Words matter. These are the best King Krule Quotes, and they’re great for sharing with your friends.
When I make music, it’s a very visual thing. Conjures up a lot of images.
There’s a lot of tension in London, but then you realize it’s always been there, in its history, and that the best thing about London, that there’s always been this tension.
I never got lessons. I took influence from Chet Baker, Ian Dury, and Joe Strummer. I don’t hear my voice and think, ‘Yeah, that’s a banging voice!’ It’s more about putting the right emotions into the right words and the lyrics than anything else to me.
Jazz is more raw than punk in a lot of ways. It’s so expressive. A lot of people say to me, especially older people, ‘It took me ages to get into jazz.’
I’m trying to create a collection of stories – the ‘U.F.O.W.A.V.E.’ songs are all stories. I haven’t really taken direct lyrical influence from other songwriters, but my dad bought me a book of W.H. Auden’s poems when I was younger, and the imagery really interested me.
My mum used to work in New York in Spike Lee’s shop; she did the outfits for the video for P.M. Dawn’s ‘Set Adrift on Memory Bliss.’
I want to get more and more sophisticated. I’m ready to go from being a kid to being a king.
Especially with the live, just the way I curve words, it’s about expression. It’s so emotive, to be able to release these words into a mike. It really emphasizes this insane tingle down my spine whenever I play.
When I was younger, I used to do that a lot: I would hear a part of a song that would really relax me and then put it on repeat. That would send me to sleep. It was quite obvious classical music, people like Penguin Cafe Orchestra, Erik Satie, Claude Debussy, Maurice Ravel.
My dad is an art director for BBC TV shows, and my mum does screen printing workshops. Both of my parents played instruments, too, and my mum used to have crazy house parties when me and my brother were young – dub and garage would be banging through my house.
I guess from 12 onwards I was always into my music.
I got a lot from my uncle who is a really good ska guitarist. Very ragged makeshift rhythms and intricate lines.
I do love the music aspect of the Internet. The Internet made me.
Because the Internet’s there, I have access to a lot of the legends, like Fela Kuti. I used to watch a lot of Fela Kuti videos, just to see how he performed. He inspired me a lot, actually, because he was a man of many words, many good words.
I was always wrapped around music being a tradition, a skill.
I went through quite a few establishments that maybe weren’t great for myself – security units, youth-offender places. I guess that was going to the lions’ den. Social services said, ‘You’ve got to go to some sort of school.’
I’ve got rid of a lot of cynicism and anger. I feel positive about my development, and I just want to carry on making music and building myself as a person.
A lot of people who have been perceiving my music have been trying to formulate a genre for it, and I think it’s just a natural thing; it doesn’t need to be categorized. It doesn’t need to be sectioned, if you will.
A lot of the time, I was unhappy as a kid, so I spent it, I guess, in a gray place.
I’ve mainly been sampling jazz because the tone of the chords are expressive in itself, so it’s quite nice to write over. It’s got interpretations of a lot of different genres, too, a lot of dubby-ness and experimental stuff.
