“When I’d go to Los Angeles, I’d see people with no legs, I seen a guy pushing himself on a skateboard. In England, he’d probably have a wheelchair. The gap between rich and poor is so big in America that I think it creates some really good music.”
Joe Fox picked up my crinkled yellow page decorated with scribbled questions and quickly put it back on the table as my hand writing was ‘Too good for me to read’, a confusingly contradictory statement that subtly, in some ways, set the tone for the rest of our conversation.
Coming off the back of featuring on an A$AP Rocky album that went number 1 on the Billboard chart is no easy feat. With that being said, he is more so interested and focused on the journey and less on the destination, with his guitar and eerily relatable voice soundtracking the way.
After a quick swap of hotels through Galway traffic and brief conversational stints ranging from Steven Seagal, Justin Bieber, whiskey, Ed Sheeran’s Irish legitimacy and the closure of fabric, we finally managed to talk Joe Fox.
So, how are you right now?
I’m very well, I’m loving Ireland. I’m actually a quarter Irish on my Mum’s side. I don’t really know much about my Mum’s family but I know that she’s definitely Irish, she slips into an Irish accent whenever she gets angry! It’s cool to be in Ireland.
What have you made of the tour so far?
Limerick was a really great gig and I met some really amazing people there, I really like Irish people, the guy who I’ve been travelling with has noticed too that Irish people are really dedicated to what they do. If you go to a bar, people have a lot of pride in the place they work at. In Limerick, I saw eight people gathered around a table and they were jamming, someone had fiddle, they had all these different instruments and everyone took a lot of pride in it and I like that, you don’t see it as much in larger cities, well, I don’t.
I see people becoming a bit detached from their jobs. To the barman in Limerick, it was the most important thing in the world; the bar, the drink and how I got served. The live music scene in Dublin is great as well!
How has transitioning from the US and UK impacted on you? The gap has been blurred for quite a while but it has opened up a bit again in terms of sound, what do you think?
Here’s an interesting thing: I was speaking to a head of label somewhere, they said to me that someone like Adele or Amy Winehouse, a white girl singing traditionally black music like Jazz and Rn’B really well, English record labels nurture someone like that. Whereas in America if a white girl came along that sang like Amy Winehouse or Adele, there’s loads of girls that sing like that and they don’t seem to put as much emphasis on them.
There’s a weird thing with America, their roots music, like the Blues were never really appreciated until bands like the Beatles and the Stones started playing it and then sold it back to America. The same thing is kind of happening with Folk and even with Rn’B, we were just talking about Ed Sheeran, it’s weird how he mixes Rn’B with Rap and Folk and all these different genres. The English are quite good at taking something, packaging it and selling it back.
Even with Rock n’Roll, David Bowie, that was basically a fine art view on Chuck Berry and Rock n’Roll. I couldn’t ever see David Bowie coming from America because he’s such an English thing, but then, I couldn’t see Elvis coming from England because the Alpha Male thing is very American.
Hip-Hop is such an American thing, that’s the great thing about when you go there. I was going to Harlem and Compton, all these places you only hear about on CDs, and you’re like ‘Oh my God, this is where the Blues came from!’ There is rich and poor in Ireland and the UK but we have a better social welfare system, so when you go to America, people are so poor. When I’d go to Los Angeles, I’d see people with no legs, I seen a guy pushing himself on a skateboard. In England, he’d probably have a wheelchair. The gap between rich and poor is so big in America that I think it creates some really good music.
How has the crossover between the US and UK changed your mindset and approach to making music and has there been one individual that had a really big impact on you?
The interesting thing for me, say someone like Rocky, he’d be really into John Lennon or the Pogues. I’d play him stuff you might not think someone from Harlem would really connect with. When I’d play him John Lennon’s solo album, he and all his friends loved it.
As clichéd as it sounds, music really is boundless, every new generation is finding this out. It doesn’t matter where you’re from, if you’re from Limerick or if you’re from Rome or New York or Oxford, one thing that really unites us is music, and we’re just finding it out, every generation that’s coming along, so just to be a part of that is great.
Now, there’s a good answer to a good question.
You’ve said before that your initial interaction with music was prompted by bad experiences, but what made you turn to music instead of anything else?
I have no relationship with my Dad and very little relationship with my Mum, and because of those things, I have very little relationships with any of my family. When that really started to hurt around 12,13,14, there were those song writers like Ray Davies, Kurt Cobain, Lead Belly, Muddy Waters and they had songs that spoke about those things and that was really broad, from Rock right through to Rap, I found all these people that were really pissed off too.
What I meant by ‘bad experiences’ was that it was very obvious that when I listened to The Fugees, I could hear Wyclef Jean and Lauryn Hill and they weren’t happy with where they were from, and the same with Arctic Monkeys etc. Once I dived into music, that was it, game over. It’s nice in a way, because it makes everything make sense. The feeling I get from music is so pure and redemptive, it’s like medicine.
At the moment, I’m still writing songs because I’m trying to stay down to earth. It’s very easy to get swept up into it all. Ed Sheeran is signed to Sony ATV, Taylor Swift is signed to Sony ATV, I’m signed to Sony ATV and so was Michael Jackson, almost like you’re supposed to ‘fit a mould’. I’m signed to Island records, they have Drake and they had Amy Winehouse, rest in peace, and now they have me. I could see why I could go down to the shopping centre and buy loads of new clothes, but I just can’t be fucked to do that because I know it’ll start me writing shit songs if I start not behaving how I’ve always behaved.
You were initially writing music from the perspective of those ‘bad situations’. I’m assuming you’re in a better situation now. How has that changed your outlook on those occurrences when you’re re-assessing them through music?
It makes you feel like maybe there was a reason for something, makes you start believing more in fate and destiny and thinking, ‘OK, that happened so maybe this can happen, maybe everything happens along the way for some sort of reason.’
I find a lot of people who are angry with their lives, it’s because they desperately feel like they need to control everything and that if they could just make this girl or guy like them, or if they could just get this job, or be on this TV show or work for that magazine, then they’ll be happy, but there’s loads of people at that magazine or that record label that aren’t happy, there are loads of successful actors that die in a pool of drugs.
Sadly, none of these things will make you happy, if they did, then the world would be a much happier place, what you’ve got to do is accept that you can’t control everything, but you can try and make the situation better on that day and you can try and make things as enjoyable as they could be. About two or three months before I met Rakim Mayers (A$AP Rocky), I said ‘I can’t control the music anymore.’ I was doing bands and club nights, I thought ‘what am I really doing?’ I thought ‘fuck it, I’m just going to sell CDs and play music,’ and see what happens. I’m going to stop trying to make this band work, I’m just going to stop trying and let it be, and that’s when things got more comfortable.
Did you feel pushed or pressured to release your own music once you had been more exposed to the wider public? Did it speed up your relaxed approach?
As a fan of music, I like to see an artist’s body of work and it’s nice to see a journey as well. It’s nice to see they’ve done this EP, they’ve done an album, then they did a feature with thingy and then they did their own thing. There are some artists that are just known for their features and you don’t get the full picture with that.
With the A$AP hype dying down somewhat, has it allowed you to better explore your own sound? Did you fall out of touch with it, being surrounded by someone else’s music?
No, I let go of the idea that I had control over everything and I just accepted the fact that I’m making this A$AP album. Now I’m making my own record, people might like it, people might hate it, people can do whatever they want to do with it. I think a lot of musicians think that if they love something everyone else will, I think that’s the best way to fail.
You’ve just got to say; this is what I’ve done, it might sell 10 copies, it might sell 10,000, you can’t control those things. I don’t feel any pressure, which is a good thing because I can just focus on the music.
Do you feel isolated with that mindset in such a consumption based society?
Yeah, even though what I’m doing now is public, I’m doing the music like I’ve always did it, I haven’t changed. For the A$AP album, that’s just me playing my acoustic guitar and singing, I haven’t changed my music to become popular, whereas the music industry is mostly people that look at what has now become popular and change their music in order to be popular.
I don’t hang out with musicians all night, just ones I really like.
How did you feel being around such famous/musical circles?
I really like those people, I stay in touch with a lot of them, I think the people who’re the best at what they do are always independent.
To have any reputation that’s growing, it’s a cool place to be. It’s an independent place, but in some ways it’s a lonely place, so to be good at what you do, you always have to stand alone. Someone like Kendrick Lamar, who a lot of people consider to be the best rapper, he stands alone, I’m sure he’d like a few peers, he’s kind of peerless right now. In fact, the funny thing is, a lot of people that work in the music industry are really nice people, even the ones who’re doing it, not to make exciting and interesting music, but to pay the bills, they’re just still people trying pay the bills, you can’t really hate someone who’s trying to feed their son!
I never get bad music mixed up with people because quite often really good music comes from really bad people.
Did you find that the media was too invasive when addressing what was paradoxically a very private meeting between you and A$AP Rocky? Did you think that people were too fascinated with a meeting rather than what came with it and that the media think they have too much of a right to know everything?
That’s a great point! It was a really personal meeting because we became friends, we still talk and we still work together, everything I do musically we look at together and we listen to it. Let me put it this way, I remember I was in LA with Rocky and there was a woman from a big magazine. The album hadn’t come out yet, but he’d just started mentioning that he’d met a guy selling mixtapes, and she was at his house to interview him. There was another lady there who worked for the magazine too and she came over to me and said ‘How did you REALLY meet? Did he have it planned and is that what you’re telling the media?’ She kept saying this, then I met her at a party and she said ‘It’s too slick that you can just play these songs etc.’ It’s cool that she thought that it was too slick to be real, but it was 100% totally real.
That’s the media though isn’t it? It’s a very good point. Could a non-celebrity be that exciting? Could a celebrity be that humble? We’ve really separated celebrities and normal people to the point where I can’t be in Soho at 4am, he can’t be either and he can’t like my music, it can’t be that pure. It has to be the X Factor now, it has to be a big story.
The people who give a fuck and have listened to the album, and listened to my stuff, they’ll realise ‘Yeah, they did just meet like that’ because some things, you just can’t fake. That was the nice thing for me about living with Rocky, to find his grills on the floor, to find that he was exactly the person he portrayed in the media is very cool.
I only looked at the media on him when I met him as well. That’s probably why our friendship was more genuine. Because of my circumstances, I hadn’t been keeping up with the latest updates on Pitchfork or The Fader!
Did the personal scrutiny affect you or the music?
When we met, it was a year and a half before he told anyone. Once he started telling people then it makes the thing different; ‘He saved the poor kid’ etc. What’s interesting is, I’m meeting people now that are like, ‘These songs are so good, I can’t believe Rocky just met you randomly,’ but you have to meet people some time. People can’t just appear. The fame culture has really fucked people up where they think people just appear and disappear.
Has working in a Hip-Hop environment made you or your music more transient or accessible to different genres or audiences?
It’s weird, for instance, the other day ‘Head Down Low’ which is a guitar and vocals song, got played on an Urban station. People say to me that the content of my songs is kind of like Hip-Hop but with a guitar. I think there’s a transcendence to music that if something’s good it can just fly around different places, it no longer becomes Urban or Rock or Folk or Pop, it just becomes Good.