'I Like Terrible Dreams'

In 1971, filmmaker Peter Bogdanovich released his directorial debut, a bittersweet coming-of-age movie titled The Last Picture Show. “That was a massive influence on me,” Nick Waterhouse admits emphatically, fresh from a session accompanying, writing with and co-producing an emerging singer named Paul Bergmann. “That, American Graffiti, Chinatown, Easy Rider… I felt like a lot of that new American cinema in the ‘70s, which comes from the ‘40s classic films and French cinema and new wave stuff from other countries, and then recalibrating it to make new statements about things like Vietnam and changing cultural things, and nostalgia, people growing up. I already felt in tune with all that stuff as a young man. That was something I was thinking about a lot when I was making Holly.”

Second album, Holly, was released last year, Waterhouse releasing his debut album, Time’s All Gone, in 2012. In high school, he’d been in a band called Intelligentsia, but that had fallen apart within a couple of years and he’d been working at a record shop, disillusioned, when, aged 23, he recorded and independently released his first single, Some Place, in 2010. “I knew I’d turned a corner when I first ran tape on my first single,” he explains, “because I kind of impulsively recorded that. It was a pick-up band of my friends. Genuinely when I first ran that song down, which was the day of the recording, it felt like a record.

“Before I was making music professionally I had aspirations to make films professionally, without really knowing what that meant. But I think the auteur aspect of it has spurred on how my music works. Like, I don’t just write the songs and then give them to the band to play. I direct, I then band-lead, I then am really involved in the manufacturing; I want to create a whole atmosphere for the listener, which some nights I’ve had with records, playing them in a nightclub or alone in my room – they can feel like movies.

“My whole career has been about gestating my influences – most people tend to just focus on that idea, you know, my influences – a lot of ‘60s rhythm and blues, rock’n’roll and soul, whatever you want to call it. I just really like this mélange of that stuff, and I don’t intensely like it – that was just what I grew up listening to a lot – and re-jiggering it for what my experiences are, growing up in San Francisco in 2004; that sort of feel telling stories that are related to that. But I like incorporating… I like dreams a lot, I like terrible dreams, I like confusing dreams, I like how they reflect the same nightmare feel that one can get very late at night in cities, and that’s been a thing that’s come across generations. Tunes like Holly or Sleeping Pills, I felt like I was really getting to the point of what my vision was, you know?”