Afghan Whig/Twilight Singer Greg Dulli once said that Steve Earle is one of the greatest soul singers around. The fact that Earle is generally considered a country-rock kinda guy speaks to the genre-busting benefits of having soul. If you've got it, you'll breathe life into whatever you do, from delivering weather forecasts to playing klezmer music.
Nic Armstrong plays rock 'n' roll music. His fuzzed-out 12-bar mutations aren't likely to alter the course of history, but they're already making people happy. They've got soul.
Armstrong and I have found a relatively quiet spot in the corner of Club Deville in Austin, Texas. He's still sweaty from his set at the New West Records party at the South by Southwest music conference. Fans and industry folks are all over him. "For me it's '50s rock 'n' roll, so raw and passionate," explains the 25-year-old Newcastle, England, native. "I want to make a passionate record. I want people to be able to listen to this in 30 years' time. I want a record that's not part of a fashion."
Nic Armstrong And The Thieves' new album, The Greatest White Liar, won't be accused of following fashion trends—at least anything popular with today's twenty-somethings. It's garage rock, but not the Anglophile stuff coming out of New York a few years back. Armstrong is more aligned with Sun Records, Nuggets, and Delta-charmed Brits like The Yardbirds and The Animals. His is a young man's roots music. All of the blue notes, none of the blue hair.
"I'm more isolated," says Armstrong about belonging to any kind of music scene in Nottingham, where he's lived since moving there to attend art school. "I've never really been involved in the scene. I'm quite stuck in my little bubble."
Armstrong's bubble is populated with a handful of artists taking an equally rustic stab at modern rock. Upon signing to One Little Indian Records in the U.K., Armstrong was asked if he'd like to record at London's Toe Rag Studios, analog home of producer Liam Watson, who did The White Stripes' Elephant there. Watson also worked with Liverpool's The Zutons, who, along with Deltasonic label mates The Coral, bend more notes than the average Brit these days.
"I'm quite prepared to go that way on future records," says Armstrong about working with a more contemporary sound palette, "but Liam Watson is Mr. '50s and '60s. I just went in and didn't know what I was doing so much in the studio. Maybe he's affected the arrangements with little bits here and there, but I tried to keep it as close to my demos as possible. That studio, there's no computers there at all, so you're bound to get our warmth. And you've also got me. I'm not such a good musician."
Armstrong is incredibly humble and genuinely warm. He admits to wrestling with a near-crippling shyness, something you'd never suspect by watching him perform. "I couldn't answer questions in class," he says of his school days. "If I spoke out loud my cheeks got bright red and it stopped me from talking. It's one of the reasons the guitar sort of helped me go. I couldn't even sing. When I tried to sing a song in front of someone for the first time, I couldn't do it."
So where'd all the swagger come from? "I just got a drive to do it," Armstrong explains. "It's probably related to my artwork and my creative development. It's just a drive to want to get better and get noticed. I was terrible at first. I'm not a technical singer. I think I can affect my voice through a passion. I could play you some tapes when I started out, 'cause I've kept everything I've done. I record all my ideas [on a Dictaphone]. I've got like hundreds of tapes of me singin', tryin' to sing better."
Not so much dealing with the devil as choosing among muses, Armstrong stood at the crossroads a few years ago. "I thought I was going nowhere," he says. "I had a band where I was living at art college, and it split up and I lost all my equipment—it was stolen. I was on skid row and broke and couldn't hold down a job. I was swinging between making money from art or doing music—it's always been that battle. About two months before I got the call from the record company saying they wanted to sign me, I was on the verge of quitting and just holding down a job to make some money to buy materials to get painting again."
Today Armstrong is confident in his ability to keep on rocking, and feedback has been good. Paul Weller declared himself a fan—taking Armstrong along on his fall 2004 European tour—and Rolling Stone's David Fricke cited the SXSW show as among the festival's best.
The recognition is nice, but Armstrong is accustomed to getting his strength from within. "Just trying to change myself," is how he does it, "trying to get away from that person. There's still that fight goin' on. [There were] crazy little things that I got rid of—just to beat it down, to beat the shit. I didn't like myself, and stuff like that."
Has he found that making music has helped?
"Absolutely," he says. "I found out what my purpose is."
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