Splash Hits

Tom Baxter’s visit to the Sea Sessions festival marks a return to active duty after a protracted spell in the long grass. Following the conclusion of the touring campaign for his second album Skybound, which spawned the huge hit single ‘Better’, this pilgrim went walkabout.

“I’ve been kind of away from music for a long time, since I finished off my dates at the end of 2008,” he reveals. “I went to India for six months and then Spain and then Paris.”
And what prompted this sabbatical?
“I got to a stage where I just needed to experience life again. It had been such a long uphill struggle to get somewhere with my music that I hadn’t had time to see some of the other things in life. It’s kind of a complicated scenario, because to get anywhere in music you’ve almost got to be narcissistic and self-obsessed and yet at the same time it’s disgusting! But when I went to India it was a completely different environment. The first thing people say isn’t, ‘What do you do for a living?’ It’s quite nice when you’re absolutely balanced with everyone else and there’s none of that social conditioning.”
Travels concluded, Baxter returned to Devon in south-west England, where he was brought up.
“It’s a bit of a trek to London but the quality of life and the space is the thing that I love, all that nature around you,” he explains. “It gets quite addictive actually, you get back to the city and you’re going, ‘God, I have to get out again now.’ If you think about the way everything is in city life, there’s not even much human interaction anymore, it’s computers. These days I try and avoid emailing as much as I can, just because of the quality of life for myself. I suppose I think I’m in the wrong century!
“One of the main reasons I wanted to take such a long break is when it becomes a business, when it becomes about making money... We’re slightly trapped as creative people in that you have to make a living, but you don’t just want to produce something for the benefit of other people, you want to produce something as an honest representation of part of your soul, and that’s not something you can always churn out.”
On the other hand, sometimes a deadline is the best thing for the work.
“That’s what I’m at right now, trying to question whether I should start creating a deadline for myself. I’ve been enjoying my floating, but I’ve really got to have something to make me finish off this work.”
Speaking of floating, if you’ll excuse the segue, it’s not that surprising that Baxter would be tempted out of his lair to play a festival as singular as the Sea Sessions.
“I haven’t wanted to do very much in general, if I’m honest,” he admits, “I’ve been playing my two albums worth of music for a long time, so I wanted to have a break from those songs, but now I’ve got some new stuff on the way I’m feeling a bit more like doing the odd festival and feeling things out a bit, and the Sea Sessions sounds like a quite nice one. I live on one of the finest coasts at the moment for going surfing, Devon. There’s a really big surfing community, although I must admit I’m not part of it.
“The only time I’ve really properly surfed was on a stag weekend for my brother, and it’s one of those things – until you’ve done it you can’t really understand why the fuck people would want to go out there in the freezing cold and get knocked over and then go swimming back out there. But I think there’s a bit of an affinity with music, because it’s a natural process in a way, isn’t it? You’re riding the wave of Mother Nature. I suppose in a similar way music disarms people, and it’s always a challenge to see if your music can free people from the mundanities of life and transcend that in some way or another.”

Tom Baxter, Cathy Davey, James Vincent McMorrow, Túcan, O Emperor & One Man Party play the Main Beach Stage on Sunday June 27