Six Of The Best: Andrew Johnson

New release, One Breath, finds Teesside songwriter Andrew Johnson contemplating mortality, time, and existence through the lens of Marcus Aurelius’ Stoic writings, pairing hypnotic rhythms and understated psychedelic flourishes with an airy, spacious soundscape that lends weight to his emotive vocals.

Here, Andrew talks about his influences with a Six Of The Best…

FILM / TV

SLOW HORSES
Maybe a bit of an obvious touchstone at the moment, but it just feels like a positive epoch shift in a genre that was increasingly heading down an overly dramatic and cliché-driven style. The characters are all very human and brilliantly portrayed. It’s their flaws that make them captivating to watch. They make stupid mistakes, sometimes with a deadly or personal consequence. Gary Oldman is superb as Jackson Lamb. I love a performer that fully commits to the needs of a role regardless of whether they are being portrayed as glamorous or not

MUSIC

OLIVIA DEAN – THE ART OF LOVING
I make a conscious effort these days to listen to new music, whether that just means new to me or new to the world. Like most people, I have gaping holes in my knowledge, but I’m curious enough to want to at least try listening to something I wouldn’t ordinarily gravitate towards. I was helping a friend choose and work up some songs to sing at a music session I help run in Darlington and she played me “Man I Need” by Olivia Dean. I wasn’t massively fussed on the track itself but decided to give the album a play on my way home from a gig one night. I really loved the immediate, obvious quality of all of the elements, from the sparse, economical playing and performance to the fusion of influences to create something distinctive and modern that seemed to have some real soul and honesty. It’s short too. I’m all for a sub-40 minute album.

I’m not about to suddenly turn into a jazz/pop/soul artist, but I can always learn something from good music, whatever the genre.

ART

FLAGS 
I visited Bilbao for the first time this summer and a trip to the Guggenheim was a must. There was a Jasper Johns exhibition. Although an avid fan of visual art in general, throughout my life, my knowledge of Johns and much of mid-century US art stemmed from my love of The Stone Roses and the visual art of guitarist John Squire. He “borrowed” heavily from Jackson Pollock in particular, but Johns has also been a key influence with some of the flag imagery and text-based art he has created. There’s a fair bit of misunderstanding around fans of the band who may see the Union flag image used on the inner sleeve of the band’s debut album and for the cover of the Waterfall single as some kind of patriotic symbolism, but the anti-establishment, anti-monarchist imagery within the songs themselves tell a very different story and I’m pretty sure Ian Brown wiped his arse on stage with the Union flag. The same thing with the mods in the 60s appropriating the RAF target symbol and the Union Jack as items to adorn their clothing. It was a very post-modern, pop art shock factor they were going for. I actually think the Union Jack is a brilliant bit of design. You won’t find me scaling a lamppost to raise one though.

THE TURNER PRIZE 
In terms of other art that interests me I do like work to be thought-provoking without explanation or context. Whilst I get that information about the intention of the piece can absolutely enhance the experience I think, if presented as a visual piece of work, it should have some sort of immediacy about it, even if it’s to ask questions of it. I visited the Turner Prize exhibition at MIMA the other week and the two works that stood out for me were the table of crude oil samples by Tanoa Sasraku and the sculptures of Kira Freije. Both pieces of work invited the viewer, most readily, to have a conversation with themselves about the intention and a subjective interpretation could be arrived at regardless of any prior knowledge. I’m all for stuff being unfathomable too though. We need weird in the world.

BOOKS

THE STAR WARS ARCHIVES – EPISODES IV – VI (TASCHEN)
I was six when the original Star Wars movie came out (later retitled A New Hope) and can just about remember going to see it with my mum. It would be a life-changing experience for most kids my age. To be immersed in a completely alien world (albeit with very 1970s haircuts) that someone had created with good versus evil, mysticism and a girl kissing a boy it authorised my desire to dream and be creative. I’m lucky in that I’m able to suspend my disbelief through pretty much any well told narrative so I can become completely absorbed in the supposed reality of a film or TV show. My interest in knowing how to create across multiple media led me to be fascinated with the special effects processes used by film makers across the history of movies. This book (and the prequel one) are easily the best Star Wars books I’ve read, with in depth interviews with George Lucas, the cast and crew that delves into the whole process of creating the stories and films, the challenges and compromises, the accidents that led to iconic moments and, in particular, Lucas’s open-minded attitude to how a piece of work unfolds through the development period with him taking on the best ideas to shape and tell the story with a team that understands you often need to discard your “favourite” elements in favour of telling the story. I’ve learned not to be precious about the ideas I have and the work I create and particularly when working with others. Consider every idea, test them and go with what works best. When writing and recording my own music the final stages are often cutting out all the superfluous parts, no matter how proud I might be of how they’re played or arranged. My latest album only came together as a whole once I cut two tracks from the sequence. I really like the tracks but they didn’t really fit or add anything to the overall work. 

DERREN BROWN / MARCUS AURELIUS
I recently found a copy of Derren Brown’s first book, Tricks of the Mind, on the charity shelf in the supermarket. I’d borrowed it from the library previously but knew I needed to read it again. It’s part auto-biography, part “behind the curtain” expose of magic, illusions and debunking of mediums/cold-readers etc but he also gives insight and advice relating to human psychology and behaviour. Why people behave how they do in certain circumstances. I’ve read a couple of his other books which focus more on this aspect and they’re really great in terms of recognising not only the behaviours of others but, more importantly, your own unconscious biases and habits. One of the great, simple pieces of advice he offers is to not worry about anything which is outside of your control. It’s a principle of the Stoic philosophy which he talks a good deal about. This led me to buy a copy of Roman Emperor Marcus Aurelius’ Meditations. It’s a collection of private, written thoughts never intended for publication but that has become a source of, for want of a better word, ‘wisdom’ over the past two millennia. I went in thinking it might be a bit of a tough read, in archaic language, but it was surprisingly easy to get into. He restates and repeats the same handful of thoughts and principles throughout but it’s a good introduction to the philosophy of the ancients and it inspired my new single – One Breath – which is my own interpretation and interpolation of the meditations about the fleeting nature of existence. Well, I am 55 now.