we for? Everyone’s had to get jobs to make ends meet and while that’s a tenet of making music anyway it is a strange kind of hinterland to inhabit, so it is really nice to play on stage again, I can’t lie.”

Fleming reveals he is currently working on a new album, for release next year. “It’s in process but I’m not there with it yet,” he says. “I for one have found it quite hard. I think as a solo artist you live a bit too much in your head anyway if you’re not careful, or at least I do. I think you do need to meet the world a little bit in order to have these ideas that you can relate to the real world a bit, so that can be a challenge when you have no objective reality to measure it by, as you see by how insane people have gone during lockdown. Look at the online space, what a manic, poisonous space that is.

“Creatively I don’t work well with a lot of time. I work well with a bit of time and a lot of pressure, I need somebody to go, ‘where is it then?’ otherwise I’m a world-class procrastinator.”

Golden Arches/Ever New is out now. www.onetruepairing.co.uk