You’re My Favorite Artist – King discusses his 12” single for The Vinyl Factory, Mumford & Sons, embourgeoisement and The Wurzels

The following interview was conducted by Anton Spice for The Vinyl Factory website, 4 July 2013.

ANTON SPICE: Could you describe the personal experience on which You’re My Favorite Artist is based?

SCOTT KING: I was once in New York – a few years ago now – when a woman I’d just met, a woman I didn’t know and whom I’m convinced had never heard of me – took me by the hand and dragged me around the room, introducing me to groups of people by saying: “Hey! Have you met Scott King? He’s my favorite artist!” I don’t think I was her only favourite artist.

ANTON SPICE: That’s extraordinary, and must have been somewhat unsettling. Are such levels of sycophancy commonplace in the art world?

SCOTT KING: Well, the art world is built on varying degrees of sycophancy isn’t it? Some people do it very well, very smoothly, so that it’s barely even noticeable. Others are a little more aggressively sycophantic… sort of militantly complimentary. Polite networking is the engine of the art business, meeting and befriending people. So, the great fear is forgetting someone’s name – or even worse – getting their name wrong. Someone told me a good tip for dealing with this: you just call everyone ‘Darling!’ all of the time. This is only flawed if the person you are talking to then needs to be introduced to someone else. So, if you see a third person approaching – if you are threatened by needing to make an introduction – you just start waving and shouting “Darling!” at someone else across the room, then scarper.

ANTON SPICE: The track confronts this head on. What’s the story behind the production of the record and who was involved?

SCOTT KING: I worked on it with Jamie Fry (formerly of the legendary Earl Brutus, now of The Pre New). Jamie is a very old and close friend of mine. He’s 52 but has the enthusiasm, energy and drinking habits of 20-year-old on holiday in Magaluf – so it was great to work with him. Then we worked with Brighton-based producer Tim Larcombe. Tim and Jamie make a very good team and they just wrote the song at the mixing desk, while I sat there quite confused. I wrote the words – that was in the morning – then in the afternoon, an actor called Polly Martyn came in and sang the song in a couple of takes. She was brilliant and brought the whole thing to life. Polly couldn’t really read my handwriting, which is why some of the names are mispronounced, but we liked it so left it like that. It was all done very quickly.

ANTON SPICE: As it’s your first, why release this as a record rather than a piece of visual art?

SCOTT KING: I think that this record is just as much a piece of visual art as it is a song. The sleeve is essential to the whole thing. It’s very much a ‘package deal’. I’ve always wanted to make a record, so was grateful for the opportunity – and I enjoyed it so much that I’m now making another one.

ANTON SPICE: Earlier this year you made a print bearing the slogan ‘Stop! Mumford And Sons’. What’s your opinion of the band?

SCOTT KING: They are shit. They represent everything that is wrong with this country today. They are a bunch of public schoolboys pretending to be hillbillies aren’t they? I think that’s quite funny, Etonians taking on bluegrass or Woody Guthrie or whatever they imagine they are doing – the sons of investment bankers taking a genre that was explicitly about poverty, and making it into a multi-million pound phenomena. This whole country is slowly being Mumfordised. Even places like Margate now have a Mumford Quarter that sells lattes, vintage posters and rustic lunches. Everything presented as ‘real’ and ‘authentic’- real ale, hand-cut chips – gastro pubs stuffed with broken furniture on stripped wooden floors – everything ‘hand-reared’ and localised – you can no longer buy mussels, cod, pork or crab in these pubs – only Shetland Isle Mussels, Peterhead Cod, Suffolk Pork and Dorset Crab. There is an overwhelming folksy, middle class, twee faux-local attitude that means many urban areas are rebranding themselves as ‘villages’: people in cities lusting after allotments, going to farmer’s markets in their wellies – the Mumfords are the house band for this desire to create the rural idyll in cities. Bring back The Wurzels, I say. The Wurzels were much better than Mumford & Sons.

ANTON SPICE: Perhaps this is a side-effect of a world that takes itself too seriously. Does the art world have a sense of humour about itself?

SCOTT KING: Well, nobody’s complained about being mentioned on the record so far – the only people who have complained are the ones who didn’t get a mention.

ANTON SPICE: That’s pretty telling and seems to prove some of the point you make with the review on the cover. You’ve worked on cover designs yourself in the past for, among others, Pet Shop Boys and Morrissey – tell me about this one. It’s basically not a cover at all…

SCOTT KING: This cover is a fake review from Artforum magazine. It seemed like the perfect solution for the sleeve. Artforum is this strange mix of very ‘serious’ art theory and cocktail parties – so to parody the magazine in the form of a glowing review for the sleeve was an inspired move I think. The photographs are by Jonathan de Villiers, from a few years ago, when he asked me to play the part of The Artist in a fashion shoot. It was a satire on that kind of old-fashioned Male Art… so I hope people get that. I’ve designed many record covers in the past – and I have to say – I’ve never struggled so much as I did while trying to come up with the idea for this one. It’s much easier to design sleeves for other people. It’s awful trying to do one for your own song, but I’m very pleased with the result.

ANTON SPICE: Were David Rimmer real (assuming he’s a parody of a fickle art critic), what kind of guy would he be and what do you think it is about the track that would have changed his mind about you?

SCOTT KING: He would be a very self-important man – it’s all in there – you only have to read the text to see what kind of character he is. I think he would actually hate the song – I don’t think Rimmer would find it funny at all – but because he was paid handsomely, he wrote a nice review. Also, there is a clear hierarchy between ‘rock stars’ and artists – it’s very evident in New York – artists tend to fawn over rock stars that are connected to the art world, they make a terrible fuss over them and like nothing more than to be able to claim a rock star as their friend.

ANTON SPICE: Did you draw inspiration from other great artistic satires?

SCOTT KING: No, I don’t think so. We listened to Losing My Edge and Love Can’t Turn Around when we wrote it – but the idea for the whole thing isn’t based on an existing satire. We really just wanted to make the idea into a pop record – a potentially popular record – it was very important that it wasn’t an ‘artist’s record’ – we didn’t want it to be arty or wilfully obscure, I hate things like that.

Cover photography: Jonathan de Villiers, Sacré Bleu for L’Officiel magazine, Paris, 2008

Thanks: Polly Martyn, Tom Morton, Paul Pensom