Little Lark of London

“I’m so unbelievably happy with how it’s turned out. This is exactly the album I wanted to make.”

Felix Hagan, one of the co-creators of the Olivier and Tony award-winning Operation Mincemeat, will soon be releasing an album of solo work, entitled “Happy Songs.” Recently, we had the chance to speak with Hagan about his new album. We discussed how he fell in love with music, his creative process when it comes to songwriting and even what he hopes audiences take away from “Happy Songs.” 

So starting with a bit of a general question, how did you first get started in the world of music and songwriting?

There’s no tangible moment where I could say, “This was the moment that it all started.” It’s so strange! When I was a kid, I just had this weird obsession with music. Whenever I’d watch other kids playing instruments in school concerts, I just found it so magical and fascinating, and I was desperate to know how to do it. And my family’s quite musical! My dad was a very good drummer, and he played guitar and sang. He grew up in Liverpool in the 60s, so he spent his teenage years literally watching the Beatles every day. He’d be studying for his Accountancy degree, and then at lunchtime, he’d go down to the Cavern [Club] and watch them play every day for ages. And he was in a band. His band once supported the Beatles! It’s astonishing. 

And then my mum, she’s Swedish. When she first came to England, she was an opera singer. She was a coloratura soprano – the Queen of the Night, the high notes, all of that. And she was also a very good pianist. So we just had instruments in the house – guitars all over the place, and a couple of pianos. And then my dad, when he turned fifty he bought himself a present – the most badass drum kit you’ve ever seen in your life. All of a sudden, there’s this sick ass drum kit sat in the house, and I had seen my dad play drums with a band of mates who were all very good musicians – he filled in on drums for one of their gigs. And I remember watching! You’re an impressionable young child who kind of worships your parents, and you see your father rocking out on the drums with a band. You’re like, “Well, I guess I’m framing my entire existence around this.” 

And my parents’ generation, they were all born in the 40s and 50s, and were teenagers in the 60s. If you were a teenager in the 60s, all there was was music. There wasn’t really television catering for you, apart from cartoons and Adam West Batman. The youth culture was entirely based around music. And so instead of getting an Xbox, you got a guitar or some sort of instrument, and you would learn to play it because you wanted to play the easy three-chord songs that you were learning. And so every single one of my parents’ friends would be able to ream off 50 songs with any instrument, and they all knew the words. Every Christmas, we’d celebrate Swedish Christmas. And the Swedes celebrate Christmas Eve much more than Christmas Day. So Christmas Eve, you have a massive, great big smorgasbord, everyone nails fifty shots of Aquavit, you get battered and you sing Swedish songs. 

And then we’d move through into the room where the drums were. And my dad’s great mate, Tony Howe, was an astonishing bass player – still one of the best bass players I’ve ever encountered. And then I was playing the drums, Dad was playing the drums, my brother Charlie, was playing the drums. Everyone had a guitar, there were pianos galore. Sometimes people would bring other little instruments that they had, or if their kids played an instrument, they’d bring that, and we’d all just sing together. It’d be like, “Right, anyone know the chords to ‘Love Me Do?’” And then we’d all sing that, or we’d get halfway through a song and then collapse in laughter, then we’d jam it out. Or Tony would take that time to teach me some foundational music theory. And it was just all of us playing together, well until the sun came up again. And that feeling of being together with people and playing music, communicating and creating that communal joy became everything, and it’s informed everything. 

We lived in London until I was six, and I was the youngest of three. My mum used to take me to matinees of shows. My first experience of live entertainment in any capacity was watching Starlight Express and Return to the Forbidden Planet, these shows in which someone was backflipping on roller skates through a ring of fire and then doing a drum solo. And so that calibrated my expectations of myself and of music in general – that is the standard one should be aiming for. That is the level of entertainment one should be striving toward. And then, as I got a bit bigger, my big brother went off to school, and he came back with all of intense metal music – we’re talking Metallica, Pantera, Def Leppard. And then Guns N’ Roses, Green Day and Offspring, all of the rock bands, just blew my mind. That made me want to learn guitar. 

And then, all of a sudden, trumpet was my main thing. But there were drums in the house, so I would come home from school, drop my bag and sit behind the drums. If I was home and I wasn’t eating, sleeping or doing homework, I was playing the drums. And then when my brother was home, we would play together, and we’d switch around – I’d play a bit of guitar and sing, he’d play the drums. Every single spare moment of my life was taken up with playing. I wasn’t sat there going, “Oh God, this is so I can be a successful drummer one day.” It was just because the thought of not doing it was gross, sort of perverse. I just had to do it. And still, to this day, if I go on holiday, like I have to take a guitar, because if I’m sat there and I can’t get it out, it’s intolerable. 

A lot of it is, I’m sure, down to being undiagnosed autistic my entire life until quite recently, but it’s this feeling like it’s the only way that you can express the ridiculous noise going on in your head. And for me, that noise has always taken the form of music, so the mission has forever been to try and get to a level where the barrier between imagination and reality is as permeable as possible, and that means just playing and obsessing over all these instruments so when the music does come, it can just flow out. You don’t have to spend an age puzzling out the theory behind it all – you can just hear it. The childhood that I spent learning hundreds of old songs and playing them with people and learning together, it propagated this idea of learning by ear, so there’s never really been anything else. It’s been music since I was single digits.

So you learned a lot more by ear than by sheet music or classical lessons?

I still can’t read sheet music! I can do a single stave, if it’s treble clef. But I’ve never learned, and there have been times in my life where I wish I had! Back in 2016, I was with my band, Felix Fagan and the Family, and we were going out on tour as the main support for Frank Turner. He’s one of those musicians who you either don’t know who he is, or you’ve got his face tattooed on you somewhere. The devotion he inspires in his legions of fans is astonishing. And he is a truly magnificent man. He saw my band playing in a tiny venue, really liked us and took us on the road. And right before the tour, he phoned me up and said, “We’re doing another tour! We’re going to America, and our keys player, his girlfriend is due to have a baby right in the middle of the tour, so our keys player can’t do the tour. Do you want to come and play piano for us?” And I’ve never considered myself to be that good at the piano, because I’ve never read sheet music. It’s just vibing out until it sounds like I want it to. But it was like, “Oh my God, yes!” I think I just screamed the word yes. And then he was like, “Cool, we’ll just send over the sheet music.” And I was like, “Well, sorry, man, I can’t read sheet music.” And he goes, “Well, we’ll figure something out.” I go, “Okay, well, that’s not gonna happen.” But then a few days later, he sends me this video file. Their keys player, Matt Nasir, put a camera on a mic stand and filmed his hands from above, playing their whole set. So for months, I did nothing but study this video, often in slow motion, just to find out the inversions he was using and all of this. Good lord, it would have been vastly quicker to just learn to read music, but I just never felt the need! [Laughs] And obviously this is not universal truth at all, but when I’ve hung out with musicians who did learn in a more formal way, by studying the music and doing their scales, they get vastly astonishingly better technique than I do, but they can’t improvise.

That’s me! I did the classical sheet music lessons on piano, and I hate that I can’t improvise.

I like to give the advice that, whenever I sit down at any instrument, if I pick up this guitar here or whatever – I’ve got a house full of instruments, it’s ridiculous – whenever I sit down, it’s like, “I’m not going to sit down to play the song that I’ve learned.” You sit down for whatever reason. The universe is pulling you towards that instrument, and there’s something that’s going to come out. You don’t know what it is, so you sit down and you just improvise. And that’s led to this guideline, which is always be improvising. Not so much when you’re with other people and you’ve got to do the thing you rehearse! But if you’re on your own and you’re playing, just be constantly making it up, making that barrier between inspiration and reality as permeable as possible. A big part of that is always having access to the imagination, always being able to hear the music, to discern it from the noise. And the best way to do that is to, whenever you sit at your instrument, programme yourself to immediately just be playing whatever is in your brain, to turn off that consciousness and just go on instinct. For example, let’s say that you are a week out from opening your musical on Broadway . . . 

Purely hypothetical!

And a piece of scenery which looks exactly the same as the one in London, but is different, takes four additional seconds to open, and we need four additional seconds of music right fucking now, because the show’s opening in a minute, and your entire decade has led up to this, you can’t go, “Okay, I’ll just go for a long walk and wait till I can hear the Muses.” You need to go “Right, bang,” and it needs to just be there. If you’ve primed your brain to only ever be making stuff up, it makes that a lot easier. 

You mentioned your ten-year journey with Operation Mincemeat. What has that been like?

It feels such an insane thing to look back on! I watch videos right around the time when we started writing, and we look like children, and it’s so funny hearing us talk like we know what we’re talking about. Like “This is what we’re putting into this song, and it’s going to be great.” And I’m sitting here ten years later going, “That bit got rewritten 50,000 times, then thrown in a bin!” It’s quite astonishing to look back on it all. I hope this doesn’t sound like an insane thing to say. But we said, “Hey gang, let’s write a musical!” And we were looking around for a story. Then we finally stumbled across this story of Operation Mincemeat. I remember hearing the story for the first time on this podcast, Stuff You Should Know, that we all listen to, and thinking, “Oh, we’ve got something here.” Because the four of us knew each other so well. I knew Tash [Hodgson] so well because we’ve been in a band together for ten years, and I knew Bob [Roberts] and Dave [Cumming] from hanging out all the time and seeing all of their work and their comedy plays that they write. I knew that we all shared this sense of humour that came from a very similar, primordial petri dish of various wonky British comedy shows that we all loved, that all had a dusting of the macabre to them. And this perfect story about some posh boys stealing a corpse and tricking Hitler with it, I just thought, “It’s like a gift the universe has handed us.” This story, which is so deeply harmonising with our weird, little horrible comedy brains, had such a fun and capering madness to it that very much fit with the style of music which I like to write, or at least the energetic thread that runs through the music I write. And I felt like we had the perfect thing, and we had the chance to do something really cool with it. Now it’s running on the West End and Broadway. That’s a hell of a journey!

Pretty cool! What’s your songwriting process like for your own work versus when you’re collaborating with others, like SpitLip for Minemeat?

A lot less arguments when I do it on my own! [Laughs] It’s a very different process writing. In some ways, it’s completely the same – in other ways, completely different. It’s exactly the same artistically for me, from the songwriting point of view. It’s like my approach to these things as always. Yes, you’re trying to express an emotion. Yes, you’re trying to communicate. Yes, you’re trying to make people feel a certain way. But number one, by a country mile, is you are trying to entertain people. You are trying to write a melody that will wedge into their brain like syphilis and never, ever leave. You’re trying to write songs that bring joy, and the joy comes from finding the perfect melody that gets into people’s brains, from expressing something in a way that makes people laugh, that makes people dance, that makes people move, and creates an extremity of emotion, be that sadness, be that joy. And that has always been the case. It’s like you’re painting in very, very bright colours. That’s always been the thing. I don’t know how much of this is just coming from having a wonky old brain and having to keep this vast ocean of turmoil under wraps for so long. But if you can let that out through art, you want to shout it. You want to let it out in as loud a way as possible. And so the music I’ve written has been, historically, very energetic, quite hyperactive, and that is perfect for the world of musical theatre. 

But the difference is, when you’re writing a song for a musical, you’re not writing a song in isolation. You’re writing part of an emotional continuum. You’re writing part of a pantheon of songs, and every single song impacts every other song. So there’s so many more dimensions to think in, because you’re thinking about your character’s journey, where they are on the journey, how it impacts all the other stuff, what kind of emotions it activates within the plot of the show. Can you take that catchy melody you’ve written and then “One Day More” it with a bunch of the other ones at the end of Act One? Then you’re reprising things, you’re inverting them, and you’re reharmonizing them to view an emotion through a different prism. There’s so many different things to think about! But when it’s songwriting for myself, it’s just, “Is it right? Is it good enough? Does this do the thing I want it to do? Is this song the perfect encapsulation of this feeling? Have I played it well enough? Have I mixed it well enough? Is this going to make people feel the way that the emotion that prompted it makes me feel?”

You have your new album, “Happy Songs,” coming out. What was it like putting that together?

It was just the most exhilarating thing in the world! There are some songs in there that I wrote a long time ago, and there are others that I wrote in the weeks before going into the studio with it. The way that I like to create songs, I like to get the most basic form of the song done as quickly as humanly possible, because if you let an idea stagnate, it’s quite hard to pull it back to a fertile place. But that’s not always the case. There’s no hard and fast rule. I have no fixed process. But when an idea comes, you’ve got to push through the ADHD brain that wants you to go and do something else, and you just got to get it written down so you can play it. And then it’s an iterative process, just like musical theatre, because I think of arrangement and orchestration as being just as important as the lyrics, melody . . . Everything! You’ve got to be thinking of the whole song all the time. 

So then, because I’m lucky enough to be able to play a bunch of stuff, and I’ve got a laptop and a microphone, I’ll go and record the song in my little studio. I’ll listen to it a billion times. Does that communicate the energy? Is that drum part good enough? Is it fun enough? Is that the thing I want to play live for years? And then probably not chuck it in the bin, do it again and again and again. So there are songs on the album where this will be the 10th time I’ve got to the point where I’m happy with the arrangement! I did years and years of preparation in terms of the writing and the arrangement, because I knew that for this album, I was going to play all the instruments. I’ve done lots of things throughout my career, and I didn’t want to go into the studio and be figuring out the bass line. I wanted to go in knowing the bass line so that I could focus on the tone and the energy. And, the more spiritualistic and esoteric aspects of the music only come when you’ve got beyond, “What is the part I’m going to play?” So it brings that huge rush of excitement that I want in that moment.

And also, I had two weeks to record it, so I couldn’t be messing around. I’ve got to get it right on the first few days. But the process of making it up . . . Anyone with a weird old brain, if you find the thing that interests you, you will forget to eat, you’ll forget to sleep, you will disappear. It’s like being in Tron! So being in the studio is that for me – there is no upper limit for how long I can spend in there. I’d come in in the morning and then, “Fucking hell, it’s midnight!” You can’t stop, you don’t blink. It’s the best feeling in the world, to purely exist like a non-corporeal being of thought, just having to float about and make all this noise. It’s so fun. God, I love it. And having it all come together like that. 

And I got to have a string quartet on it, which just made me weep because it sounds so beautiful. I’ve never done that before. I’ve never got proper musicians on something I’ve made before. It’s always me having a bash at it myself. But then I got a load of friends of mine to come and be a choir, and that was just this huge, majestic noise. I’m so unbelievably happy with how it’s turned out. This is exactly the album I wanted to make.

How do you remember everything without sheet music? Do you use voice notes?

It’s usually how it works! Trying to find the perfect part for the song, if I’m bashing my head against it, it’ll usually come very late at night. I’ll be going to sleep, and then all of a sudden, my eyes just fly open, and it’s like, “Oh shit, that’s the perfect drum beat,” and then I have to go and beatbox it into my phone. So I’ve got thousands of truly batshit voice notes in my phone! [Laughs] And then I will often forget that I did that, return to it months later. But it’s just constantly recording. Usually, when you’re recording in the studio, you either record all the tracks at the same time and then overdub, or you get someone to do a guide track on a guitar, then you record the drums, the bass, the guitars and the vocals, and you delete the guide track. I took in the recordings that I had made and was happy with of the songs, and then recorded over the top of those. 

All my demos, I record on my electric drum set, and it’s unbelievably handy and convenient. But when you’re playing a real kit, some peculiar, beautiful quirks of the instrument will come out, which will suggest some new, cool part that you want to do, or some other way of playing it. And you’ve got to be able to jump on those in the moment. But I never write anything out apart from lyrics. It’s just constantly recording and then listening to it a whole bunch of times until some better idea comes. It’s such an unbelievably long process! But it’s how I’ve always done it, and I get to the point where I’m truly happy with the song, rather than thinking, “Oh, I wish I’d spent more time on the arrangement,” or “The mood doesn’t feel right, or it’s not moving people like I wanted to.”

What do you hope audiences take away from the new album?

The songs on the album are wildly varied! There is no single genre represented at all. The album opens with probably the most intense disco song I’ve ever written, which has got this ludicrous guitar solo in the middle of it. And then, as the album moves on, it takes in really low-key, Lo-Fi jazz. It takes in acoustic ballads. It’s got great big, stadium-coded rock songs in there for choruses of people. There’s a song where it’s just me and a string quartet that’s a love song written from a place of total madness. There’s everything on it. And, because I’m getting back now after many years down the musical theatre mine, I’m doing shows again. I do a lot of solo shows, and I started doing band shows again. I always try and talk to everyone who wants to chat afterwards.

People come up and they say the most beautiful things about how I’m very open and honest with lyrics. It took me many years to get comfortable doing that, sharing that much of myself in the words and so directly, rather than clouding everything in allegory and metaphor and stuff. To actually go, “No, this is how it feels to go through a massive depressive episode. This is how it feels to feel the worst a human being can possibly feel, and to live with a brain that barely works in a world that doesn’t tolerate it and try and communicate that feeling.” People come up and they say the most wonderful things about how it’s helped them with their own forms of acceptance, it’s helped them make decisions about rubbish situations, and, in some cases, it’s got them through things that they don’t really think they otherwise would have got out of. That is the most beautiful thing in the world. 

The emotions that prompted a lot of the songs, and the themes that are explored on the album, were so heavy and so isolating. To be able to try and use them as a means to connect with people, to take all of that darkness and try and alleviate it for other people, and then to see that response come back to you and see the positive effect it has on people, it’s the best thing in the world. To o have so many people connect and understand because you’ve taken all of that swirling maelstrom of madness and turned it into music in a way that you couldn’t possibly express with words, that’s water in the desert. That is a beautiful feeling.

Felix Hagan’s new album, “Happy Songs,” is coming out soon. For more information, click here.