Tom Vek Interview: Vek Lucky

“Am I a lucky type of person?” mulls Tom Vek. “Well, I think I’ve had a fortunate life so far, which I’m grateful for. But I still strive to do better.”

Over the course of a decade-long career mixing punk, pop, electronica, grunge and spoken word (‘garage rock for the Pro Tools generation’), the 33-year-old Londoner has built a solid reputation as one of the UK’s most interesting and eclectic indie solo artists. He did it in his own good time. It took Vek six full years to follow-up his attitude-spiked 2005 debut, We Have Sound, with 2011’s raw and impactful Leisure Seizure.
His third album, Luck, released through Moshi Moshi, took just three years to record.
“The thing with music is that I enjoy the moment where something happens very quickly and very easily,” he says. “When you’re like, ‘Wow!’, and there’s that kind of good fortune. But at the same time, I like working very hard on something, and spending a long time on something, because that’s also rewarding.”
Although Vek had spent years building an elaborate home recording studio, he had to give it up when his landlord decided to sell the building shortly after the release of Leisure Seizure. He says that being forced to work in a studio away from home was ultimately advantageous
“Well, I don’t write unless I’m in a studio environment, so it makes me grateful for it and excited to go in, and then when you feel like you’ve done enough you can shut the door. You know I listen to stuff outside the studio obviously, and it’s quite nice just to be listening.
“But it’s funny when you’re, like, ‘This took me this much time, and this took me this much time, and would I have even started doing this if I had realised how long it was going to take me?’ I feel like you wouldn’t ever want to be just a lucky person, you wouldn’t ever want to be one of those lottery winners who wins the lottery and is still unhappy because you go straight to your end goal without the journey.”
What’s the concept behind Luck?
“Conceptually it’s another album of hopefully cool sounding noises,” he explains, “and that’s always my starting point for a song. Find a cool noise and then try to turn it into a song. Lyrically and words wise, I grew up on emotional grunge music, quite angry music, and it’s about trying to translate that, or maybe to grow with that, and be like, ‘Well, I think it’s good to be passionate about things but we live in a world where it’s not just being angry about something’. Being confrontational is not actually the way to get something done.”
One of Lucks key tracks is the funky bass-driven ‘Sherman’ (Animals In The Jungle)’ – a searing comment on our state of moral ambivalence.
The song was inspired by Tom Wolfe’s novel The Bonfire Of The Vanities. But has the famously white-suited American author heard it?
“That’s a really good question and ‘I don’t know’ is the answer,” Vek laughs. “I’d love if he did. It was after I’d finished it initially that I realised there was a chance that, with time, somebody might say to him, ‘Oh, there’s this song...' That would make me happy because I enjoyed that book so much. I just read A Man In Full as well, which continues his own investigations into justice and fortune and stuff like that. So if you know him, please tell him!”

Luck is out now on Moshi Moshi