Maisie Peters was visibly nervous yet excited. As soon as the lights came up, gone was the shy, young girl from the interview room. Stood in her place was a bold, powerful musician with remarkable talent.
She laughed and thanked me when I pointed out that she was ‘one to watch on the music scene’. What I really wanted to learn about Maisie was what inspired her to do music in the first place.
“Taylor Swift! I watched the music video for ‘Love Story’ when I was 12 and thought this was sick! I would always write stories and I was really into music, especially pop-punk artists such as My Chemical Romance. My first gig at Brixton was All Time Low and I was so gassed!”
She had the audience in the palm of her hand, everyone curious to hear more of this young performer.
“I actually haven’t performed live that much. I done a little support tour last year but this is my first big one. I feel like I haven’t done it that much to fully decide what my favourite thing is about performing but I love meeting people afterwards and chatting to them, seeing where they’re from. Being able to talk to people that you have only known on Twitter and Instagram is really nice. I just love all of it really.”
Upon the up and coming release of her new EP, ‘Dressed Too Nice for a Jacket’, Maisie revealed the record will be a mixed bag of pop and acoustic.
“It’s a really good mix. Some of it is kind of quite different from what I’ve released so far and some of it is really similar to what I started out with and just straight up acoustic. It’s a real mix of the two, more like left field pop stuff and then more acoustic stuff.
My new single, ‘In My Head’, was wrote the day after we wrote my song ‘Worst of You’ and we only managed to write one verse. I remember coming out the studio feeling really disheartened. I’d say the song definitely reflects the time of my life, for example going out but then also feeling sad. Trying to pretend like you’re not sad but you are. I definitely have experienced that but the song wasn’t written by a specific person. It’s a song to reflect lots of nights and lots of times of my life. It definitely naturally formed.”
When asked who she would love to collaborate with, Maisie definitely brought back the classics.
“Do you remember like 2010 and you had all the rappers and singers and they all had quite like bate but amazing songs? I wanna bring that back and would love to do something like that. So many people!”
Every artist also dreams of performing in a particular venue one day.
“I live in Brighton and there’s a venue there called the Brighton Dome which is basically part of the Pavilion which is this really old palace which was built for the King back in the day and it was like his holiday home. It’s now been turned into a historical sight but then you have the Dome. It’s this beautiful, big high ceilinged, almost like Church building. I’ve seen loads of my favourite artists play there and I’ve always thought I’d love to play there.”
Maisie then finished with her single ‘Worst of You’ before Tom Walker prepared to set foot on the stage.
A kind and down to earth Tom Walker appears comfortable in his surroundings before being asked about how he got into music.
“My Dad is like super into music and he’s got loads of different records and he’s into everything from like Paolo Nutini to Foo Fighters to Muse to Deadmau5 to Underworld, a bit of everything! He took me to loads of gigs when I was growing up and bought me my first guitar and guess he just saw that I was naturally good at it and pushed me to do it because he knew that I enjoyed it which I don’t think most parents do.”
The crowd went wild as soon as Tom walked onto the stage. He opened with ‘Fly Away With Me’, the ideal opener for what was set to be an incredible show.
Interestingly, Tom revels his most popular track ‘Leave a Light On’ was inspired by a friend’s battle with mental health.
“I wrote it when one of my mates was going through a bit of an issue with addiction and kind of mental health, I guess he just kind of went off the rails for a little bit and I didn’t really know how to deal with it and how to approach the situation. This was like two and a bit years ago now so he’s totally cool now and everything worked out totally sweet but at the time I didn’t know what to do and my way of kind of coping and processing issues that are going on in my life is just to write about it. That’s kind of like my therapy I guess.”
Tom continued on performing tune after tune, the crowd hanging on to his every word and swaying in time. Due to the venue being on the smaller side, it made for the gig to be intimate. Performing at QMU in Glasgow was the kick off for Tom’s tour. What I wanted to know is what venue Tom would most like to perform in overall.
“I think the MEN Arena in Manchester because I’ve been to see all my favourite bands there with my Dad when I was growing up because I am from Scotland but I moved when I was three and a half and then I grew up in Manchester. So all the big bands that were coming through went to that venue so if I could play there one day, I could die a happy man.”
“Arctic Monkeys really got me into song-writing because they were writing stuff that seemed to be the stuff I was doing in my life, like trying to get into a club and getting kicked out, swapping jumpers with your mate trying to get back in. They just seemed to make their everyday poetic and inspirational somehow. So when I kind of got into their first album, that’s what made me think that I could get into song-writing because it was songs that I’d finally 100% connected with in every way, like the music, the lyrics, everything.”
Tom will be releasing a new album sometime next year, ‘What A Time to be Alive”. He told me what fans could expect from this upcoming album.
“There’s a mix of everything. There’s some new stuff that is kind of similar to ‘Angels’ and ‘Leave A Light On’ and then there’s some stuff that is a little bit more rocky. There’s a song called ‘Cry Out’ where we recorded real chains dropping and smashing on the floor and a gospel choir. There’s a song called ‘Fade Away’ which is just me on piano and a sixteen-piece string section because I like so many different songs and styles and genres of music, I didn’t want to just do an album where everything sounds the same and I think the thing that ties it together is my voice sounds like whatever I’m singing, as long as it’s my voice it sounds like my style. It’s diverse but doesn’t sound too mental!”
Watching Tom up on the stage, he is quite the performer. The way he interacts with the crowd and his fans is wonderful to watch. If there is one thing I can say about Tom, he definitely loves his fans.
“It’s just so exciting to go and play new songs, it’s really nerve-wracking but there’s nothing better than getting the instant feedback from the crowd. That’s when you know a song’s good or not, if they’re digging it. It’s always just nice to see that in real life because it’s all cool writing a song and doing it in the studio and you think it’s good obviously, but the real test is doing it live and seeing if the general public like it so that’s always exciting.”
Tom is an absolutely incredible solo artist, but every artist has that dream collaboration.
“Not even collaborating but I’d just love to sit down and have a beer with Paolo Nutini because he is one of my absolute favourites and I just love everything he’s ever done. There’s not really any songs that I don’t like and he’s got such a great mix of really melancholy and depressing then really happy. In all the interviews I’ve seen, he seems like a top guy and I like that he takes four years between each album to make sure the album is going to be really cool and he doesn’t give a f**k about what anyone else is saying.”
All photography by Andrew Gaw
