A lazy grin beneath a riot of red dreadlocks, you wouldn’t take Newton Faulkner for the mayhem-loving kind. But you would be wrong.

“I love playing Grand Theft Auto,” explains the English singer-songwriter, known for his dewy-eyed ballads and plangent cover versions (his latest: a supremely laid back tilt at Daft Punk’s ‘Get Lucky’).
“I get a great kick out of going in one of the cars and just driving out into the desert and flicking through the radio stations. They have that America song which sounds exactly like Neil Young on it – what’s it called again?”
Faulkner has just let slip that he’s composing the soundtrack for what could be a ‘massive’ new video game. But his involvement in what, by his telling, is a multi-million dollar project, hasn’t been officially announced yet so he can’t give details. How did a preternaturally chilled acoustic rocker much beloved of the surfer fraternity hook up with the brash, caffeinated video game industry?
“Twitter!” he laughs. “They got in touch with me quite randomly one day. Lots of bizarre opportunities come my way via-the internet. One minute I’m tweeting, the next I’m in the computer game business. I suppose it helps I’ve always been a massive nerd. I’m old enough to accept that now.”
Faulkner’s interest in technology intersected with his music career in the strangest fashion imaginable last summer when he web-streamed in full the recording of his fourth album, Studio Zoo. For five weeks, starting June 11, you could log onto his website at any time day and night and watch Faulkner via-four cameras around his house and live in studio. Upstairs was off limits, so he was able to safeguard his privacy. Some of it at any rate.
“It was funny. I’d get up and come downstairs and I’d get a bunch of tweets: ‘good morning’. And I would be like ‘hi, guys – first I’m going to get some coffee’. The level of interaction was insane. At the start we did a q’n’a session on Twitter and Facebook. By the end I was just tweeting back and forth all the time.”
The webcast was his manager’s idea. Initially Faulkner didn’t think the record label would bite. Given that he would be playing music all day, every day, what about the potential for piracy? He anticipated a firm, polite ‘are you crazy?’ To his shock, the suits jumped at the suggestion. Plans were swiftly upgraded from a single camera with no sound broadcasting one hour each day to four cameras, with sound, filming constantly.
“It was just the weirdest thing,” Faulkner nods. “I must say it didn’t take me very long to get used to the cameras being there. But it’s taking a long time for me to get used to them not being there!”
Whatever prompted the record label to back the project, for Faulkner the impetus was simple. He’d grown dissatisfied with the increasingly polished sound of his LPs and sensitive to the criticism that his music was becoming too slick for its own good. He wanted to revert to basics. What better way than by, in essence, staging a mini-concert in his studio every day? With fans watching, it would surely be far more difficult to vanish up his creative rear end.
“Around my second album this strange divergence started happening. The live show was very raw ‘cos it was simply me on my own. But the albums were becoming ‘bigger’. They were layered, with loads of production. You look back and think, ‘Well, that was weird’. At the time, it made perfect sense. I was trying to get radio play – people were telling me to do various things in terms of forwarding my career. With the live show, the rules were completely different.”
With the cameras always on, there were surely moments he regretted inviting fans into the studio. Faulkner seems a laid-back individual, but even he must have his wrong-side-of-bed days. Did viewers see a side of him they mightn’t have suspected existed? He shrugs. Maybe they did, maybe they didn’t. Regardless of what they witnessed, it was 100% real.
“I wasn’t covering anything up. So if I had to deal with stuff, I had to deal with it. If I was annoyed, everyone knew I was annoyed. If I was slightly drunk, everyone knew I was slightly drunk. The best bit was the feedback. After a vocal take, I’d put a shout out: ‘Should I do it again?’. That sort of immediate response is amazing. As an artist normally you don’t get it. There were evenings people were saying, ‘look mate, just go to bed’. You know how it is when you really want to finish something and you get all wrapped up in it. And they were tweeting, ‘dude, just stop’. So I’d take their advice and have a break.”
Always a solitary composer, on Studio Zoo Faulkner decided to shake things up by co-writing. Mumford bassist Ted Dwayne popped in to help out as did X Factor alum Janet Devlin. The main creative adjunct however was older brother Toby, who co-produced the record.
“We come from completely different places,” says Faulkner. “When I was listening to John Martyn and Joni Mitchell he was a drum ‘n’ bass MC. Since then I think our tastes have gradually grown closer and we’ve met somewhere in the middle. Writing with another person is something I’ve really only started getting into. At the beginning it’s weird. For the first few hours, you’re just trying to get to know one anther – trying to figure out if you actually like the same things or not.”
Contrary to his image as the ultimate beach dude, Faulkner has no ties with the surfing community. Yet surfers constituted his first major fanbase. Nearly a decade later, he has no idea how or why such a turn of events came to pass – Faulkner honestly does not know one end of a surf-board from the other. He’s just grateful for their continued support.
“I cannot for one moment pretend to understand how that came about,” he admits. “I don’t think I’ve touched a surfboard in my life. I understand the principle of surfing. That’s about it. The funny thing is, I don’t even write in the sunshine. I think it might have been sunny when I was doing the third record. On every other occasion, it’s been written in a small room with no windows and me listening to the rain.
“The sunny thing is completely ingrained in perceptions of me. I moved apartment recently. I must have passed this guy in the corridor six times a week and he never said a thing. Then the weather improves and one day he stops up and goes: ‘hang on – are you Newton Faulkner?’ I find it extremely odd. When it rains it’s like I become invisible to people.”

Studio Zoo is out now. Newton Faulkner plays Dublin’s Olympia next February.