I met Olivia Colman, otherwise known as Sophie from Peep Show, on Charing Cross Road late last night. She stopped me to ask for directions. It was a little surreal - her talking to me exactly as she always has, only suddenly without the anticipated medium of a television screen. As I stared back at her I couldn’t help but become very conscious of a somehow bitter and cynical internal monologue I wasn’t previously aware of.

She was very nice though, particularly as I couldn’t help with her directions and then perhaps slightly perplexed her by asking for a hug.

From the journal…

It’s been six years now since I went to the Fringe with him and Andrew. Andrew’s now a successful headlining standup comedian. John’s now finally starting to get recognised for his music on an overdue scale. There is no greater pain than seeing friends succeed. After I read the review I spoke to a friend who was both supportive and dismissive of my clichéd laments, suggesting that as a musician he knows exactly how any writer must feel - anonymous and invisible. And it’s true. Everyone claims to be a writer at some point because it’s easy to say it. All you need to do is write something. You don’t even need to show it to anyone. You don’t need a stage or an instrument or a canvas that others can view to validate your claim; your identity. Thus the only validation becomes how ’successful’ you are - “do you have an agent?” “Are you published?” “How many copies have you sold?” “No? Not yet? None? Oh.” To paraphrase the original little green man, a writer craves not these things.

It’s a profession anyone can claim and dismiss in a moment, but few truly understand unless it’s something they truly are. I can thus take some comfort from that I suppose. I am a writer. I am. I am a writer. I am because I keep going. I keep writing. Even when I think I’ve given up - even when I think I’ve achieved nothing but ‘failure’ because my markers for success are foolishly set by an uncomprehending society rather than by myself, I still don’t put down the pen or stop typing. I am still writing even in this journal, more often than ever in fact. Is this just habit? Is this courage? Is this faith? Either way I feel that it is not something that ‘failure’ can triumph over. This is the person I am. This is the self I bare to the world.

Ben Leto asks Josh Todd of Bark Cat Bark what year it is, why people in Paris don’t wear baseball caps and whether he’d like another Absinthe.

Josh Todd has started the day in what only the British would consider true Parisian style. It’s not yet lunchtime and he’s had, by his own admission, “plenty of wine this morning.” Here on one of his many visits to Paris, his “local town” and “where his heart lies”, Yorkshire-born Josh calls himself “just a young eighteen year old traveller”. Some of his friends call him a grandad. Anyone who’s heard his music however could only ever call him an upsettingly talented and rising artist.

Signed to Playground Records aged only 13, Josh has since been releasing music under the name of Bark Cat Bark. As a classical musician playing the undeniably modern, it’s refreshingly difficult to crowbar his sound into any one genre, much like his contemporary influences of Beirut, Patrick Wolf and Final Fantasy, amongst others. He’s a polymath with what seems like every instrument any musician has ever heard of and a few I certainly haven’t, including the Bouzouki, Gayageum, Euphonium, Kinnor, Bandura and the Kokyu. Musically ignorant folk such as myself would probably be found trying to order these names in a Korean restaurant, whilst talking to Josh for only a few minutes can make you feel like you eat too many Doritos and watch too much TV by contrast.

It was with this slightly sinking feeling of having wasted the twenties I spent my teens looking forward to that I sat down with a cup of conspicuously unFrench coffee to ask him some fatuous and irrelevant questions.
 
 
Ben Leto: Okay then, here goes, straight off the top of my head.

Josh claps his hands once.

BL: Let’s play with synesthesia. What colour would you say typifies your last album, Rest in Tale?

Josh Todd: Can’t we start off like, “hey, hey, I’m currently in Paris, yeah…”?

BL: You see, I’m not very good at this. To do this properly we’d have to be sitting at a café des artistes with a notepad and dogeared copy of Rimbaud on the table next to an overflowing ashtray and two empty glasses of red wine.

JT: Ha ha! Those interviews have happened before, and let me tell you, they’re not so good. Half the time both of us wouldn’t even talk about anything. The Newcastle Metro interviewed me like that, and we didn’t even get an interview done. Still haven’t.

BL: They’d be good with me. The interview would last seven hours and we’d be smashed. Think Withnail and I meets Time Out.

JT: Ha ha! Sounds great! We shall do it sometime then. But in answer to your first question it would be ‘brown’, as it is very dismal, and mucky.

BL: Ha! I knew it! A rusty brown.

Josh laughs.

BL: See? There’s hope yet for this interview.

JT: Ha ha! Come on, keep them coming. I’m on a roll.

BL: Shit… um… (orders another Absinthe)

JT: Such a good drink!

BL: Would you say you were a loner at school? If so, was it by choice, and if not, did you care?

JT: I was very popular at school actually. I always used to get nodded at as I walked through the corridors with my violin in hand and known as the ‘class clown’. It was only in college when I started really settling down and being what I found to be myself. I like my inside time, and also love going clubbing with a selected few.

BL: Some people would say the ‘class clown’ avoids being taken seriously - standing out just to fade his true self into the background. Were you quite open about who you were, or did you let people assume you were who they perceived you to be?

JT: I have always been very open. I really couldn’t care less about what someone thought. If I enjoy what I do, I enjoy what I do. No one can tell me different.

BL: There was something you said before about your music being like a relationship between a man and a woman. What does that mean? And why the male/female dynamic particularly? Would you say you consider your music’s like the feelings in romantic or sexual relationships?

JT: Well, let’s say the woman is the music I create. The woman can irritate me and my emotions which then causes us to fall out and stay away from each other for a while. Then when I return to her we are full of love again. Just like any normal relationship between a man and a woman.

BL: Is it therefore a conscious choice that you use female vocalists? Have you considered using a male vocalist for any of your songs?

JT: There is a song in production where Jack Colwell is appearing on vocals. Jack is a talented young man indeed. As for female vocalists, I don’t know how it came about. It depends what mood my music gives out and then I will decide if I want a female or male to sing or even, in some cases, no one sings and it stays as one instrumental, then later in life they come back and we put vocals to it. ‘I Saw A Wolf’ was officially an instrumental on an old vinyl of mine, but then last year we thought of some lyrics and Katie Morrice arose to the challenge of singing them.

BL: You mentioned that you don’t like performing in England anymore. Do you think of yourself as an English musician when you’re playing abroad? Songs like ‘Baron’ have, I think, a definitively British parochial sound. Is this something you try and express in other countries?

JT: When I play in different countries I see myself as one of that nationality. I give all my songs their country’s sound. But when I am back in England I see myself as just a normal Englishman - a Yorkshireman. I tend to gasconade about being from Yorkshire. The songs that you hear that sound like they are not English in any way at all is because they’ve not been recorded in England. They have been recorded in different parts of the world, e.g. Bahrain, Paris, Arrecife… Ichabod Crane was recorded in England, hence why it sounds like a 17th century English classical piece. And the Sitrah album was recorded in Bahrain where I used sitars, darbukas And qanuns which are their country’s instruments. I like to experiment in different countries with different instruments.

BL: I actually thought Ichabod Crane sounded more French! Like something from the demise of aristocracy!

JT: Oh no! I was listening to a lot of English classical artists at the time, and the riff and everything just came to me in my room.

BL: Is that how you compose? Do your ideas generally come from soaking up other pieces and allowing them to shape your own, or do you start off with an idea and then listen to others to give it form?

JT: In all honesty, 10% of my music has come by listening to other artists and the other 90% is just sitting there in a quiet room.

BL: So do you find it easier to compose whilst travelling, or once you’ve returned?

JT: I like to take my dictaphone with me and whilst travelling in other countries by foot I will attatch my dictaphone to my belt, walk and take an instrument at random with me and play anything as I’m walking around, taking in the scenery and playing what I feel like, looking into the details of the scenery. Then if I’m not recording whilst I’m over in that country, I can bring my dictaphone back with me and listen back, then record it over here with it sounding that I’m still over in that country.

BL: Do you ever go busking when travelling? And do you ever play whatever you want then or just stick to written songs?

JT: I do love to go busking, without permission. But it is phantasmagoric! And you attract the right crowd! When I’m in countries like Macedonia I like playing the songs which they’re familiar with like Opa Cupa or Zemjo Makedonska. But when I play my own they seem to enjoy it, and that makes me gratified as can be.

BL: I can see you busking in the Piazza della Signoria. Have you?

JT: I have not played there, but I will most likely in October when I visit Florence!

BL: Crowley once said England is “the most fertile mother of poets, but she kills the weak and drives the strong to happier lands… The English poet must either make a successful exile or die of a broken heart.” I had that in mind when you were talking about the differences in audiences’ reactions in the UK and abroad.

JT: I like that! I’ve never read that before.

BL: Do you feel that we don’t appreciate artists here like they do overseas?

JT: I feel that way. I think it’s because people these days in England are too afraid of what people might think. This country’s people have sadly gotten this way.

BL: So what year is it in your head?

JT: Anytime from 1678 to 1741.

BL: You have a Yorkshire passport, but you suggested Paris is your home. Can you say why, or does it simply sing to you in a way UK cities don’t?

JT: The people in Paris have class whereas the people in England have baseball caps.

BL: So it’s just the people then?

JT: I personally think so, a mass majority. But again, I love the countryside in England. It’s absolutely breathtaking - where I can record some of my folk music over the grass and cornfields, where there are few people to be bothered by. I think the whole point to this travelling hobby of mine is that I can’t get what I want, unfortunately.

BL: When an artist gets what he wants, he stops being an artist and goes into HR.

JT: Music is my true partner, and a true partner never leaves. It would be half a millimetre from the impossible scale.

BL: It’s funny you say that about the people in Paris and the UK. I think London, for example, is a beautiful city - so much history and culture embedded into the stone and cobble when you walk the streets. It’s just the attitude of the majority of the people here I don’t like. I’ve found Paris can be very similar to London in terms of people’s attitude to each other, and particularly foreigners.

JT: I see what you mean. I did enjoy the historical side of London and the lovely places to go. But there’s something more about it that switches me right off the place.

BL: Do you have any vices, and do you think your music would suffer or benefit without them?

JT: I don’t really know. I make my music until it pleases my ears. Once my ears are pleased, I am pleased overall.

Josh laughs.

BL: Not one for creative celibacy then? The last of the great sensualists is alive and well! As Oscar Wilde once said (though strictly off record), ‘finish on something fatuous’: who from all of history would you most like to support in concert?

JT: My dream would be to travel round France to Lebanon with the man that is Zach Condon - me with my accordion and Zach with his ukulele and magical voice. There would be nothing greater in my eyes. Dream what you want to dream, go where you want to go, be what you want to be; because you have only one life and one chance to do all the things you want to do. It will happen.

BL: That’s a nice note to end on. Shall we have another Absinthe?

JT: Absinthe it up!
 
 
Bark Cat Bark is currently down and out in Paris and Yorkshire. He likes Rosé, anything by Zach Condon and playing with Mariopaint Composer. Order his latest album here while you still can.