'I try to be honest about who I am': Lewis Capaldi opens up in the latest issue

Lewis Capaldi is the latest boy next door to conquer the charts. He’s also one of modern pop’s foremost exponents of toilet gags and poo puns, as his 400,000 Twitter followers will tell you.

“I try to be honest about who I am and about what I find funny,” Capaldi tells Hot Press in our latest issue. “As it happens a lot of my humour has to do with poo jokes. It’s not something I ever thought about - ‘let’s make this a thing’. But people seem to have grabbed onto it for some reason. Everything that has happened it me is so unbelievable that you’re better off not trying to analyse any of it.”

It’s always a mistake to conflate the artist with the song. But Capaldi, who has just released his debut album, Divinely Uninspired To A Hellish Extent, is an extreme example. As a writer he bares heart and soul unabashedly. Take, for instance, break-out hit ‘Someone You Loved’ – written, among other things, as his way of processing grief over the death of his grandmother.

Lyrically, melodically, in every way, the song is absolutely devastating. Capaldi has been likened to Adele and here the comparison makes sense – he’s got a huge voice and what feels like a bottomless well of heartache. He performed ‘Someone You Loved’ on the final of Ireland’s Got Talent and, amid the primetime tat and the cheese, it struck you straight in the solar plexus.

And yet, in person he couldn’t be further removed from the figure he presents on record. There’s the “poo humour” and general irreverence (“whoever says money can’t buy ye happiness has never ordered three takeaways in one day,” Capaldi tweeted recently).

Being Scottish, he has that instinctive Celtic insouciance too. He takes his music seriously – but can’t bring himself to be po-faced in person. Also, he seems notably jittery about his career and how long it will last, theorising whether he might not end up living under a bridge if it all goes wrong.

“Sometimes there might be artists who have all the worries of the world on their shoulders,” he says. “That’s not me. I’m very honest in my music. I don’t hold back. The thing is, it’s all in the song. If you need to know my innermost thoughts that’s where you will find them. I don’t go around with all these troubles on my shoulders. I put everything into my songs. That’s what they are for.”

Read the full interview with Lewis Capaldi in the latest issue of Hot Press, which is on the shelves now.

• Divinely Uninspired To A Hellish Extent is out now. Lewis Capaldi plays Independent Park, Cork with Walking On Cars (June 21); the Olympia, Dublin (November 21); and 3Arena, Dublin (March 8, 2020)