Fred Again fever is at an all-time high in Aotearoa at the moment. But three years ago, pre-Boiler Room, Tiny Desk Concert and him blowing tf up, our very own Brook Gibson interviewed the British DJ.
Brook was on George Nights then, and the two had a 35-minute chat about Fred’s freshly dropped debut album ‘After Life’. Considering Fred doesn't really do interviews anymore - he thinks he sucks at them - it's awesome to have such an in-depth chat with him on the record.
They talked about and played most of the tracks from the album, which includes the hits ‘Kyle (i found you)’ and ‘Marea (we’ve lost dancing)’.
Fred’s signature sound is sampling voice notes and audio clips he comes across in his daily life. With ‘Actual Life’ beginning and ending with audio clips of Fred himself, Brook asked him why he has made such sounds the focal point of his music.
“The main thing I want to do is show all the beauty and seemingly mundane everyday mediocre stuff and glorify it,” Fred said.
Fred also shared why he uses people’s names as song titles and explained who Julia in the song ‘Julia (deep diving)’ is.
“They’re all named after the person who the person in the clip is, whether it’s a friend of mine on my phone or someone I met,” he said. “I just carried on doing it like that and it just felt like the most pure way of honouring where the song had come from.”
“Julia is one of the people I stumbled upon on Instagram. She’s reading this poem and she has the most beautiful speaking voice - it sounds like innocence personified.”
“She’s saying ‘I wanna deep dive into your emotions’ and I fucking love it and it just sounded so much like the bashful excitement of falling in love in the most pure, naive, beautiful way.”
Give the full walkthrough a listen, it’s pretty awesome and a great insight into one of the world's biggest artists. Shoutout to Brook for asking cracking questions and to Fred for his great answers.
