Nick Mulveys' Solo Impulse

On paper it looked like a huge risk, walking away from a successful, Mercury Prize-nominated band, Portico Quartet, on the verge of cutting its third album, but for Cambridge-born singer-songwriter Nick Mulvey there was never any question.

“It eventually became something that I very much had to do,” he admits, on the phone from Paris having just done three nights supporting John Butler. “It didn’t even feel like a decision that I was making; it was like something, a runaway happening that I had to choose to go with and choose to author, rather than being led by it, because, after four or five years of being in Portico Quartet I really was branching off on a different tangent that was expressing itself in two key ways, the first of which was a desire to return to the guitar and return to singing and indeed return to songwriting and working with lyrics, because none of those things were part of my creativity in Portico, which was hugely satisfying for a couple of albums.”

In Portico Quartet, Mulvey, who had put himself through a guitar school in Cuba and gone on to study ethnomusicology, had played a melodic percussion instrument called the hang drum.

"there was a lot of pressure building up inside me that really needed to go somewhere"

“By the fifth year of not playing the guitar and singing and songwriting, there was a lot of pressure building up inside me that really needed to go somewhere and indeed the very first song I wrote after leaving the band was one that made it to the album called Fever To The Form, and literally the first lines of that were, “So with the musical madness will live by one of the two”, and that’s kind of where I felt I was at, music being this music – the songs and everything that would then become First Mind, the album – or, if it wasn’t going to be that, it was going to be madness. Not necessarily section 27 schizophrenia but, you know, neurosis and unhappiness. The choice wasn’t quite as dramatic as it seemed at that point.

“The other thing was then at the same time, the kind of inverse of that expression. The boys in the band were really getting into a style of music and a whole lot of artists I wasn’t quite following, much more in the electronic route, which I love but wasn’t quite my calling as an artist at that moment. So this split was happening already and it was a question of owning it and altering it before we got into the studio with another advance from the label and got into a bit of a pickle where had to deliver some music but were not on the same page.”

So in 2012, Mulvey totally cut himself off from anything to do with the music industry, let go of any expectations about what music might come, set up a writing room, played his guitar every day for six months and the songs began to come. The result was First Mind.