Blood brother

Tom McRae and I meet the morning after the night before – the night before being one of the dullest Brit Awards ceremonies in a long while, depressingly ironic given that British music itself is enjoying one of its most vibrant periods in an equally long period. McRae himself, of course, flirted with the world of mainstream show-business following the release of his self-titled debut album a couple of years back, although these days his views on the upper echelons of the entertainment industry are somewhat more circumspect.

“I always get told by people (in radio) that they love me and they think I’m great but they can’t actually play my music,” he reflects ruefully. “What I fear is that I’ll be one of those artists where people go, ‘Yeah we love Tom, we really respect him. We’ve never heard anything he’s done but we know that he’s quite good because we read an article in The Guardian’. I really don’t want to be that but I can’t get on the MTVs of this world and I can’t get onto the major national radio stations because my music doesn’t fit their format.

Much of the reason for such struggles stems from his choice of genre, the dreaded singer songwriter. “We are a despised breed and they hate me,” he admits. “It’s a weird one. I think it’s different here, as it is in Europe, but the British press think of singer-songwriters as a totally miserable breed who are self-obsessed and whining all the time.

“It might be true but it completely pigeonholes you straight away and if you try and do anything outside of that they always say, ‘You’re a bloke with a guitar, you must be like David Gray, like Nick Drake, like Bob Dylan, blah, blah, blah’. You never really get a chance to break out of that box.”

Despite the allergic reaction in some quarters, McRae isn’t doing all that bad. The record sales are mounting and he has the backing of a major record label, his views on which subject are customarily forthright.

“I went to them and said, ‘You are the people who put out Gareth Gates and Will Young, I consider that to be denigrating my culture. Your chance to make amends is to spend that money on me’,” he recalls. “They laughed and agreed. There is an argument about staying on an independent, keeping your credibility. I’ll make it work for me on the inside or they can drop me.”

And making it work he certainly is. Just Like Blood is a significant step up from his eponymous debut.

“I wanted to make an album that was darker than the first one but I didn’t want to make it so bleak that it would shut everyone out,” he explains. “I thought that if I could sweeten it a little and broaden the palate, I could sneak a few songs in under the radar that were far blacker than anything on the first record; they just sounded more like pop songs”.

Is he a dark person?

“I’m not a suicidal poet dressed in black carrying razor blades all the time, but I am attracted to that because I think that as humans we have a natural default setting which is slightly pissed off with things. That for me is far more interesting than sun-drenched harmonies. It’s about having the courage to admit to not being permanently happy or not believing in the idea of happiness as the mass medium of sanity.”