Simeon Walker: 'With my shows, we’re trying to bring people together'


Now released as a digital single, Saturnine was, he says, a piece that he’d been working on before the Covid lockdown with one of his “regular collaborators”, the drummer Steve Hanley. “We got some Arts Council funding for developing my career practice and part of that involved working with a couple of people to try to develop more collaborative relationships,” Walker explains.
“This was a piece we’d been working on but when we came around to recording it in early 2021 it was in full-on lockdown and we had to record it remotely. I had to record it watching the (sound) file and trying to work out where he was going big and going down.
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Hide Ad“It’s quite different musically to a lot of the stuff I’d released before in that it’s quite expressive, it’s rhythmical and builds into quite a loud, full-on central climax which I think is quite a surprise for people sometimes. I play it as the final piece in a live set and it really works quite nicely.
“I guess I was trying to have a sense of light and shade. A lot of the time I tongue in cheek reference my music as being sad and melancholy, and in a way I’ve tried to lean into that even more. That’s why Saturnine felt like a good word because it does feel in that central bit dark and gloomy and stormy.
“I was trying to play around with some other voicings on the piano, some slightly different chords or harmonic progressions and tried to take the listener and myself into a different space musically, rhythmically, harmonically, melodically. It still sounds like me, but it’s a little bit different certainly to the Imprint stuff I did a couple of years ago.”
In an accompanying documentary film, Walker looks back on a lifetime of playing the piano, which began at the age of seven, encouraged by his mother, who taught the instrument. Having played in bands, 10 years ago he struck out on his own. He feels becoming a father himself earlier this year made him reflective.
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Hide Ad“I think that I was aware of this decade of putting music out, of sharing what I was doing as a solo artist, having never really set out at least with the aim to become this,” he says. “There was a really organic growth in those first couple of years, but I do feel that this period of reflection has crept up on me quite quick.


“When I first put music out it was not released in a general way in 2015. Streaming was definitely the thing but at that point it hadn’t become as embedded as it is now, so I was only putting music out on Soundcloud because then it was a non-monetised space, sort of like MySpace 2.0, where you could share music, listen to it and comment on the tracks, send people messages and have that social media-type social interaction with the artists in the moment as you’re listening to their stuff.
“I found that really helpful as a first way of stepping into that world as an artist, and what I found was there was this really lovely community of people who were based all over the world, particularly around piano music. It seemed to really work for piano.
“In a way I stepped out of the classical world that I’d grown up in and was involved in lots of different genres playing in bands back in the day then I’d come across people like Nils Fraham and Olafur Arnalds in 2012-13 and I’d just started to think if I really wanted to make piano music, what would it sound like for me.
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Hide Ad“This combination of classical background and training and love and interest for it and the harmonic approach to jazz and being involved with so many different styles of music, and then actually making something, which was quite rough, but then putting it out there and finding an audience of people who loved it, and it being OK as well for it not to be classical enough or jazz enough. Those niche scenes, as wonderful as they are, can actually be not very supportive, not very community-like because it feels like everyone is competing…
“That’s not what my music is about at all. With my shows and the the Piano Sessions (the pay-what-you-feel events which Walker has staged regularly at the Brudenell Social Club in Leeds since 2018), we’re trying to bring people together rather than push people apart.”
Simeon Walker plays at Brudenell Social Club on November 25 and Cafe No9 in Sheffield on November 26. Remnants is out on November 28. https://www.simeonwalker.co.uk/