Tom Hickox – Interview

With the release of new album The Orchestra Of Stories this week, we grabbed the chance to chat with talented songwriter Tom Hickox about his lengthy hiatus from music, recent and past life events, his love of Scott Walker, and to hear him expand on the varied and interesting stories he’s brought to life on his beautiful record.

Spring has truly sprung in Central London as I sit down to talk with Tom Hickox on a bench in Hyde Park, surrounded by a cacophony of hectic birds, excitable dogs, and endless streams of runners training for the marathon. It seems fitting that I’m deep in conversation, surrounded by all this colourful activity, with someone whose focus on creating music puts him at the centre of a similar swirl; in his case, a vast range of musical instruments and sounds.

In the eight years since Tom’s acclaimed album Monsters In The Deep, he’s been largely off-grid, dealing with the logistical and financial challenges of producing his new album, The Orchestra of Stories, whilst navigating various major hurdles: first, the pandemic and social distancing; then, the sudden loss of his stepmum quickly followed by his mum, and the ensuing emotional impact and administrative demands; and third, the very different demands presented by the arrival of a much longed-for baby. “So it was only last year that I was able to sit down with my manager and say: ‘Let’s crack on’. But here we are in 2025 and it’s been eight years since my last album. It feels shocking to say that out loud. The pandemic stole a big chunk, and then life happened… I very much hope it will be much sooner, to the next one.”

In Tom we have not just a singer-songwriter, but an introspective and articulate composer who is looking for answers to life’s deeper questions, and who uses instrumentation and clever arrangements along with story-telling lyricism to connect with people. He’s been described by the Daily Telegraph as “the most powerful and original lyrical songwriter this country has produced in years”. Inherent in his work and inescapable throughout is the classical music DNA he’s inherited from both parents. Added to this are two major current influences: first, an increasing obsession with Scott Walker, and his “combination of storytelling and choosing unusual angles to write about, and then these amazing orchestrations and how arresting and fresh they still feel”; and second, Randy Newman, who he simply states is “a genius, as a storyteller and as a musician”. The result is a beautiful album of interesting stories, resonant with Tom’s rich baritone, with exquisite strings throughout, where every listen reveals a bit more.

“My parents were both professional musicians – mum hadn’t been a professional musician for a long time, but she trained as an orchestral timpanist and percussionist and my dad was a conductor. So there was music around permanently – not so much playing at home on the stereo or anything, but I was constantly sat in concert halls watching rehearsals or sat underneath my mum’s timps on stage as a two or three year old playing with her drumsticks – or travelling with my dad to go and watch him perform. They were really formative memories and treasured ones, because as a child you think that’s quite a normal experience, but then you realise it’s quite unusual. You come into contact with lots of very different, creative and interesting people, in different places as well, and I’m very grateful for all of that.

“You come into contact with music mostly in a live context so, although I’m not in any way a classical musician, that music has seeped into my bones from a very young age. I love, in particular, the colour that an orchestra can create in so many ways – that was a massive thing that I tried to bring to this record, to try and use some of those colours and some of those instruments in ways that are particularly interesting. Because I think sometimes, particularly with strings which are deployed everywhere now in pop music, they’re often used in quite a dull way or just a little burnishing, a little polishing on top – and what I hoped to do was make those articulations and those tones the absolute fundament of the record, as equally fundamental as the band, and indeed myself.”

An example of this skill in action comes with The Lament For The Lamentable Elected, which Tom describes as “a post-Brexit howl of frustration – expressing a rage as to why things seem to be so hard to improve for so many people. So, it’s a very bleak chorus line, that idea of ‘sealing us in dreams only’.” The bleakness, frustration and rage are built up by a “layering of the string section playing trills, but the interval of the trill is in fourths, and this creates these really ethereal and beautiful textured chords, which is really unusual.”

When it comes to composing, Tom has no set songwriting process: “The thing that I’m always looking for is the first good idea, so that can be an idea for a song, a theme, a story, that can be a melody, it can be a chord sequence, it can be a line or a couple of lines. But you’re always looking for that first thing that’s really good that you can hang everything else around. And that isn’t always the same thing. I’m always looking, I’m always writing down ideas for subject matter and always writing lyrical ideas down. I’ve got a massive list of things that I keep going back to and sometimes I’ll end up using an idea for a song that’s many years old – it’s just that I couldn’t find the right way in, I couldn’t find the personal angle. It’s humanity really that I find interesting and although some of my songs I go back into history, trying to find interesting stories, it isn’t interesting to deliver a history lesson via the medium of song – you’ve got to find the personal story that illuminates that thing, and therefore that’s what can make it connecting for people – and therefore make it interesting.”

Behind this, and driving Tom forward, is a strong compulsion to write music, which started in a band at school and went on from there: “[Writing music] was a bug that I’ve never really lost and I remember thinking really quite early on and wondering whether this was something that I might be able to do as a living. It never occurred to me that I would be a musician professionally.  I knew I was never going to be a classical musician because I didn’t want to exist in that shadow of my dad and I didn’t have that real drive or passion for it that he had. I could see that wasn’t for me. But then my own passion for songwriting just started blossoming when I was about 14/15, and then it’s like this thing that burns inside you. And then when I was in my early 20s, when I was really struggling to get it going, I was almost tortured by it because you have all these questions: ‘Is this going to happen? Am I good enough? Is there enough of an interest here? Am I ever going to make it work? If not, when do I decide not to do it?’ All these huge questions. Obviously, thankfully, I did get it going, and here we are. It would be very difficult to imagine doing something else now. So it’s always been there.”

Each song has an interesting back story. We focus on the hauntingly beautiful Chalk Giants, the first single from the album and a song that I was immediately drawn to. (Personally, I can’t wait to hear this one played live, the strings are stunning.) I want to know how much of Tom is in the song. “Well that song is quite personal. The idea for that song is quite conceptual I suppose, because I wanted to write a song that reflected the idea of the great American road myth – the idea of the journey to get somewhere being as rewarding and important as the destination itself. I’ve always been interested in that idea, I think it’s a beautiful thing – but obviously I’m not American, I don’t live in America, and I decided to try and transport that into a very overtly British pastoral landscape. And so it’s really a love affair to this very romantic vision of the best of Britain, while also being about the search for meaning in life and what we’re all looking for. And that’s how you get Chalk Giants. The video is filmed on Bodmin Moor in Cornwall. We saw no Beast, unfortunately, but we were keeping an eye out! It’s so flat, you’ve got these two hills, Router and Brown Willy, but you can see for miles. It’s always foggy. There’s an old RAF camp and a huge old airfield, and that’s where the Cornish go and teach their kids to drive, because it’s off the road, safe as houses. And so we were having to quickly do shots without these people practising their reverse parking behind us. A few bewildered dog walkers too!”

[embedded content]

More political commentary comes with Game Show, written a few years after Brexit, well before the current tenure of Trump and Musk. With an introductory audio segment that refers directly to the FBI’s investigation of Trump amid suspicion that he may be a Russian asset, the song starts with a comment that feels very relevant and contemporary, with the same questions still being asked even more urgently today. However, the subject matter is much wider than Trump and chums.

“Although I felt like including the news audio ultimately was a really important thing to make sense of the song and that does make it more political – really the song is about the relationship between the individual and the rest of the world via what we share of ourselves online, and the powerlessness that ultimately we have in that world to change anything. I mean, there’s no avoiding being part of it, unless you go and live off grid on a Hebridean island… And that’s where the idea of the game show came from because it’s something that we are all part of. And even for me as an artist now, it’s impossible to exist as an artist without engaging in those spheres of social media – that’s how we connect with people. To me that is endlessly frustrating because I find existing in those spaces is generally bad for us all. But that toothpaste is not being squeezed back in the tube, and so we have to be a part of it and we have to make sense of it. And that’s where the song comes from – it’s accepting what we’re giving of ourselves to these companies, and then also accepting that once you have given all that data about yourself, then that can be put to multiple uses, some of which can be very nefarious, and which can have major political consequences – and that’s what we’re seeing.”

Due to a strong emotional and personal connection with Cornwall, Tom leans towards The Port Quin Fishing Disaster as being his favourite song on the album. Central to the story is a tiny fishing village in North Cornwall, where all the men in the village, all fishermen, went out to sea together on one fateful day, and every single one died in an enormous storm. “It left the women in the village with these massive existential choices about what to do next – whether they should stay and try to continue and rebuild in that community there or whether they should just abandon it and go somewhere else. And that’s what they chose to do ultimately: they went to a village two or three miles away, Port Isaac, where they were welcomed in like refugees. Perhaps that’s the reason why the song resonated with me; because I felt like there was an allegory there about what do you do when circumstances of life push you into a situation that is awful beyond your control in a very surprising way.”

More storytelling comes in the Failed Assassination Of Fidel Castro, a light and irresistibly catchy, synth-driven love song. Tom explains the background: “This is a song that was born out of the story of this woman, Marita Lorenz, who was hired by the CIA to seduce Fidel Castro and then poison him in the bedroom. And what happened was that he got there and he ended up seducing her and they fell in love, and so she didn’t do it. The CIA tried to assassinate him 75 times or something completely ridiculous, and they all failed catastrophically, and although you shouldn’t romanticise and glamorise these things, there’s something undeniably romantic about that old era of spy warfare.

“So, I wanted to write a story about her and her story, her relationship with Castro – and then the arrangement felt like it would have drifted into a place that was too hammy or melodramatic if I’d created a Cuban sound world, it would have been too on the nose. So the synth melody that drives the whole thing, it just felt right to give it its own sound world, and then as the song develops you get some more of the orchestral colour and it becomes a bit more traditional with real drums and string pizzicatos and a few other bits and bobs. But also I think it’s a lovely moment of change sonically in the album as well – it comes directly after Lament which is heavy thematically, and it doesn’t resolve musically either so I think it’s a lovely moment of sunshine, when that song starts.”

The album’s second single, The Shoemaker, was released last week. Tom describes is as “a shape-shifty song”. He goes on to elaborate: “The initial inspiration was literally meeting a shoemaker, a really amazing man called Jason Amesbury, who made bespoke shoes to ridiculous levels. I got to know him a little bit playing a very low standard of amateur cricket which I do about four times a year. We still play this team in which he played, and over time you just get to know people in a very gentle way. I found him to be a really fascinating character, a really interesting man, and got to know him a tiny bit, hardly at all really. He was a big character, quite a maverick I think, very stylish as you’d expect but a big smoker, quite a big drinker, quite old fashioned in some ways.

“The first verse was borne out of an imagined perception of what his life might have been, or what he might have felt – but completely imagined, I hardly knew him at all. The song then becomes much more personal but I’m still in his character. But it’s a song about belonging and about finding a place in the world, which I now realise quite a lot of my songs touch on and have touched on over the years. I suppose it’s a nice example of when you’re inhabiting another character that actually you’re sometimes able to express things that are more personal and in a more articulate way than if you’re just first person confessionalising (if that’s a word).”

[embedded content]

Another song that is important to Tom, with a personal element, is Roy and Eve. “Eve is my grandmother, my mum’s mum – Eve Sheldon-Williams was a painter. She lived a very interesting life – the more I reflect back on it the more I realise how unusual she was. She had my mum in in 1950, she was a single mum – I assume my mum was born out of a one-night stand – and she lived a very hand-to-mouth life, mostly as an art teacher but really scraping by. She had a very bohemian and unusual circle of friends. Mum’s godfather was in a very longstanding gay relationship, which at that time was still illegal. She floated through life in a really amazing way.

“She was a great letter writer, which is what this song was about really. She bought a small picture by an artist a little bit younger than her called Roy Turner-Durrant at a private view of his. He was a very reclusive man and wasn’t there at the time, so she wrote to him to say how much she liked what she’d bought and to thank him really; he wrote back saying how touched he was by her letter and how glad he was that she liked the piece, and he enclosed in that letter another little sketch. She wrote back again to say: ‘That’s so kind, thank you so much.’ And that started this correspondence that went on for 25 to 30 years, during which he enclosed with every letter some sort of painting, drawing, sketch. We’re not talking about Paul Nash here, but he’s a really well-respected artist and it became really clear that he became really obsessed with her. And though they never met in person, they had this sort of love affair just through letters. I don’t think she was as obsessed with him as he was with her – he was married and had family, and I think he thought of her as his fantasy. Some of his drawings – if you can imagine Picasso drawing a dick and some tits, that’s basically where we are! Semi-abstract, slightly childlike porn – pre-mobile phone dick pics. We’ve got all his letters and all the art. It’s a great story and I have had that in the back of my mind for years – what can I do with this? And in the end I thought that writing a song about obsession from Roy’s point of view would be the most interesting way of reflecting on this story about my grandmother, through his eyes.”

The rich and rumbling baritone is back for another song that draws from Tom’s life – Man On The High Road – inspired by a man who Tom often saw on Balham High Road, regularly sitting on the steps outside a church near Tooting Bec tube station watching the world go by “usually with a can of something pretty punchy in his hands. I started to see him – this sounds a bit ridiculous really – as a Greek chorus figure keeping an eye on all these people rushing around from A to B and observing London life. I had various anxieties and traumas going on at the time and I was starting to imagine that he was bearing witness to all of this. So the song is about that relationship and it expands a bit beyond that.

“I’d just read a fantastic book by Ben Judah called This Is London – each chapter tells the life of a Londoner in a very different way. There’s an illegal immigrant that lives on the North Circular Road who’s trying to pick up building labouring work outside somewhere in Cricklewood or somewhere and how brutally hard that is, and the next chapter could be an heiress who lives in Notting Hill or wherever and this huge sense of contrast amongst the people who live in London, absolutely brilliant. So there’s a little bit of extra character written into that song that was inspired by that book.”

I wonder how the man who sat on the steps would feel about having inspired something that sounds like a Bond theme tune.

The album also contains one cover – The Waterboys’ The Whole Of The Moon – which Tom has made so much his own that it takes a few seconds to realise what it is. Tom felt the song has a looseness and abandon to it, as well as being a song that is universally cherished and loved. “When we recorded it, it wasn’t really my intention for it to be on the album, but that thought just got stronger and ultimately it felt like it belonged on the record more than it didn’t, and that’s why it ended up making the cut. It feels like it sits as part of that body of work.”

Looking towards the future, given that the song ideas are a steady stream, it’s likely that there’s a lot more to come from Tom, and soon – possibly another EP towards the end of the year for starters. “There’s a pretty decent body of work written now. If you put a gun to my head and said I had to go and record an album tomorrow I could do it, there’s more than enough. That’s part of my job for the next year – to get that made so that we can follow on with something else reasonably quickly. I’m very hopeful that this record will do well and you don’t want to lose any momentum that you can build. It’s hard to generate. So once that’s going you want to jump on the back of it and go again. I never stop writing. My mind is always awake to trying to find those good ideas, and that process is always ongoing. There are times when I’m more focused about intentionally putting time aside to write, but you never just shut down and nor should you. Often when I’m walking that feeling of momentum, putting one foot in front of another, stimulates the mind in a way that it doesn’t when I’m just sat down. So yeah, it’s always ongoing.

“I obviously have hopes and dreams, like everyone does, and I think you have to have them as an artist. It’s very difficult, you just have to put one foot in front of the other and give every moment your best shot. I’ve been away a long time and partly the last few months building up the release has been trying to say to people: ‘Hello, remember me, I’m still here.’ And then you just have to see where the music travels. And that’s always the most amazing and fascinating thing is – once the music’s out, where it then goes. It’s like water isn’t it? It just has the natural ability to fall. I really believe in the album, I think it’s a really good record, and you hope that other people agree with that. And then you have to see where it can take you.”

One of the first places, literally, is Kings Place in London for a big launch show: “It’s my full band plus a string quartet plus trumpet, French horn and trombone – it’s a big old ensemble. And it felt really important for this launch gig at least to try and demonstrate as much of the colour that’s on the record as possible. All these songs started with me at the piano, and therefore they can all still be played with me at the piano. It may well be the case that some of the smaller shows later in the year are more intimate. But the ultimate dream of course is to play in that building over there [pointing towards the Royal Albert Hall] with a full symphony orchestra. That’s where we’d really like to get to. It’s not impossible that we’ll be able to get there, not too far away. We’ll just have to see.”

~

Next dates:

30^th Apr    Rough Trade, Denmark Street, London
9^th May     Kings Place, London

Autumn Tour (tickets here)

28^th Sep    Trades Club, Hebden Bridge
29^th Sep    Phoenix, Exeter
2^nd Oct      The Caves, Edinburgh
3^rd Oct       Yellow Arch Studios, Sheffield
4^th Oct       Halle at St Michael’s, Manchester
5^th Oct       The Grove, Newcastle upon Tyne
7^th Oct       The Glee Club, Birmingham
8^th Oct       Social, Hull
9^th Oct       Lantern, Bristol
18^th Nov     The Stables, Milton Keynes
21^st Nov     Acapela, Cardiff
30^th Nov     Komedia, Brighton

~

Words by Naomi Dryden-Smith. Promo photos and photo by Fred Scott supplied.

• Source: NEWHD MEDIA