INTRODUCING WARBY…

Interviewed and photographed by Louis Lota

April 1, 2026

WARBY stepped out of the pandemic with a set of songs that not only convinced himself that he could write, but that he should turn them into a full record and release it into the world. Having spent the majority of his life working with other bands and helping build their careers, WARBY found himself at the helm of his own record for the first time. With the assistance of an array of seasoned musicians and the encouragement of friends, collected stories and melodies found their way into an album brimming with musical influences from throughout his life. Ahead of the release of the first single, Struggles & Resolutions, WARBY sat down with Louis to discuss the roots of the songs and peel back the layers of the project.

LOTA: Hello, how are you?

WARBY: I’m good, glad to sit down and chat about the record.

LOTA:  Brilliant, let’s get into it. First of all, why now and why not any time over the past thirty or so years?

WARBY: It’s a very good question. If I go back further, I was always writing songs as a kid, even from when I was really young, writing little melodies and stuff like from when I was at primary school even. Then I was in bands through school and college and into my early twenties. I was playing in this band R.O.C., but it wasn’t really my band. I was always trying to put my own band together at this point, but with very meager resources. I think the thing to remember is that I left school at sixteen and started working. Even though I went back to college a little bit later for a couple of years, I was kind of in the world of work already at this point. And then I became a promoter and then an agent really young. The first shows I booked were when I was twenty-two. Then by the time I’m twenty-three, I’m booking tours, so it just took over really. And I always thought, yes, I’m going to do it and there will be time and hopefully I’ll make a bit of money so I can buy equipment, but those things just never really happened. I never had the money to buy a four track, or a decent guitar. It just didn’t seem to happen.

LOTA: Did you feel like the urge to make something of your own was mounting in you over the years, that there was still something to say artistically, or did it escape your mind with these distractions?

WARBY: I think because I was always continuing to write stuff, and some of the bands I worked with were aware of it, it didn’t so much feel pent up. Like with The Lemonheads I remember going on a trip and I played a little song that I’d written, and then ended up writing a song with Evan, a song that never really saw the light of day. There were all these little bits and pieces going on.

LOTA: Amazing! Do you remember what it was called?

WARBY: It was called Astrid. It never got released or anything, but I do know that they played it in soundcheck occasionally.

LOTA: That’s fab. I guess you spent more time with the bands back in those days. More time messing about with them on the road.

WARBY: Oh definitely, you travelled together. I mean in a way, in those earlier days, you weren't in the band but you kind of felt like you were because there were not a lot of managers and if there were, the managers were a long way away. So you were kind of just around and you had great access to the band.

LOTA: I guess the creativity and influence of them passes on more directly that way.

WARBY: Yeah, you feel like you’re really part of the story.

LOTA: Were there certain bands that you would think ‘I want to do that’ or ‘I should give more time to that’ when you were with them, or did the inspiration to put your own songs together come from a separate love of music?

WARBY: I don't know where it came from, really. It's funny because the voice I've written with in recent years, that sort of formed the basis of this record, and the songs that I was writing in my teens and early twenties, they’re from the same place. If I were to play you one of those songs, you would recognise that. I mean, musically I think I've been identified with working with lots of American bands, but this music really is not coming from that sort of contemporary US indie scene. The music inspiration I had was coming from somewhere much earlier, from the seventies I guess, and very early eighties really. Those bands that came along from the US underground I suppose had some sort of grasp of melody and voice which is what I really responded to more than anything. But I also recognised the things that I could not do. And in a way that became very exciting to project it onto them because what they were doing was so innovative. So seeing the likes of Sonic Youth, Nirvana and Dinosaur Jr., I wasn’t directly thinking ‘I could do that’.

LOTA: I suppose it is moving being at the cutting edge of any scene, and being aware of it.

WARBY: Absolutely, you move along with it. But the most exciting part in a way was that those bands had power and also had the melody. Where that combination came through with Kurt for example. Lots of artists could make a powerful sound and not that many could write a great song. But where that really intersected, particularly resonated with me.

LOTA: I guess it jumped to such a scale so quickly, so you were at the intersection of the underground becoming huge.

WARBY: Yes, you know, Nirvana became this super big band but they were from the underground, and the rest of the artists I was working with were from the underground, and have largely remained there too. You know, Pavement and Guided By Voices, Sebadoh and all that kind of stuff. And then Elliot Smith, you know some of those people achieved enormous critical acclaim but were really of their own culture. They weren't anyone’s prioritised major label artist. So I always thought I was kind of connected to that. But also maybe being British brought another element. Britain had such a great broad music culture with lots of interesting things going on in electronic music at that point and I found what was happening from the, what might be called lo-fi side, the more experimentational bands, was just as interesting. Stereolab and Broadcast, was more interesting to me than much of what was labelled Britpop. There were certainly great artists there but that wasn't something that I belonged to greatly.

LOTA: Well it does sound like a British record that you’ve made. And you have managed to incorporate those more experimental electronic bits into it, like in the intro to Bullies for example, with that moog experimentation.

WARBY: Yeah, you should hear that noise on its own, separate to the record, I’ll have to get it from James. It's an extraordinary sound! But yeah, there was one single I made in that period, under the name Antiroc with my artist friend David Wiles, that was more of an experimental electronic record which was on a Domino label called Series 500. So, I knew that there was a creative itch somewhere that I was not reaching and I wasn’t sure what it was. I kept chasing the lightning in a bottle, whatever the newest hottest band was. If it was promoting a club night or latterly running a label, I was looking for an outlet for it and I somewhat ignored the idea of being an artist. I think there's a point, probably when I stopped writing songs, in the noughties era where I was just so busy. 

Foo Fighters took off spectacularly… then it's The Strokes and The White Stripes and The Libertines and it just continued to gather momentum for a few years right up to Vampire Weekend. And there was just so much going on musically that I just didn't have time to think about anything of my own. I honestly think I barely wrote anything in that period. And then, as it does, the appearance of new bands slowed down a little and the whole indie world just seemed to run out of steam overnight, virtually overnight.

The Arctic Monkeys caught the last bus and phenomenally, but in the time between the demise of traditional retail and the advent of streaming, the support mechanism of band culture just collapsed inwardly.

LOTA: And now in more recent years, do you feel the music scene is a space where you do want to be a part of it as an artist? Have you become re-inspired?

WARBY: Yeah I would say probably it's sometime after like 2007, at the end of that noughties wave, I can recall melodies coming to me. Half Joking, that melody just came to me one day and I knew what it was. And then another time I took a holiday, away from phones and computers, and I dreamt Your Arms Wrapped Around Me. I dreamt the chorus of it, and woke up without anything to capture it on, but I had a guitar tuner, so I sang what I thought the notes were. And later in the day, I had an old telephone, and I sang it into my answer machine, so I could listen to it again when I got home.

LOTA: Oh wow, you were writing the tunes for this record back in 2007?

WARBY: A couple of these songs are from around that sort of time, yeah. But I never forgot that melody, it never went away. So I thought ‘it's probably alright, that one’.

LOTA: An eighteen year or so gap between writing and recording it…

WARBY: Well there weren't that many songs written then, there were a couple and it proved to me that oh maybe there are some melodies in there. But again, I was getting busier. You know, I’ve got an older daughter but I became a dad again in ‘99. With him and work, it was very hard to find the space.

LOTA: Well if you don’t get fed up with your melody in that length of time then it must mean something special to you.

WARBY: It was only those two. Everything else is much more contemporary.

LOTA: At any point did you start writing specifically for an album or were you happy to just let them accumulate until you hit the record button?

WARBY: Well you know it was 2020, there was a lot going on family wise and I was thinking it would be nice to spend more time at home and to have some time for creativity, and then the pandemic comes and suddenly I’ve got loads of time for both of these things. Just before the pandemic actually, my friend Patrick came down with his laptop and an interface and we recorded an initial demo of Forsaken. Then that continued on my own as the lockdown began. Of the 13 songs we recorded, 8 of them were written during the pandemic, out of a lot more that didn’t make it. At this point, I didn't really know what the direction was, I didn't know if it was going to be a little bit electronic, or if it was going to be song based. I could hear two different directions. 

LOTA: I guess you weren't even picturing what band you’d play them with or in what room. It's hard to place the song just from the writing.

WARBY: Yeah, if you were to listen to those early takes, some of them were a lot more experimental, like what I'd been working on when I was in that band R.O.C., so there were two distinct strands. I played more bits to Patrick and he was super encouraging with all of it. And then I played it to Richard Norris, and you know, Richard is a very well known producer, an electronic producer, he worked with The Grid and Beyond The Wizards Sleeve and he just said, ‘I'm really responding to the songs, so you should focus on them.’ And I think he’s probably right, there's a lot of people doing electronic music and a lot of people doing it a lot better than me. The songs were what he felt he responded to, so that's what I did. At this point, what I really thought I would do was produce some demos that showcase the songs without necessarily being good recordings in and of themselves. And if some were any good I could send them to some publishers and see if anyone wanted to record them. I think I had that idea of Leonard Cohen who had written all of these country songs and he went to New York with the hope of getting to Nashville but never got there. So in a way that's what happened, I never got to Nashville.

WARBY: So I set out to record these songs myself, with a band. Around this time, an Australian manager, Charlotte Abroms and I were talking. She liked the songs and said I had to meet her friend James Knight. One thing led to another and we eventually met and went to his studio up in Stoke Newington. I thought we were basically going to take the demos and he was going to add bits to them, so he handed me the guitar to begin. But there's a grand piano in the room and I thought, actually I'm going to play a little idea that I was still working out. And I ended up writing the remainder of the entire song there and then. In those first three hours together we’d sketched out the shape of the song that opens the record, For All to See.

LOTA: Serendipitous to open the record with the first track from the session.

WARBY: Yes and I went back a week later with a complete lyric and we recorded a guide vocal for that. I wrote pretty much the entire lyric once I got home that first evening, feeling inspired by the recording. Every time I’ve been at James’ there’s a funny dual thing between what I thought the idea is going to be and then how enjoyable I find the direction it actually turns out to go in is.

LOTA: It’s strange when it's a solo project, it has your name on it, the songs were written in a room on your own, and then you’ve got to share it with someone else's ideas. Most of the time, if it's someone you trust, it becomes bigger than you could ever imagine on your own. But those first few tunes that you work on and you let them rearrange them can be a vulnerable process.

WARBY: It was, yeah.

LOTA: When I saw you and James in one of the sessions, it seemed like a very joyful process, bouncing ideas off each other.

WARBY: Yeah, it’s important to take the time to get to know each other. So we’d go to the studio, we’d work for a couple of hours, then we’d go and have dinner and talk a little bit about what we were doing and talk a bit about each other's lives and then go back for another hour or two. That felt really important to me from the beginning.

LOTA: It allows you to open up behind the mic as well.

WARBY: That was certainly something, I hadn't done a lot of singing, not in front of anybody. So in a way I've been learning things in my fifties that I might have learnt in my teens or twenties.

LOTA: How did the other musicians on the record come about?

WARBY: Patrick & I have been friends forever. I've always trusted his instincts as a musician, leaning on him for encouragement and in editing my ideas. I knew he played piano as well as guitar. After he started touring seriously playing keyboards he was clearly excellent. A couple of times I asked him to listen to working songs and he sent back ideas he had played on top that I really loved. He was putting himself forward for the job really, whether he meant to or not. Then with Mal, I went to see a live rehearsal. He was playing with Jim Jones, who was in a band called Thee Hypnotics, and at that time he was in something called Jim Jones and the Righteous Mind. They were playing up in Bethnal Green and I was watching them and thinking ‘what this band really needs is Mick Ronson’ and Mal just suddenly stepped forward and let this big solo fly and I thought ‘there he is’. I was just wowed and wanted to see more of that. When I was putting the band together I immediately thought of Mal, so I sent him some songs, and he said ‘your timing is incredible because I was just thinking I wanted to do some more playing’. We rehearsed a little bit on the songs at home, not too much though, and I gave him a bit of free reign to do what he wanted on the songs.

And then with Adam and Dan who played drums and bass, they had both played in a live band of Jarvis Cocker’s, and I really was very impressed by how they worked as a rhythm section, so they were asked. I'd sent them all the songs, I made a little playlist of inspiration over Christmas, and then early in January last year we went in and tracked it with the band. After four days of recording we had 13 songs. And then Mal and Patrick stayed on another couple of days and did some overdubs. Then over the next three or four months when I had time I would just go up to the studio for the evening and overdub the rest of the parts. I felt some of the songs needed this really pure voice alongside my vocals and I thought Ainsley Wills, who is managed by Charlotte, was the one so she recorded her parts in Australia and sent them over. And she really nailed it on Wednesday and Forsaken.

LOTA: Well I'm excited to help put it out, not long now. With some live dates to ride it home too.

WARBY: In a way, you know all the way down the line it's been very tentative steps. You get to my age and you sort of think ‘who wants to hear what I've got to say?’ And then suddenly at a point I thought that I’m old enough now, I’ve got to do it and it felt so natural. In a way, I had kind of skipped over that bit in the middle which can be kind of boring. You know some artists are very interesting at the beginning of their career and then again late in their career.

LOTA: Well, look no further than Leonard. I know every album he's put out has been interesting in some way, but in terms of moving me, it's the first few as well as the last one.

WARBY: It's interesting because it offers a different perspective. When I discovered Leonard Cohen in the eighties, he was considerably older than me and he was already in an advanced place in his career. It was interesting to me to be into these older artists that weren't kids.

LOTA: As a teen, when I started looking up to the singers who don't resemble typical pop stars, like Tom Waits or somebody, I began thinking about the writing on a deeper level, and started trying my own hand at it.

WARBY: Totally, well Jarvis said it to me. He was asking how the record was getting on, and said he was interested in the perspective of someone our age because you don't get that very often.

LOTA: Especially when it's your first expression of songwriting in an album format, it’s your initial statement which will always be fresh, regardless of what age the writer is.

WARBY: It is a bit strange, I think at this point you'd probably have had a career in music and are either thinking about reviving it, or have just given up on the idea as a whole.

LOTA: There's a bite to the album, there's energy that doesn't feel like it's trying to claw back at anything.

WARBY: I frequently forget how old I am and I frequently forgot that in performing it. I was certainly aware of the fact that perhaps the skill needed to be worked on but it wasn't the feeling of ‘oh, it's because I'm older’.

LOTA: It's an ageless sound.

WARBY: I think in some way, it has already done something. I’m aware of it because people I know have now said ‘I can do that, I can make some music,’ after listening to it, which is great for me to hear. I mean, I hate the idea of giving up. Just do it. I think I was certainly guilty of that in my younger life. Well maybe I could do this or do that, and you're so exhausted by the process that you don't actually do it. I had an art teacher at school and I think I always talked about the process, and he said “you can certainly talk a good painting but it would be really good if occasionally we got round to painting one” and that always sticks with me. Just do it. Just do the damn thing.

LOTA: No one's waiting for your first record. 

WARBY: No, apart from me it turns out. It’s been nice to have this sort of semi secret that only you can listen to before anyone else really hears it.

LOTA: Well, we’ll be hearing it very soon.

Struggles & Resolutions / Bullies on Esco Romanesco Records

ESCO 025

Released 29th May 2026

Pre-order now