About

SulkyMan is a London singer-songwriter, multi-instrumentalist and producer. He writes, plays and produces everything himself: a six-album collection cut on 4- and 8-track analogue tape, two of them released so far.

It started at nine, sitting outside a bedroom door listening to Bowie and Marc Bolan through the wood. At fourteen he was handed a bass by one of his nan’s friends, pulled the frets out of it, and joined a band that rehearsed in a garage with water running down the walls — one later credited, in the book The Day the Country Died, with starting London’s anarcho-punk scene. They played the Anarchy Centres alongside Rudimentary Peni and Subhumans, and finished at the 100 Club in 1983.

What came after took the long way around — another band, years as an international tech house DJ and producer — before he went back to writing songs alone. The Stranglers, Joy Division, Killing Joke, Siouxsie and the Banshees, Magazine and Japan are all in there somewhere, along with the advice Herbie Flowers gave him after another player told him his bass wasn’t up to scratch: carry on doing what you’re doing, it’s brilliant. He has not played by the rules since.

The six-album Lost Tapes collection was written and recorded at home around 1995 on 4- and 8-track analogue machines, every instrument his own, from fretless bass to oud to gatam drum. MT50 (The Story Begins) and I’m So Strange (Lost Tapes 1) are out; four more are finished and waiting. The songs are observational and often uncomfortable — a face glimpsed in a bank queue, a man in the moon seen from the top of the stairs — set to melodies that lodge in you without asking.

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