Simeon Walker: ‘I felt I was living a life that wasn’t how I really, truly felt’

“It’s been an interesting three years,” says Simeon Walker, the Leeds-based pianist and composer, reflecting on the time that has elapsed between the release of his debut album Mono and his new record, Winnow.
Simeon Walker. Picture: Will KillenSimeon Walker. Picture: Will Killen
Simeon Walker. Picture: Will Killen

In that period he has toured the UK and Europe and his music has been played regularly on BBC Radio 3 and 6 Music and streamed 10 million times. He also founded the Brudenell Piano Sessions, a pay-as-you-feel series of concerts at the Brudenell Social Club in Leeds whose audience had trebled in size, and he is currently studying for a Masters degree in composition at Leeds Conservatoire, where he also lectures.

Winnow expands upon the solo piano sketches on Mono, with Walker supported by a seven-piece chamber ensemble that includes drums and ondes martenot, an instrument that can produce theremin-like wavering sounds.

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The oldest piece derives from a performance that he gave at High & Lonesome Festival in Leeds, the day after the Paris terror attacks in November 2015. “I remember that one being such a formative experience for me because this was one of the first times I’d done that kind of stuff in Leeds,” he says. “I felt like it did set the tone quite well. There was a piece that I played then that was probably one of my oldest pieces but it didn’t really fit the last album, and I always knew that it needed to be more than a solo piano piece so I kept it in reserve.”

A long period was spent experimenting with jazz drummer and percussionist Steve Hanley. “We knew each other for a long time but we saw each other at a wedding and got chatting and said, ‘we should play together and have a jam’. That was a bit of an impetus to finish the album off. It completed that line-up that I was looking for. Piano and strings is a common combination in my kind of music, and it’s great, I love it, but I really wanted something that was going to stand out a little more, and that real instruments on it as well.

“There’s a lot of music in my world that uses plug-ins and computers and technology, which you can get some incredible sounds out of, but I wanted something with real people in one space, in the room together recording at the same time, just to bounce off each other.

“I think that’s what marks this out as being so different to what I did before, which was all solo material recorded in my living room, whereas this one was in a studio with seven other musicians all playing at once.

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“Stylistically it’s similar but in terms of the way it’s been worked on it’s developed quite a lot, really.”

Much of Winnow was inspired by Walker’s personal battle with faith. He says it’s an issue he “had to spend a lot of time thinking about” before unleashing the record. “I had some conversations with family and friends over the summer to say this is coming and with it I’m not trying to be disparaging or saying bad things of anyone or anything in particular. I’m not making a judgment on it as such, I’m just talking about my experience, so in a sense the compositions have come out of that experience I guess as a way of being able to express my feelings.

“I’ve been trying to bang the drum for instrumental music for a while, and having been in bands and played with loads of different musicians and sat at the back playing keys and letting them do their thing because I’m not so skilled at writing lyrics I’ve always felt that I could say what I want to say through not having lyrics. I feel that meaning is able to be conveyed through the music and so you get these different pieces. The titles of the pieces are fairly representative of the feelings that I’ve experienced over the last six or seven years, these ideas of unravelling, bits of my life that have turned when I’ve sat down to really reflect, they aligned with how I felt.

“I felt I was living a life that wasn’t how I really, truly felt. I had some baggage which I brought with me when I came to Leeds in 2005 as a student. I grew up in church. So you get these ideas of unravelling and haze and captive and seasons.

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“In some ways if you just looked at the titles and listened to them, a lot of people think with instrumental music you just pick a random word and hope that it vaguely fits thematically with the content of the music, but really for me they are almost tomes of reflection on certain themes of how I felt to have something which was previously a fulcrum for my life, the thing around which everything was based and everything came from there.

“When that centrepiece of your life is removed it wasn’t in a big, grand, anti-Damascus road way, it was just a long period of unravelling and starting to think ‘I think this is where I am any more’ and then using music to express myself. It’s created this collection of music that talks of that time, even though it’s not through words, it’s a musical expression of those emotions.”

The album was completed with financial support from the Help Musicians fund; Walker also received funding for publicity from the PRS Foundation’s PPL Momentum Accelerator talent development grants.

Walker says he’s greatly missed not being able to stage any more Piano Sessions, but appreciates others have lost far more to the Covid pandemic. The sessions, he felt, were “just the right thing at the right time”. “They tapped into a mood that people wanted to come and experience different kinds of music in a space that maybe they weren’t expecting to hear it in, but also that ability to see and hear things that they might not know about, they might not have a huge knowledge of that area of music, but by doing it in a venue like that and having the trust of the venue, as I’m growing my profile hopefully in my curation as well, that people were able to say, ‘I don’t know who any of these musicians are but I’m going to give it a go and come along for a really nice evening’.

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“The one we had in January we must have had almost 150 people to a pay-as-you-feel show in the Community Room at the Brudenell with a bunch of people who haven’t been huge names, that was really something and I do miss it. What has a become important for me with curating was creating an eco-system for artists within my scene where to get gigs particularly on a real piano that makes a massive difference to how the music is heard and experienced. And (Nathan Clark) at the Brudenell has been so supportive.”

Winnow is out on Friday November 20. www.simeonwalker.co.uk

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