How Lewis Capaldi became the most unlikely ruler of Planet Pop | Dork
How Lewis Capaldi became the most unlikely ruler of Planet Pop
Chart-topping singles. Sold out tours. A social sensation.
It’s Saturday night, and The Jonathan Ross Show is once again being beamed into front rooms up and down the country. It’s fair to say that it’s quite a big deal. Take tonight’s guests: there’s Danny DeVito and Colin Farrell promoting the big-screen remake of Dumbo, actual Olympic Gold medalist Nicola Adams, household comedy favourite Jimmy Carr, and recent Alan Partridge star Lolly Adefope. As Jonathan Ross kick-starts the show, they pan to another face…
“I tend to sweat quite a bit when I go on those TV things,” admits Lewis Capaldi. In a new world, he’s concerned that the basics might go awry. “I’m always like - do I smell weird? Danny DeVito just shook my hand, but did he smell like, an arsey smell while shaking it?
This is the life of Lewis Capaldi in 2019. Caught in the eye of a storm sweeping across the world, he’s become the most talked-about new artist in the country in the space of weeks, and beyond that, stands as one of music’s undeniable new entertainers. Red carpets, big-time performances, sold-out tour dates months and months in advance - he’s on course to get the world ‘Capaldi’ added to the Oxford Dictionary in no time. By that, we mean ‘Capaldi’ defined as ‘an absolute bloody legend laughing in the face of how ridiculous things are getting’. It’s a view we could all live by.
Peeking behind the curtain and turning to the world as if to say, 'what the hell is this?', Lewis Capaldi isn’t afraid to say what he thinks and how he feels. In a matter of months he’s taken on the world of planet pop and become a new form of national treasure, one not afraid to post up every ridiculous moment happening to him for the world to see, and as a result, has become entwined in people’s hearts. From odd showers in New York, turning up to the BRITs wondering what on earth is about to happen, or being kept up late in a hotel by the couple next door getting up to, well, who knows what, it’s side-splitting gold that’s drawn everyone in. He's rewriting the rulebook, one Instagram Story at a time.
“From the start of the year, to be honest, it’s been this massive, massive…” Lewis pauses. As he speaks, ‘Someone You Loved’ has been sitting at Number 1 as the biggest song in the country for a month, and only getting bigger. “At the end of last year, we did a show at Shepherds Bush Empire. Two nights at the Barrowlands. We did the Live Lounge and stuff and did that all through November/December. I thought okay, this is as big or as mental as things are going to get, d’ya know what I mean? We found where we would fit in the landscape of everything and yeah, at the turn of the year it just kicked up a fucking gear and I was like - Christ almighty, this is next level! I thought I was busy last year!
If there’s one thing you can say about Lewis Capaldi, it’s that he’s certainly enjoying himself. His every move is pored over and shared, like a mate who’s suddenly ended up on this unbelievable rollercoaster. Instead of sharing videos of your mates from the night before, everyone’s sharing Lewis’ tales - primetime viewing every single time.
Lewis cracks and laughs thinking about it all. “This whole experience I’ve found, even before having the Number One, has all just felt really fucking stupid, like! You have to take that… if you realise that in your head, that this is all fucking ridiculous, then you’re in good stead, I reckon.
A Lewis Capaldi celebration kicked off, embracing the wild side of the music industry in a way only he could. “I had two half-pints of Heineken ordered to my room, had them and went bowling.
While shaking Lewis up and spraying him across a room may be out of the question, the sparkling bubbles he adds to the new batch of ‘singer-songwriters’ entering the fray makes him a cocktail worth toasting over and over. Something universal that has him beating the likes of Ariana Grande and Calvin Harris week after week - for a 22-year-old without a debut album out that must a surreal proposition?
What ‘Someone You Loved’ has done, is catapult Lewis into the mainstream. Fan accounts are cropping up all over the web; when you head to gigs and hear at the back of the room, ‘Have you seen what Lewis Capaldi has done today?’ He’s the talk of the town.
“It’s fucking so weird. You look at all the people below me in the charts at the moment, and it’s like Sam Smith, Ariana, Calvin with Rag’n’Bone Man and you’re like - what the fuck is going on here? Surely people must have better taste in music than to listen to me?” he laughs.
Lewis is the first to say his music isn’t attempting to break bold new sonic ground, a self-deprecating crack to the stage he now finds himself. In the past, he’s described himself as a ‘melting hippo’, and the idea of the big glitz of the music world seemed beyond anything he could ever dream of. As Lewis saw it, a Number One single was “never, ever, ever, ever” on the cards for him.
Once you hear Lewis Capaldi’s voice, it’s clear why thousands upon thousands now flock to his every move and just why ‘Someone You Loved’ has taken on a whole life of its own. The sort of soaring pull that has you hooked, it sounds like a call from the gut that could take on skyscrapers - a secret weapon that you’d never know was lurking behind the joke-cracking Scottish smiles. It’s taken him to the very top, and now he can have some fun with it.
At school, he'd make the rest of his class fold over in fits of laughter regularly. "I’d know when to cut it before I got into real trouble,” he recalls, “but I was a bit of a nuisance sometimes. I got a punishment once in French because I farted - the teacher was teaching a lesson I went ‘SHHHHHHH’. She turned around and was like, 'what?' And then I farted and got sent outside.
He was quite happy floating along through school, admitting he probably would have done better if he had applied himself and studied a bit more - but had his mind on other things like having a laugh and playing music.
He ponders what his music teacher’s reaction would be now he has the biggest song in the country.
That first glint of music came at an early, early age. Growing up in the small town of Bathgate, spread halfway between Glasgow and Edinburgh, to Scottish-Italian parents as the youngest of four children, it was on a family trip to a holiday camp at the age of four when he first took the stage.
“We got there, and there was this band up playing some song like ‘Be Our Guest’, and I got up and gave them a Queen CD with ‘We Will Rock You’ and ‘We Are The Champions’ on. I sang them on that stage and immediately I was like, can I do another one? I just experienced this weird rush. I mean, I was four so I hadn’t experienced that many rushes before, but it was this buzz and from there all I wanted to do was sing live to people. From that, my love of music came from this idea of - right, if I want to play live to people, I need to write my own songs. In my head, that was just what you did.”
By the age of eleven, he’d picked up the guitar, written his first original song and had begun gigging around various pubs and venues around Bathgate, Glasgow and Edinburgh. He caught the tail-end of a vibrant music scene with a range of bands playing a range of venues, but as his teenage years continued, those bands began to fade away, and venues started to close. It meant more than ever; he was heading to the likes of Glasgow and Edinburgh to get up on stage whenever he could.
In every facet of his life, music was there as a constant.
“I always see people in interviews say if you want to be successful in music and you really love it, you’d do it every single day - and I was like, I’m pretty sure I didn’t do it every single fucking day, and I was doing gigs all the time. Looking back now though, I realise so much of my time that I didn’t even realise, in that moment, was doing music and playing gigs. All those formative things that didn’t even register, like my first underage drinking thing was when me and my mates would put on our own gigs and get pissed. It was, right, we’re 16 and 17 years old and we want to get drunk, how do we do that? Okay, let’s put on a gig. That was facilitating something else - my burgeoning alcoholism - but music was there as an important part of my life to make that happen, more than I realised at the time.”
Lewis pauses. “Fuck me, I did spend an awful lot of time playing in the dark.”
Throughout his journeying and drive to be a musician, his parents were hugely supportive. “If I was appearing to give it my all and was going out there to play shows and better myself, then they were fully supportive. They knew the score after having three other children before me.” Lewis changes his tone. “Look, we’ve raised three kids already - you’ll probably be fine. We’ve done this before; this isn’t our first rodeo,” comes his impression of his parents' philosophy.
Rather than chewing on Irn-Bru bottles, Lewis went about working on and pulling together the songs that have come to define his past 18 months, uploading tracks to YouTube and slowly building a loyal audience. It was ‘Bruises’ that truly took things to a new level, a favourite that he had played live for years was released into the world and found a, well, decent response.
With ‘Bruises’ he became the fastest ever unsigned artist to reach 25 million plays on Spotify and it had him snapped up in no time. “For so long after, we never had a song do as good as ‘Bruises’ which was a pain in the fucking arse. I felt like, ahhh fuuuuuccckkiiinnggg hell we shouldn’t have let that song go out there first.”
“It was never meant to be as big as it got on streaming,” notes Lewis, taking a deep breath. “I mean, neither was this one! I think that’s what’s good about streaming in general though; people decide what they’re into. You can have the song and take it to radio and do a big video - and trust me, we’ve done a few of them over the past couple of years - but if people decide if a certain song is the one, then they have the power to make it huge. Personally as an artist…” Lewis stops and cracks a laugh, “fucking hell, an artist! What on earth! As a singer, I think a lot of the music industry is saying, like, well this is an exciting time - none of us know what the fuck is going on! I sound like a politician, but I think it’s a good thing that the power is back in the hands of the people.”
Raw and unequivocally honest, it’s an album that practically makes itself at home on first listen to record players, music libraries and radio airwaves. Every generation will connect to it in some form, but Lewis still feels some apprehension in what lies ahead - that worry of what could happen from here.
“There was definitely a moment where it was like, oh we’re going to have that one big song on streaming, and then the next three songs aren’t going to do that. There was kinda this apprehensiveness. I was very conscious of becoming this one song thing, and what’s nice about ‘Someone You Loved’ is that it seems to have opened up those doors for people to come and listen to more than just one song. People will come up to me and say oh, I’m listening to this song and this - and I don’t know if it’s given me confidence because I’m still pretty nervous about everything, nothing’s guaranteed in music these days.”
He’s a strong believer in “you’re only as good as your next fucking song. You can’t get complacent and put out any old shit. People are smarter than that. This song isn’t good enough; see you later,” and how important playing live still is to him. The recording process on the other hand...
“Ahhhh,” breathes Lewis. “Putting an album together was the most stressful and boring thing I’ve ever done in my entire fucking life. Everyone will tell you about this fucking mad little journey they went on with recording the album, and for me, I was like fucking hell, I want this to be over so I can just play these fucking songs live.
“The actual writing of the songs? Loved doing. The arrangements of the song? Loved doing. But when it comes to the actual recording process where you sit there playing the same fucking guitar part 47 fucking times to go back to the one you started with in the first place? Drives me fucking insane.
"I've never really enjoyed recording or being in a recording studio because you're simultaneously really bored and also really stressed and nervous, like - this is like a really boring process but also I want people to really like this, and I want to do these songs justice.
"If it were up to me I’d finish a song, put it on a voice recorder on my phone, put them on Spotify and then fucking go! I always want to get from writing a song to playing them live as quick as fucking possible.
Thankfully for Lewis, it all came together in a week of recording with tracks he’d been working on from the past 12 months.
Across the album, Lewis delves deep into the soaring hooks that have taken him to the big leagues - dripping with open emotion and never shying away from it all. The amount of tears that might be shed to this album is in the millions, that’s for sure.
“When you’re sad you definitely think about things a lot more - you’re thinking about those factors and reasons why you feel like this, so it’s a lot easier to put that into words because you’re constantly thinking about it.
“When you’re happy you’re only thinking about… I dunno, having sex and eating crisps.
“I had a breakup at the start of the year before this all kicked off and what I found was interesting about everything going on wasn’t oh, I just met Danny DeVito on a couch on The Jonathan Ross Show. What was interesting was my own insecurities I was still feeling while I was having these experiences. An imposter syndrome almost, with my own ability and stuff like that; longing for the feeling and simplicity of being back home.
Underneath the hilarious videos and ridiculous situations he now finds himself, that longing and human connection is ten-fold - an album about rising back in the face of it all.
“To watch those tickets fly out in seconds was fucking mental,” he jumps. “You think back to all your favourite bands and sitting there waiting on Ticketmaster for tickets, and they sold out really quickly, and you’re like ‘fuck me’ but at the same time you thought, how fucking mental is it that you can’t even get a ticket for them? It’s weird to be in the same position as the people you used to go and see and try and get tickets for.
He laughs about saving as much money as possible on the stage show, potentially bringing back some of that bowling alley champagne he first celebrated his Number One with - “It sounds like a band from Brighton, right? 'We’re Bowling Alley Champagne, and this is our Burberry Acoustic',” he cracks - as well as fairy lights and a cardboard sign with ‘L E W I S C A P A L D I’ scribbled on it. You can guarantee the sold-out rooms would be loving it either way, but it’s pretty clear there’s something up his sleeve there.
He stops.
Breaking hearts, smashing charts and enjoying the rise - Lewis Capaldi is the figure pop needed right about now, and you can guarantee that we’re all invited along for the ride.
He’s planning on taking full advantage of the here and now. He wants to headline an arena at some point, potentially in Scotland, and tour the US along with the rest of the world. “I just want to get the music to as many people as possible, and I mean - there’s quite a lot of fucking people over there."
Most importantly for Lewis though, his goal is to not to embarrass his mum. “As long as my mother’s not embarrassed, then it’s all good.”
Stay glued to your social media accounts. In the ridiculous world of pop, Lewis Capaldi is taking over. That’s no joke.
Taken from the May issue of Dork. Lewis Capaldi's debut album 'Divinely Uninspired To A Hellish Extent' is out 17th May. He’ll play Barn on the Farm, Truck and more this summer, and a UK headline tour from 21st November.
Words: Jamie Muir
Lewis has always been mischievous, a joker in the pack with a laid-back view on the world that finds him making light of a situation whenever possible. “I was definitely as much of a gimp back then as I am now," he says.
At school, he'd make the rest of his class fold over in fits of laughter regularly. "I’d know when to cut it before I got into real trouble,” he recalls, “but I was a bit of a nuisance sometimes. I got a punishment once in French because I farted - the teacher was teaching a lesson I went ‘SHHHHHHH’. She turned around and was like, 'what?' And then I farted and got sent outside.
He was quite happy floating along through school, admitting he probably would have done better if he had applied himself and studied a bit more - but had his mind on other things like having a laugh and playing music.
He ponders what his music teacher’s reaction would be now he has the biggest song in the country.
That first glint of music came at an early, early age. Growing up in the small town of Bathgate, spread halfway between Glasgow and Edinburgh, to Scottish-Italian parents as the youngest of four children, it was on a family trip to a holiday camp at the age of four when he first took the stage.
“We got there, and there was this band up playing some song like ‘Be Our Guest’, and I got up and gave them a Queen CD with ‘We Will Rock You’ and ‘We Are The Champions’ on. I sang them on that stage and immediately I was like, can I do another one? I just experienced this weird rush. I mean, I was four so I hadn’t experienced that many rushes before, but it was this buzz and from there all I wanted to do was sing live to people. From that, my love of music came from this idea of - right, if I want to play live to people, I need to write my own songs. In my head, that was just what you did.”
By the age of eleven, he’d picked up the guitar, written his first original song and had begun gigging around various pubs and venues around Bathgate, Glasgow and Edinburgh. He caught the tail-end of a vibrant music scene with a range of bands playing a range of venues, but as his teenage years continued, those bands began to fade away, and venues started to close. It meant more than ever; he was heading to the likes of Glasgow and Edinburgh to get up on stage whenever he could.
In every facet of his life, music was there as a constant.
“I always see people in interviews say if you want to be successful in music and you really love it, you’d do it every single day - and I was like, I’m pretty sure I didn’t do it every single fucking day, and I was doing gigs all the time. Looking back now though, I realise so much of my time that I didn’t even realise, in that moment, was doing music and playing gigs. All those formative things that didn’t even register, like my first underage drinking thing was when me and my mates would put on our own gigs and get pissed. It was, right, we’re 16 and 17 years old and we want to get drunk, how do we do that? Okay, let’s put on a gig. That was facilitating something else - my burgeoning alcoholism - but music was there as an important part of my life to make that happen, more than I realised at the time.”
Lewis pauses. “Fuck me, I did spend an awful lot of time playing in the dark.”
Throughout his journeying and drive to be a musician, his parents were hugely supportive. “If I was appearing to give it my all and was going out there to play shows and better myself, then they were fully supportive. They knew the score after having three other children before me.” Lewis changes his tone. “Look, we’ve raised three kids already - you’ll probably be fine. We’ve done this before; this isn’t our first rodeo,” comes his impression of his parents' philosophy.
Rather than chewing on Irn-Bru bottles, Lewis went about working on and pulling together the songs that have come to define his past 18 months, uploading tracks to YouTube and slowly building a loyal audience. It was ‘Bruises’ that truly took things to a new level, a favourite that he had played live for years was released into the world and found a, well, decent response.
With ‘Bruises’ he became the fastest ever unsigned artist to reach 25 million plays on Spotify and it had him snapped up in no time. “For so long after, we never had a song do as good as ‘Bruises’ which was a pain in the fucking arse. I felt like, ahhh fuuuuuccckkiiinnggg hell we shouldn’t have let that song go out there first.”
“It was never meant to be as big as it got on streaming,” notes Lewis, taking a deep breath. “I mean, neither was this one! I think that’s what’s good about streaming in general though; people decide what they’re into. You can have the song and take it to radio and do a big video - and trust me, we’ve done a few of them over the past couple of years - but if people decide if a certain song is the one, then they have the power to make it huge. Personally as an artist…” Lewis stops and cracks a laugh, “fucking hell, an artist! What on earth! As a singer, I think a lot of the music industry is saying, like, well this is an exciting time - none of us know what the fuck is going on! I sound like a politician, but I think it’s a good thing that the power is back in the hands of the people.”
