Talking to: Joel Marten
Joel is a freelance musician living and working in London. Graduating from Birmingham University in 2019, he was regularly performing across the country, including festivals, gigs and live sessions for BBC Radio 6 Music. In 2020 coronavirus took him further into the studio; as well as working as a session musician for Biig Piig, lock down birthed a brand new direction for Joel, producing his own EP of spoken word set to acoustic guitar, called Stories. Joel’s new project also embraces visual art through a collaboration with artist Ollie Fearn, who created an animated film for one of the tracks from the EP, Interlude.
The animation and accompanying words explore anxiety, writer's block, and the moments when you’re trying to stay creative despite challenges from external and internal events. When we caught up with Joel recently we delved deeper into the topics explored throughout his visceral, honest and often humorous EP, as well as talking about the creative process and the difficulties and joys of living and thriving as an artist in these unusual times.
So Joel, you are based in London at the moment, are you from London originally?
Yeah, I’m living with my parents in London having graduated a couple years ago; I was brought up here, in Ealing. I lived in the same house for 18 years, went off to university in Birmingham, studied Music and Maths, and then came home to my parents living in a different house. So I guess it’s the kind of cliché thing; everything changed.
There were quite a few other significant changes in my life at that time, my grandma died as I went off to university, because my parents moved house almost as soon as I’d gone off, it was so much change. And so now since graduating I’ve come back to a different house and I was just trying to get involved with music in London thinking if I’ve got parents living here I might as well give it a proper go. Then covid struck after about six months, so I’ve spent more time here in lock down than not, but it’s all good.
How’s it been trying to make a living in the creative industries in lock down?
This is it, I was really just getting started in London. I feel for a few of those six months in lock down I wasn’t even set on getting gigs as a career option, it kind of started to creep in after a couple months. At first, around September 2019, I was looking at jobs even in Birmingham or jobs down here as a radio broadcast assistant or starting out in the radio world, music databases or events, various music jobs, starting as a young graduate right at the bottom.
Then I decided, well, I’m going to do some tutoring to support a career getting gigs. So I was trying to meet as many people as possible; I met some artists that I really got on well with and was having good things with. Then obviously covid struck and I felt like I was just getting started. To be honest, I didn’t have a network of producers, musicians and labels to work with to sustain that through covid. Obviously a lot of my friends who did have that type of network still really struggled and weren’t earning as much as they wanted to; they had to get extra work. But for me, honestly, I could count on one hand the amount of gigs I had last year; but they were all with Biig Piig.
I really really like Biig Piig! She’s amazing!
She’s such a wonderful person and her music is very special. I think a lot of people are connecting with that at the moment; it’s great to see her really blow up over 2020. I think a lot of artists went into 2020 thinking at first, “here’s an off year basically, we can be creative!” I know even people like Jess [Biig Piig], she was saying she didn’t feel creative for the first two or three months of covid. Then we got together and did a couple of videos, a few live streams, so it was great to have that work. But aside from a few things with her, I didn’t have any paid work at all. So I started doing maths tutoring and some data entry work, just different things that you can do from home.
You’re obviously a very creative person, is that what’s keeping you going through the data entry, through the maths tutoring?
Yeah, If I learnt anything from 2020 it was a big self-motivation thing of just getting on with it. I feel like when lock down came, in March and April, I had all this time and at first I think I just wanted to rest, you know? … I was balancing that with thinking, “oh but I have this time to be productive”. It’s very weird; about February last year I remember thinking, “gosh life is getting a bit too busy to keep up with” which I think everyone feels in some regard... Maybe I would have an entire day off and I’d put it into doing music by myself at home, which I didn’t have much time to do at uni anyway...and when I suddenly made a whole day for that I’d think “god, this is what I love, almost more than being crazily busy and trying to get every single gig”.
I really do love that lifestyle, but I realised that this is the sort of thing I was missing… Obviously it’s much more important to get work than just to try and go live your life entirely for yourself, but when lock down came I thought maybe I will have the time to do that stuff. And I spent a lot of months balancing resting and some tutoring with actually just trying to make stuff on my computer, sitting at home, filling that need that I didn’t really satisfy before. And I feel like that’s what eventually led to this EP.
Wonderful! What I found at the start of the first lock down and what I'm finding now at the moment is anxiety kind of kills your creativity doesn’t it? It was a really anxious time for us and I feel like at the moment it is as well, with what’s going on in the world. I don’t think I really did anything for the whole of March and April apart from just surviving really!
Yeah! That was it, wasn’t it really? It was just a period of time where it was like, “oh my god we’re in this global pandemic, we’re in this horrible thing in history, we're starting to realise that our government is handling it far worse than other countries”. It was not a normal time and it feels like there is a real responsibility to stay informed and be engaged with the world; it does feel strange to be creating in those times. You’re just so absorbed in what’s happening that I did find it hard to be creative.
Moving on to your EP and animated shorts, what led you to collaborate with Ollie Fearn on the videos?
We lived together at uni and we both studied music, but he was filling so much of his free time with painting and drawing and doing loads of album artwork for other bands on the Birmingham scene. So, it just felt like the right person to ask. When I put the EP out I didn’t consider it at all and it was just that people said to me that they could really see an animation for one or two of these things, and I just thought “well we’re all just sitting at home at the moment, so I might as well message him and see if he’s interested”.
At first, I think he found the idea was quite intense. He hadn’t done loads of animation; he had just done single drawings and he thought this was gonna be a lot of work. But … we had a lot of video calls about trying to turn this thing into an animation, trying to add a whole new angle to it. It’s definitely worked, now when I listen to that I see his animations and I didn’t have his images in mind at all when I first wrote it.
Have you done much else together? I have seen the one short but have you done a series of them?
Not at all. It may happen again for sure, it would be really fun to collab again. He’s just so talented and hard-working that I really enjoyed it.
Moving onto the message behind the animated short, it talks about anxiety, which we touched on, and also writer’s block and trying to stay creative. What are your feelings behind this? It’s obviously something that a lot of creative people struggle with; how do you overcome these barriers?
It’s a really interesting one, because I think often I’m trying to combat that writer’s block by bringing whatever is stopping me at that time, I try to make that part of the process. So that, I guess, is why something like the Interlude track is just about feeling anxious. I feel like it was a feeling that I couldn’t really put into words that was stopping me from writing, so then I tried to put it into words and therefore not be stopped from writing.
But that’s it, trying to overcome that writer’s block, I just try to be silly I guess, sitting down and saying “well, whatever happens for the next hour I don’t care about I just have to get something on the paper”. Or if I’m on Logic making music then I just have to get something recorded or I just have to mess around with some ideas. Just trying to tell myself, it literally doesn’t matter what happens, I’d rather just do something than not. I guess that’s what eventually led to an EP and eventually led to a lot of the music I’m making on my computer; being like, “screw it, just have a go”.
When you talk about your writing, do you actually write in a more traditional way as well, or is it all spoken word stuff that you put to music?
Well it’s funny, spoken word is something that I’d come across, obviously we’re all very aware of it; it’s got a big presence in this country, so often at festivals there was people that I really enjoyed and there was a guy that went to my school, Harry Baker, who became a very successful spoken word artist. I always felt like I’ve enjoyed that world but I’ve never been a part of it and it’s never been something I’ve identified with; I just enjoyed it from time to time and knew the odd thing.
But then writing came after graduating, I thought “what are the things I haven’t had time for?”. Drawing was one, writing stories was another. If I had some free time which obviously in Uni you don’t have, and especially in the music world it was just constantly busy, it was really fun but there wasn’t often time to think “I’m gonna sit down and draw”. If I had free time I’d go to the pub or see friends. Three of the things on this EP were just written at random times during 2019, before covid or anything, just as straight up stories, just as short little things just for fun, having an afternoon and thinking “I want to get some ideas out”, staring at the page for twenty minutes without anything happening and then which turned into Commute and October and the Interlude off the EP. So to be honest, what I really like is actually writing without it being spoken; it just happened to turn into storytelling because one day I was sitting there with my guitar and it just became.
I guess what happened was, in the middle of lock down, I had just come out of a relationship as well and wasn’t in the best place, I think this was about July 2020. Then I had come across those stories that I had written about a year before and was there with my guitar thinking that I could turn them into lyrics for songs. I tried it and it wasn’t really working, it wasn’t anything special or anything to run with, and then that story Commute, I just decided to speak it over acoustic guitar.
I just really enjoyed it, but I also thought this was way too pretentious to ever use. But I think I was just being unkind to myself; I really enjoyed doing it and I found these other stories that I’d written and put them to guitar. I wrote a new one, Saturday, which was totally new and exactly how I was feeling on that very lockdowny Saturday. So honestly it just came together super quickly and it was nice because I’ve always loved writing, always loved music and I felt like they came together in a really weird way.
I’d like to do more, I’d love to sit and write. Me and my friend have a writing club at the moment where we just Zoom each other on a Saturday morning and try to get something out. So, yes, I love writing separate from music, but I’m definitely going to make some more spoken stuff.
That was one of my other questions actually; are you going to do any more. Has your EP been received well? Have you managed to get it out there much?
Well, do you know what? I’ve always felt very alien to self-promotion, so I sent it to loads of magazines, like yourself, and then I ended up just taking a break from it. I’ve spent ages trying to be creative and trying to be busy over covid, and I just really needed another break. I just decided to distance myself from it for ages. So it’s on my to-do list to be sharing it around more this year.
What I got was a really nice response from friends and circles, and I got some shares from different magazines I sent it into. It’s just been something in my circle, and friends of friends have discovered it, so it’s been really wholesome, but I think I owe it to myself to share it a bit wider.
It’s hard isn’t it? I get that as well with my writing, I love writing but I find marketing myself really hard. It’s really hard sending out twenty submissions and never hearing anything back. It hurts; I find it hard not to take it personally.
It’s really hard to not let that get to you. It just feels unnatural, as soon as it's marketing myself. I just try and imagine myself having those thoughts and think “oh well whatever, but next time you know”. As much as my EP is full of anxieties and stuff, I feel like a big part of my life is trying to not give in to overthinking. I wonder if I presented myself on the EP or not, because I presented the anxious side of myself, but the peaceful side of myself is a very important part of my life as well, it’s something I really care about. It would be easy for me to dwell on those anxieties, and that EP was definitely presenting a load of them, but at the same time it was supposed to be humorous exaggerations of how I was feeling. I think in that first track Commute the whole thing is just the character seeing himself in everything and taking everything in the worst possible way. You know we all do it but I wanted it to be funny, so that it shows that it is a bit silly that my brain goes that far.
It doesn’t come across as silly, I can see the dry humour in there, but what I like about it is it’s normalising those feelings that a lot of people feel, showing that other people feel like this as well and it's okay. Especially amongst people who are working in the creative industries or doing creative stuff who aren’t just going through the grind as it were. You know I think many of us feel that and that’s what I liked about it; it was very honest. It doesn’t have a feeling of dwelling on it, it’s presenting it, allowing it to be there and then moving on from it.
I feel like that is how I would want it to be. To not be trapped in this place and dwell in it too much. It’s funny, of my friends and the feedback I’ve got about it there is a big division between people who find it darkly humorous and people who don’t at all. Some friends say there’s no humour in that. I’ve had some friends who say they find it a bit too uncomfortable to listen to.
Through putting it out and by hearing how people feel about it I just feel much more excited to be a bit more nuanced next time and maybe to really carefully craft exactly what I want to say. I would like to consider how people’s anxieties can relate to this and what message am I trying to put across. I think there is a small responsibility there.
So, who is inspiring you at the moment? What should we be looking at to understand you as an artist better?
Michaela Coel – did you watch ‘I May Destroy You’ this year?
I did!
I got completely obsessed with that show and with Michaela Coel, because she did almost 100 re-drafts of it.
When I’ve listened to her interviews, she’s so adamant on listening to people’s feedback and you don’t necessarily have to do what they say, but you have to hear it. She was on the Galdem Podcast comparing it to that thing in the acting world; “take the note”. If someone gives you feedback you have to do something with that note; you have to absorb it, you have to understand what that feedback is and throw it back.
I found that very inspiring because I think before that I was very much caught up in the hole of, “well, I’m gonna like what I like and I’m gonna put out what I put out”. But actually, especially if there’s stuff about anxieties, you want to re-draft, but at the same time of course you can’t control their reactions, so it’s really interesting. I think I’ve got to a place where I see it as I’m going to try and draft it as the absolute best I can and do all of these things of taking the note, really caring about what I'm making, but getting to a point where I’m like, “yes it’s done” then just releasing it into the world!
[In I May Destroy You] it wasn’t until episode 4 or 5 that I noticed she’s leaving these things quite open ended because of how complex they are. So I just thought that was incredible, she not only made an incredible piece of TV, and absolutely entertaining and something that was funny as well, but dealt with such heavy topics.
In terms of bands as well, there’s a band I absolutely adore called Black Country New Road. They’re just absolutely incredible; instrumentally they combine other music with post punk and it’s just mad and intense and wild. I think while I was still at uni I saw their second Windmill performance on YouTube and was literally blown away for like 15 minutes by the intensity, by the things he was saying. That’s another artist using spoken word in quite an anxious way so I think I’ve definitely felt very inspired by them.
I think there’s tonnes of inspiration coming from what people call the South London underground rock scene that’s been going on for the last few years, and I just think it's so exciting that creative rock music is coming back. That’s the stuff I loved growing up, tonnes of rock, alongside soul and hip-hop, but it was just about 90% rock, and I still love that. It’s great to grow up and get into a whole load of different styles.
And what’s coming up for you next as a musician?
I’m collaborating with friends and stuff, trying to reach out to a few different producers. I spend all my time practising my music, a lot of time trying to discover my musical voice on the guitar really. When covid ends I’m gonna try to get out and play with people as much as I possibly can.
But I feel like we’re still in that intermediate stage where putting on gigs is just quite stressful, I live with my mum who’s vulnerable so I have to play it quite carefully. I had one gig in Birmingham last year and it was the best day of the year, it was so good. Just having an audience to feed off, the jazz style of performance to work with, creating things on stage, and just interacting with people. As fun as practicing an instrument at home is, it’s never gonna be that same feeling, that natural high. So I am just looking forward to that really and just trying to practice and write stuff in the meantime.
I don’t know about you but I feel like every week that goes by, my hindsight for that stuff is exploding every time. To me right now the idea of a gig, even the idea of going to the pub is the most exciting possible idea I can think of.