The Music: ‘To even have the chance one time of remembering how special it was, that’s a big thing’

The invitation to take part in one of Tim’s Twitter Listening Parties, which have become a social media phenomenon since the start of the Covid pandemic, was to lead to the reformation of one of Leeds’s most successful bands of the last 20 years and next year, coronavirus willing, they are due to play a major homecoming show at Temple Newsam Park.

For Nutter, who played guitar in The Music between 1999 and 2011, it was a welcome opportunity to revisit a world he thought he had left behind. For the past seven years, he has been working as a gardener. But first he had to get to grips with digital developments.

“I’ve never been on social media,” he says. “I had a Facebook account years ago but never did anything with it so I was like, I don’t even know what a listening party is, I don’t even really know what Twitter is, to be honest. They were like, ‘OK, whatever, are you going to take part?’ I went, ‘Yeah, of course’.

“I created a Twitter account because of it and all of a sudden my phone started pinging and my missus said, ‘What is that?’ I said, ‘I’ve got no idea’, then I suddenly realised it was Twitter registering all the people that were following me. I opened Twitter ten minutes after the announcement (of the listening party) and I had 300 followers. I was really shocked by that and the number of likes that the tweet got.”

With Nutter’s former bandmates Robert Harvey, Stuart Coleman and Phil Jordan also on board, the listening party for The Music’s self-titled first album – which was released in 2004 – proved so popular Nutter reveals that “the conversations for this gig started quite soon after”.

Nutter has since tweeted his thanks to Burgess, saying his gesture had “transformed” his life. Today, he reflects that it’s given him hope for the future. “From where my life was going pre-lockdown to where it is now are two very different places. I wasn’t particularly in a bad place but I wasn’t particularly in a good one either, it was more sort of existence, what I’d come to know over the last ten years.”

He adds: “The long and short of it is we were all quite scarred by how things came to an end for us. I found that difficult to deal with, as a result of which I found it difficult to have anything to do with music. I took myself out of it because I felt I had to and to all intents and purposes turned my back on the whole concept, really, and was trying to build my life in a much more low-key way. All the while it’s been difficult because I am a very creative person by nature.”

He did “nothing” for a couple of years after the band split up while demoing songs for their fourth album, but eventually a friend encouraged him to become a gardener. After a decade away from the band, he says he had “genuinely forgotten a lot of what it meant to be in The Music and I’d forgotten what The Music meant to people. I’d forgotten that I was even ever a respected guitarist, to be honest”.

To be reminded via Twitter that “there’s all these people saying ‘you changed my life, you changed my outlook, you made me want to play guitar’” was, Nutter says, overwhelming. “I still don’t really know what to do with that, other than enjoy it,” he smiles. “I do really feel that Tim Burgess through what he did has given me back something incredibly vital to my happiness that I’d lost. Especially after the gig announcement and the euphoria of everyone’s comments. It was an emotional period for me for a few hours after the gig was announced and everyone was going nuts, that’s when it dawned on me just how different my outlook on everything is now.”

With hindsight, Nutter feels he “took a lot for granted” when Kippax group became stars, with their self-titled debut album and its successor Welcome To The North selling hundreds of thousands of copies in the UK, Europe, Japan and Australia. Hence he’s thoroughly looking forward to the “mini-festival” that’s been arranged at Temple Newsam on May 28, 2021, with The Cribs, The Coral, The Snuts and The Skinner Brothers, plus Burgess DJ-ing.

“To even have the chance one time of remembering how special it was, that’s a big thing for me,” he says. “If it goes ahead and it isn’t cancelled by Covid – and even if it is, it’s going to happen sometime – it’s going to be an incredible experience for us.

“Going out on that stage and feeling that level of support come back at you, that’s going to have to be a bridge that I cross when I get to it. I’ve no idea how I or any of us are going to deal with that. It’ll just be emotional. I won’t be nervous in the slightest, other than nervous about how I’ll react to that outpouring of emotion that’s going to come because it’s quite clear that for ten years a lot of people have missed us. That’s heartwarming, I suppose.”

The four-piece recently posted a clip of them playing songs together but they currently have no plans for new material. In the meantime Nutter is working on several solo projects – one involves Embrace guitarist Richard McNamara. “That’s one of things that’s come out of this, it’s built my confidence back up, because I’d forgotten that I could do it as well,” he says. “I put a lot of my own demos out on my YouTube channel, I’d done them ten years ago but I’ve never played them to anyone, I thought ‘I’m going to put these out for a laugh’ and there was a really great reaction to them. It gave me the confidence to start writing again, so that’s what I’ve been doing. I’ve cleared out a room and put a studio together.

“Rik’s a good friend of mine, so he came to help me set up, but also I’m planning on going into the studio specifically with Rik because he’s a good friend and a good producer, I’ve got some really strong songs. I’m going to write in blocks of four and then go down to Rik’s place and take things from there. In terms of my personal plans going forward, it’s developing on a day to day basis.”

All four members of The Music retain separate interests. Harvey has spent the past decade working with Mike Skinner of The Streets and songwriting for the likes of Clean Bandit, Joel Corry and Gorgon City. Jordan had a spell drumming with Theme Park before retraining as a counsellor, while Coleman, who had “always been into cars”, runs a car detailing business.

Having recently compiled a series of YouTube videos on their shared history, Nutter remembers The Music’s early years with considerable fondness. “I’ve gone on into great length on the YouTube videos talking about how clever the management were in terms of dripfeeding a group of 16-year-olds into that world. When they discovered us, they said, ‘You are going to be something, don’t get us wrong, but not yet, you’ve got two years of development, so go and write something’. So that’s what we did. Over those two years something happened every week so the management were very clever. They arranged a couple of gigs every now and again and they’d bring people up like Tony Wilson, really big names in the industry, not saying ‘sign them’, just saying ‘there’s this really cool band that we’re developing, no one’s signing anything yet but here they are’. That was brilliant for us.

“In terms of all those little developments it was never too much, whereas if we’d just been signed straight away it would have been too much. We made mistakes and the management would acknowledge they made mistakes, Tim (Parry), our manager, was only about ten years older than us at the time, but it was an incredibly exciting time.

“And this is as well. It has differences, obviously. The first time round everything was new; this time round we’ve already done it and it’s a case of getting to appreciate it with a much more mature head on your shoulders, which I think is invaluable.”

When the band were at their height, Nutter says it felt like they could do no wrong. “People who would come out to interview us would be struck by how everything we did was an in-joke, we just lived in a bubble and no one was allowed to penetrate it, that’s why we were untainted by things like London and Manchester, musical hubs, because we lived in a mining village in Kippax. There was no trendy bull**** finding our ears, we just created what we wanted to create, free of any outside influences. The management fought tooth and nail for that.”

There was no animosity when they split up in 2011. “It was more a case of we’d been living in each other’s pockets for 12 years,” Nutter says. “Once that common goal went we drifted apart and started living our own lives.”

Nearly ten years on, he recognises that “each of us is infinitely more mature than they were”. From his own point of view, he says: “When The Music split up and losing all my creativity, I thought I’d never be able to replace it. The gardening job sorted me out, I felt part of something again.

“In terms of what I see for the future of The Music it’s hard to say. A lot of people are looking at the reunion and thinking there’s going to be new records, all that sort of stuff, that’s not necessarily the case. You can never say never in life in regard to anything, but certainly at the moment we are taking baby steps back into this. I know that sounds ridiculous because we’ve announced a 2,000-capacity gig at a stately home but we know what we can do, that is a baby step for us.

“If anyone wanted new songs from us that is a very different matter because without being funny, no one has an appetite to do what’s necessary to make new The Music songs at the moment. I can’t say either way whether (that will change), but one thing I’m conscious of is I want everyone to enjoy this gig.”

The Music play at Temple Newsam, Leeds on May 28, 2021. Tickets are available from Jumbo and Crash Records or www.lunatickets.co.uk