Noah & the Whale Interview feature

Charlie Fink, the 21 year old singer and songwriter behind sunshine folk outfit, Noah and the Whale, is doing his utmost to appear unfazed by his current and rather glorious predicament. Whilst a lot of young people his age would be negotiating post-University repayment loans, Fink is negotiating the final running order and guest slots for when he and his band headline The Roundhouse in Camden tonight. With a top ten single, 5 Years Time, engraved into the playlists of radio stations everywhere, Fink’s display of stoic modesty eventually gives way to an incredulous grin.

‘Yeah alright, it feels completely bizarre,’ he says emphatically, ‘to be honest it all just seems weird, especially when, after I wrote it, I’d never envisage it having any cross-over appeal. I thought it was quite a low-key song.’

We’re in a noisy café in King’s Cross near to where Noah and the Whale are rehearsing for forthcoming live shows. With any luck, these will help cement their steady ascendancy from world-of-mouth buzz to mainstream stardom. The other consolidating element is the release this week of their debut album, Peaceful, the World Lays Me Down. As anticipated, the band’s skipping breeziness, arching jangle and sunny élan soars high, but Fink’s frequent bouts of downcast gloom offers a rather more absorbing journey than the perky singles suggests. It’s simple stuff, but no less magically affecting. And anyone who can turn whistling and ukuleles into this summer’s ubiquitous hit surely has a knack for spotting big possibilities in the slenderest of premises.

For Fink, this is all about getting ‘the right balance’, between rudimentary ‘anti-folk’ and studio-harnessed grandeur, between the intimacy of threadbare lo-fi and the warm embrace of mainstream pop. ‘The key to it all is actually having a basic form of songwriting,’ says Fink, ‘I think people like Daniel Johnson, Jeffrey Lewis and Jonathan Richman. These were all going back to an essence of songwriting that’s something I want to tap into. The flipside is Radiohead’s building an album entirely in the studio and that’s what I’m also into.’

Nevertheless, anyone found using handclaps, triangles and, yes, those pesky ukuleles will inevitably be dismissed outright as insufferably ‘twee’. True, Peaceful, the World Lays Me Down is unlikely to impress Enter Shikari fans, but Noah and the Whale aren’t cultivating innocence or nostalgia for kid’s TV programs. In fact, throughout the album there’s a palpable quest for adventure, exploring both the wider world and big universal themes. As 5 Years Time makes clear, Fink is looking towards an optimistic adult future, not dwelling on a mythical childhood past.

‘I only started to write songs properly after I had traveled across the Mediterranean and India that I had something to write about,’ says Fink. ‘Once I had discovered a proper subject matter, the songs just fell out. The album effectively examines love, death and time and how these things can compromise each other. I’m trying to examine the value of each. But I’m not trying to be conclusive with these songs and, thankfully, people read lots of different meanings into the lyrics. Some of my friends who are religious interpret a religious slant on the lyrics, although I’m not explicitly writing about that.’

Fink attended a Catholic primary school in Twickenham and shrugs ‘I guess at an early age I vaguely believed in something, but it was never been forced upon me’. He started playing guitar and writing songs by the age of 12, spent a gap year traveling before taking up American Studies at Manchester University. He dropped out after a few months citing ‘boredom’ and stayed in Manchester further honing his impressive array of songs.

Back in London, by early 2007 he recruited his brother Doug on drums – ‘except we were called Johnny Hat Racket back then,’ says Fink helpfully – with fiddler Tom and bass player Urby completing the settled line-up. The band’s name is a hybrid of one of their favourite films, The Squid and the Whale, and that film’s director, Noah Baumbach. From the beginning they attracted some impressive collaborators. Emmy the Great is the backing singer you can hear on 5 Years Time while the equally feted folkie, and Fink’s ex-girlfriend, Laura Marling sang with the band as well. Fink ended up producing her first EP and her acclaimed debut album, Alas, I Cannot Swim.

‘Laura was frustrated at being lumped in as a pop singer to start with,’ says Fink. ‘She liked what I was doing and, at that time, I was producing demos for friends, nothing massively serious. So producing Laura’s stuff was no big deal, it simply felt a fun, natural thing to do’.

They quickly learnt their chops supporting Feist and Broken Social Scene and were further nurtured by tiny indie label, Young and Lost, releasing a few singles along the way. Since then, expectations for Noah and the Whale have been as large as the titular mammal and, thankfully, Peaceful, the World Lays Me Down affirms our initial affection and ratchets them up a notch. Fink, though, is already devising the next quantum leap.

‘I’ve found the next album’s songs subject matter because I’ve sorted out the philosophical theme,’ says Fink. ‘Whereas the debut album deals in quite broad strokes, the next album is much more personal and intimate. Actually, we’re going to play the first song on our next album as the last song tonight.’ A man, it seems, who is definitely unfazed.
Neil Davenport