The Facebook sleuths from the ‘Tom Vek Detective Agency’ can pack away their maps, he’s been found safe and well and reported to GoldenPlec from his East London Flat, for a chat about his upcoming Body & Soul set and his killer third album, ‘Luck’.
When Vek’s sophomore ‘Leisure Seizure’ (2011) was released following a six-year hiatus after debut ‘We Have Sound’, everyone asked, “What took so long?” Vek says he gave “a variety of answers” at the time, “depending on his mood.”
“On the first record I worked with a producer who was sort of manning the controls of the production side of it and I think I went back into the studio assuming it was gonna sound like that immediately. Then realised I had to learn those skills.
“The whole process of making the second album taught me a lot of the skills that I kind of assumed that I had, I was experimenting very crudely with looping up what I was recording and editing.”
So where has Tom Vek been hiding for the past three years? The three year gap between ‘Leisure Seizure’ and ‘Luck’ was due to a couple of things; hunting for a suitable new base to make the album, and learning new production skills.
“London is particularly obnoxious for finding good music spaces” Vek tells us “you need to be able to make a lot of noise” but he “wanted to still stay in the thick of it.” Ever the perfectionist, Vek also realised that he had to up his production skills further still “to keep doing what I wanted to do myself.’
When discussing his creative process, one can almost hear him sorting through what he wants to say. It takes him a minute or so before expressing it with astonishing clarity and insight. “I quite enjoy that side of it” says Vek “You have to be quite meticulous and you have to be quite organised.
“I like having a mess to sort out or a box of weird stuff to sort through. On one hand I’ve to make all the weird stuff and on the other hand I have to say, ok, this is all nonsense and this is good.
“It’s nice to have those two sides really. Yeah there is a perfectionist streak to it. But then also, I quite like to keep it DIY sounding. Even though I could spend a lot of time on something, part of that is trying to make a delicate sculpture and then trying to carry it through a busy shop or something without anybody knocking into it.
“Keeping something intact, that is exciting and raw at the start, and trying to keep it there the whole way through the creative process.”
In conversation, Vek is insightful, witty, self-effacing, and talks passionately about his work. For the most part, he speaks almost nonchalantly, but now and then, he blurts something out with a startling fervour which makes you realise how important his art is to him.
A self-taught producer, with three albums under his belt, Vek seems (or at least acts) like he is unaware how impressive an achievement this is. As a teenager, he thought that being a musician seemed “cool but seemed like a slacker’s job.” Perhaps his humility stems from feeling like a slacker, or maybe it’s due to the disdain he seems to express towards the modern working environment.
“There’s this thing where you’re supposed to look like your very busy and working hard….I still have that teenage opinion where it’s not cool to work very hard, or at least it’s not cool to look like you’re working very hard, that you can handle it all in your stride.”
While admitting to being quite meticulous when it comes to laying down the production side of things, Vek rarely knows how a record is going to turn out from the get go.
“I very rarely start something thinking that I know how I want it to sound. In that sense I’m not trained, musically trained or trained in production. In terms of being like, ‘ok, I’m gonna make a song like this.’ It’s just a case of experimenting and hopefully it just ends up sounding like my stuff.
“I’m a perfectionist of sorts, that doesn’t mean that I have great taste necessarily, but it means that I want to gets something perfect in my mind.”
Minutes after the self-deprecating statement about his lack of taste, he casually mentions “I dedicated my life to creative arts, studied design and went to art school and now I make music.” It’s hard to tell if he’s just a laid back dude, or if something is holding him back from fully admitting how invested he is.
Just like ‘We Have Sound’ and ‘Leisure Seizure’ before it, ‘Luck’ is a smart album. Fresh, interesting, multi-layered and multi-faceted, much like Vek himself. Scratch the hooky, polished veneer off the surface and the labour of love underneath is exposed.
Vek spews forth the metaphor-laden lyrics with raw passion hidden behind a pair of shades to avoid eye contact, just in case too much is laid bare. When asked how much of himself was put into the record and how much is character based, Vek replies “It’s a way of hiding behind something. I never mean for the music to be a direct message, there’s a personal element to it and a subconscious thing.
“It’s me, but me at exactly that certain type of day or that certain frame of mind, where you stick your neck out a bit or speak up a bit… But I’m not like that all the time.
“Writing music, it’s a kind of escapism. It helped that the framework, the model of a rock musician’s lifestyle. Growing up it was aspirational and you feel like a rock star writing music.
“When I’m singing words I feel like you have to embody this character ‘cause you feel it’s a self-propelling thing I think….so yeah, it’s like me on a cool day, or me on a saying the shit I wanna say day.
“Half the other time I’m sensitive to everybody else’s opinions and I like being very lateral and objecting about things. I like twisting lyrics a bit; making it a bit abstract so I can hold it up.
“It’s really not designed to be to be offensive at all, [it’s more like] that guy seems like he’s passionate about something, I can’t really tell what it is, but at least his heart’s in it.”
Touching on Vek’s character being him on a “cool day”, Vek adds “the main thing is it’s helpful to realise that you should just do what you wanna do. There’s a lot of people gonna be competing in a lot of avenues, or in any genre or whatever you wanna do that you might do well at, so it helps to do your own thing.
“I kinda feel.. proud that I’ve got my own project and it’s its own thing, and I try and be as cool as possible as much as people call me a geek.”
Despite this statement, Vek seems wholly (and refreshingly) unconcerned about being deemed cool. Being true to his art, passion and realness takes precedence over coolness and it really shines through in his music.
“Being passionate exposes cynicism. Cynical music has been made since the dawn of time so I think it just exposes that a bit more and makes people more vitriolic about it which is good.”
Watching the trippy new video for single Sherman (Animals In The Jungle) feels a bit like getting off a fairground ride after a few pints. So how dizzy can fans expect to get watching his live show at Body & Soul this weekend?
He assures us that his live show is “all about the music” with no split-screen trippy visuals to turn your stomach. While Tom Vek may not turn your stomach on Saturday, if the sincerity he oozes in conversation and on his records comes through in person, he may just steal your heart.