I played Through the Windowpane to death 20 years ago. So much so that when I told my now twenty-something kids I was talking to Fyfe Dangerfield, they immediately remembered it from being driven around in the car when they were younger.
When I told them I was actually chatting with him, their response was immediate. “How cool is that!”
And I still love the gloriously chaotic Guillemots performance of Made-Up Love Song #43 on Top of the Pops. Romantic, chaotic and completely frenetic, an older friend of Fyfe’s summed it up brilliantly at the time as “punk schmaltz.” For me, it remains one of my favourite Top of the Pops performances ever.
But this isn’t really a conversation about looking backwards.
I found Fyfe incredibly interesting company. He was thoughtful, funny, curious, remarkably open and, as I tell him at one point, incredibly chilled. He seems slightly surprised by that last description. But spending two and a half hours chatting with him was very chilled indeed.
Looking back, our conversation naturally mirrored the way Fyfe approaches his music right now. In the past, within the standard rules of the music industry, there wasn’t really the option for an artist to be formless. Now, with projects like The Stream, there is.
Our chat took on that exact same freedom. We wandered off in different directions, doubled back, disappeared down the odd rabbit hole and kept finding connections that neither of us could have planned at the beginning. And it’s all here, unedited.
That felt completely appropriate, because what happens when you create so much that you stop letting any of it go?
For years, much of Fyfe’s accumulated work simply sat on his computer. Eventually, he became creatively “waterlogged” by all this material he wasn’t sharing.
That realisation helped give birth to The Stream, part of his Channels May Change world. It created another option, giving music a home that might otherwise never be heard. It is an ever-changing broadcast of sketches, voice notes, characters, improvisations and recordings at various stages of completion. What if music didn’t always have to know what it was going to become? Tune in and you don’t know what you’re going to get. Neither does Fyfe, and he likes that.
There is an important distinction here though. He is still making records, of course. The philosophy is simply that there is a place for everything.
One of the things I enjoyed most about talking to him is his refusal to turn everything into an either/or. The Stream can be formless while an album has form, and Spotify can introduce someone to his music while Channels May Change takes them somewhere much deeper. Fyfe still very much believes in albums, songs and the pleasure of putting them together.
In fact, towards the end of our conversation he talks about working on music with his son’s group and rediscovering the joy of choosing tracks and sequencing an album. It has started to reawaken something in him about doing the same with his own music.
So maybe this isn’t really about finished versus unfinished. It’s about allowing both to exist.
That takes us into a much wider conversation about creativity, perfectionism and the pressure we put on ourselves to get things right. Fyfe talks about reaching a point where he could convince himself a piece of music wasn’t ready until he’d heard 200 different drummers playing on it.
We talk about fear, success, algorithms and listener numbers. We explore making money from art without allowing money to become the reason for making it, and why one person hearing something and being moved by it can actually matter.
Increasingly, we talk about play. That might be what sits underneath the entire conversation. It’s the freedom to make something without knowing exactly where it is going, to share something without proving everything you’re capable of, to follow an idea because it interests you, and to stop worrying quite so much about whether something is right or wrong.
As Fyfe puts it, “Play is life.”
There are plenty of diversions along the way, from Gilbert and Sullivan to X Factor, Bob Dylan going electric, punk versus prog, almond croissants, a woman unexpectedly singing in a restaurant, learning to use a chisel, Interstellar, the wisdom of children, and whether Fyfe Dangerfield should ever be trusted to become an astronaut.
We also go somewhere more personal. Fyfe talks very openly about a dark period in his life, what came afterwards and his aspiration to “live life more lightly.”
Maybe that’s why I came away from our conversation feeling so upbeat, and maybe that is why I was drawn to chat with him in the first place. Fyfe’s willingness to unlearn perfectionism, embrace play and keep evolving feels like the very essence of what The Third Half is all about. Make things, share things, finish some, leave others open, put an album together or throw an idea into The Stream. Life and art don’t move in neat, final quarters, and reinvention doesn’t stop.
Two and a half hours with Fyfe Dangerfield went by remarkably fast. Maybe that’s because neither of us was particularly worried about where we were going.
https://player.captivate.fm/episode/d3b94e3c-9ad1-49fa-9529-ca4083afbba7/
Very Fyfe, really. And very Third Half.