148. King Creosote
Rough Trade East
7 September 2016
Some albums don’t demand your attention; they wait patiently for the moment when you need them most. For me, one of those is Diamond Mine, the 2011 collaboration between King Creosote (aka Kenny Anderson) and electronic magician Jon Hopkins. It’s not just music, it’s a place. A feeling. A quiet room in your mind with the window slightly open to a sea breeze.
It’s the album I go to when I need to be reminded that small things still matter. A door creaking. A voice rising. The sound of the seagulls on the wind. The way a village settles at dusk. It conjures a remote Scottish fishing town fading into the evening light, its edges blurred by mist and memory. It reminds me, in all the best and strangest ways, of my own childhood, growing up in a port town, on the Sussex coast. Not the town that exists today, but the one of slow tides and rusted boats, of seagulls crying through the dark and the gentle rhythm of masts clinking as I drifted off to sleep.
That’s what brought me, once again, to Rough Trade East, that odd, sacred little corner of London where gigs happen between the record bins and the boxed sets. Tonight was the launch of Astronaut Meets Appleman, King Creosote’s new album, and I was lucky enough to be there early, nestled near the front among the crates of vinyl and quiet anticipation.
The album’s title comes from a story Anderson tells of his daughter, who was given two toys: one a plastic astronaut, the other a little man made from an apple. She chose the apple man. Something simple. Something made with love. And somehow, that small moment, odd, beautiful, entirely human; sums up his music perfectly.
Kenny stepped onstage with no fuss. Just a soft-spoken Scot in a cardigan, guitar slung gently in hand, as if he’d wandered in to check the heating. He sang five songs, delicate, hushed, quietly powerful, and each one felt like a conversation. His voice remains a thing of quiet wonder: reedy and unassuming, but capable of undoing you entirely with a single phrase. A lament in a major key. A ballad that somehow lands as a hymn.
Between songs, he joked gently, almost embarrassed by the attention. The audience, for once, didn’t chatter or shuffle. We just listened. And breathed.
Afterwards, he signed records in the corner of the shop with the calm grace of someone who still doesn’t quite believe this is his job. Then we wandered out into the glow of a late summer evening, carrying our signed albums and something else, something harder to name, but just as precious.