Mike Lindsay: 'I want to explore with no real rules'

Musician and producer Mike Lindsay has a long list of acclaimed projects to his name. A member of folk band Tunng - who celebrate their 20th anniversary next year - he has also released two albums with Laura Marling under the name LUMP. As a producer for other artists, his credits include Guy Garvey, Jon Hopkins, Anna B Savage, William Doyle, and Speech Debelle’s Mercury Prize-winning debut Speech Therapy. 

This month he releases his new solo album Supershapes Volume 1. A celebration of “the majestic in the domestic,” it explores the stories of everything from the secret life of a dining table to a meditation on making cucumber salad. In doing so, he finds beauty in things that might otherwise be dismissed as mundane.

Speaking at his Margate recording studio, MESS - Mike’s Excellent Sound Space - he explains that the album was several years in the making. Initially a collection of instrumentals with ‘super shape’ names like Squircle, it all began to come together over an antique dining table that became the heart of the record. 

Having shelved the instrumentals for a year, he returned to them when he moved into MESS in 2022. “At the same time as that, Lily, my wife, was doing her MA and, and she was writing a dissertation about objects having consciousness. We were talking about that every day and it started seeping into my own work. So I thought the super shapes could be objects, and things that kind of shape us.”

“The record just started to take form as soon as I realised that it was about the magic of the home,” he adds.

At that point, he had recently completed production on Anna B Savage’s second album inFLUX, and mentioned the idea to her. “She got excited about it,” he recalls. “So she came in and started shaping my instrumentals together. She's a poet - we would talk about ideas, and she would articulate them.”

The perfect example of this is the song Table - about the dining table where the album’s concept was formed and now acts as something of a centrepiece of the whole record. In her lyrics, Anna wonders “who else smeared errant gravy off it with their finger tips,” going on to imagine drunken dancing on top of it and “hushed midnight words” over it. 

“I said that I imagined this table has had its 124 year lifespan and all the memories and conversations it's privy to,” says Mike. “And she just went with that. She sat there in silence for about an hour and a half, occasionally giving me tidbits. And then there it was.”

Initially Mike had been planning to approach a number of guest vocalists, but with Anna clearly on board with the idea, her input and involvement spread. 

“She was only going to do a couple of tracks,” he laughs. “But she's so great, suddenly she’s all over the whole record. It just worked and I feel really privileged to have had that opportunity. She's a genius with words. And her voice.”

As well as Anna, a number of other musicians helped to build the sound of Super Shapes. Woodwind player Ross Blake worked on the early instrumentals, bringing “sounds of Bolivian adventure and loads of other lovely textures”, while saxophonist Robert Stallman later came in to add “wonked out solos."

The last piece of the puzzle was drummer Adam Betts, known for his complex drumming for bands like Three Trapped Tigers, Squarepusher’s Shobaleader One, and with drum n bass producer Goldie. For this album, however, he offers something more understated, as Mike wanted him to weave his playing in with the existing percussion. “Bit underused, considering it’s Adam Betts,” jokes Mike. “But he seemed happy.”

Happy perhaps because the assignment was not to try to slot in with another drummer. The percussion that Adam accentuates rather than replaces, suitably, is the sound of furniture. Mike created samples by recording himself tapping on items in vast second hand furniture store Scott’s in Cliftonville, just around the corner from the studio. 

“I went upstairs and sampled a lot of their items, then fed them into my sampler and they popped out the other side as ‘the clunk’,” he explains.

Aside from furniture, another item that features prominently is cucumber. First mentioned on the brilliant single Pretender To Surrender, it then takes centre stage on the following track, Kachumber - the loveliest song about making cucumber salad you’re likely to hear any time soon.

The lyrics are derived from a real recipe in a Dishoom cookbook Mike received as a Christmas present. “Basically it's the only recipe in that book that I can actually make and I can't even make it that well,” he smiles. “So I thought it was quite sweet to do that.”

As the maker of the salad, Lindsay handles vocals on that track himself, although it hadn’t been his intention to appear on the finished track. He had hoped that Robert Wyatt might record it. 

Clearly Wyatt didn’t end up on the record, but it turns out it was a rejection worth receiving. Mike recalls, “I got a nice reply, saying, ‘Hello, Michael. Thanks so much for your lovely song. You were right to ask me to sing on this because once upon a time, I was going to write a whole album of recipes.’ Then it was like a cute granddad. He said, ‘But not as good as this song of yours. Is that you singing on it? I think it sounds great’.”

That was encouragement enough for Lindsay to put the version he’d originally recorded onto the album. From there, he also started to weave his own voice around Savage’s contributions. 

“I think the collage of my slightly mundane dirge is sort of beautiful,” he says. “It makes sense with the concept of the record as well.”

Having recorded an album that celebrates staying in, Lindsay is now working out how to take it out into a live setting, with a show coming up at Where Else in Margate. For the performance, Anna B Savage, Adam Betts and Ross Blake will all return to reprise their contributions to the recordings. Multi-instrumentalist Alex Painter will step in to replace Robert Stillman, who is now busy touring with The Smile.

“Gotta get the lighting right,“ Mike says thoughtfully when I ask what form the show will take, before adding, “I am planning on making salad on stage.”

How will that work, I ask. "That's what I haven't worked out how to do,” he admits. For now, his aim is to alternate between singing the recipe and actually making it. “I will pass it around,” he adds. "But people may be advised not to eat it.”

“I think for now I'm just going to concentrate on trying to get the music sounding as beautiful as possible so people can be transported in that way,” he says, which I hope wasn’t him talking himself out of the idea. 

As well as plans for the show, Mike is also beginning to think about Supershapes Volume 2, which will develop the themes of the first record further. 

“I want to explore with no real rules, but I think the notion of super shapes can be perceived in different ways,” he says. “I just liked the idea that I could find these loose concepts and then musically springboard from that.”

So at this stage, the concept for Volume 2 is buildings. “Specifically one building,” he adds. "A building I lived in 25 years ago, the first year I moved to London. I'm thinking about trying to write a whole record about that building.”

Now a resident of Margate for six years, I’m keen to know if the move from the city to the seaside has changed how Mike works. 

“It's influenced the way I listen to music I've been working on,” he says. “I've got into this great habit of taking everything for a long walk by the sea once I've made presentable mixes. I never did that in London.”

“I just feel like there’s something about taking myself out into the landscape,” he continues. “It really helps me to place it in my mind. It also allows me to enjoy it as music rather than just hearing it in this studio.”

When he’s working with other musicians, he says, “we have to make a daily excursion to see the sea front and feel the weather. That does make a difference too. Going to see the horizon and see the sea, it does something to your psyche. It can be cathartic and calming.”

There’s one other difference between working in London and by the sea. “A lot of the records that I’ve done in the studio have got gulls on them,” he laughs. Not intentionally, but “because they're loud. But that's just part of the sweetness of the seaside town.”

Beyond making music, Mike hails Margate’s wider music scene, noting how much it has developed greatly since he first moved down, saying that initially “there wasn’t much here”. 

“Iin the time I've been here, it's morphed a lot,” he says. “I lived in Reykjavik in Iceland for four years, and what I loved about Reykjavik was this kind of DIY nature in the music scene. And there was an element when we first moved here, Margate reminded me of Reykjavik a little.” 

“The fact that you can do things here and set up a venue out of a defunct building” and the “community aspect” of the music scene is what sets Margate apart from other places, he goes on. “You can bring energy and life back into a town that needs it, without trying to change what's already great about it.”

“I don't think I need to sell Margate,” he says. “But for me, it's still really exciting to be here. I'm not planning on going anywhere.”

Supershapes Volume 1 is out on June 14. You can catch the live show (and sample that salad) at Where Else in Margate the following night, June 15. Tickets £20 via Dice.