“The inner-workings
of my slightly
odd mind”
ERNIE
Joe Allan
Joe Ernest Allan, also known as ERNIE, is a North East-based musician and chef. His Cold Cuts EP, released in November, is a set of songs as diary entries, about growing up in the North East. They’ve got him enough attention to play at St James’ Park and the Glasshouse, opening for Sam Fender and Lanterns on the Lake. We spoke to Joe about finding his creative identity, and the parallels between music and kitchen work.
Interview by Arlen Pettitt
Photographs by Christopher Owens
It’s freezing in the studio, and Joe Allan is sat with his coat on by the window, guitar in its case leaning on the arm of the chair. Chris has fired up a gas-powered heater that looks like something you’d attach to the back of the Batmobile, and later comes over with a plug-in fan heater because apparently he can see our breath as we talk.
Applying heat is appropriate, because Joe’s middle name is Ernest, and professionally he goes by ERNIE - Ernie the Chef.
“Hospitality is so friendly towards creatives because it’s so flexible. Everywhere I’ve worked, there’ve been dozens of creatives, artists and musicians in the same boat.”
It’s more than just a name because as well as music, Joe cooks - he’s a chef at the well-respected Cookhouse restaurant in the Ouseburn.
“I got a job in the Cluny kitchen,” he says of getting his start, “because kitchens generally just need bodies in the room - they’ll take anybody - and it was the only job I could take where I could do full-time hours and still have four days off.”
“I just stumbled into kitchen work,” he continues, “and as the years went by, needing time off for touring and stuff, hospitality is so friendly towards creatives because it’s so flexible. Everywhere I’ve worked, there’ve been dozens of creatives, artists and musicians in the same boat. I didn’t fall into it through being an aspiring chef, it was just convenient, but then as I’ve gone up the ranks professionally, now I love what I do. Music will always be Plan A, but it’s a pretty amazing Plan B that I’ve got at the minute.”
Joe grew up in Cramlington and got his first guitar at nine years old. By 13 or 14, he was writing songs and played in bands through his teens and into his twenties.
“During the lockdown, just because I was on my own, I started working on my first proper batch of solo material,” Joe says, “which I then took to my producer friend Josh Ingledew to see if he could help me finish them off. The plan was just to chuck that stuff out on Bandcamp and then wash my hands with music a bit.”
Josh liked the songs so much he talked Joe into giving it a proper go, and he credits that conversation back in 2021 with giving him a new lease of creative life.
“If they’re co-signing on it and telling me it’s good, then fuck it, I’m giving it my all.”
As we talk, Joe returns a few times to how important it is for him to have the support and encouragement of people he respects. Alongside Josh, with whom he clearly has a close creative relationship, Joe mentions Thom Lewis (who co-produced ERNIE’s Cold Cuts EP), Sam Fender (who had ERNIE as one of the openers at his St James’ Park gigs) and his manager Steph.
“If they’re co-signing on it and telling me it’s good,” he says, “then fuck it, I’m giving it my all.”
He explains how he got to know Josh properly, having met occasionally in the studio and at gigs, when Ingledew put an ad on Instagram asking for people with half-finished demos who wanted help getting them together.
“We both don’t really like staying up late, or being out,” he jokes of them forging a connection, “and we found loads of common ground musically and otherwise. As far as the music’s concerned, he’s a creative genius. He has this amazing musical vocabulary and has shittonnes of instruments just kicking about his house and really good knowledge of them all. For a songwriter, that’s the dream.”
Even though Allan thought he’d get the tracks together and then leave them behind, Ingledew wouldn’t let him and encouraged him to be less throwaway.
“He saw the potential in me and, as a friend, lifted me up,” Joe explains. “Having a mate who lifts you up and champions your pursuits, that’s been the most valuable thing about meeting Josh.”
All five tracks on Cold Cuts are songs about being an outsider and feeling a bit detached from life.
“Every song is a diary entry,” Allan explains. “Some are a bit more cryptic, but it’s all stories about my life, growing up here in the North East, feeling like a bit of an outsider, maybe struggling mentally. All relatable stuff, I think. But, it’s difficult to go and have these conversations, that doesn’t come naturally to me, the natural way for me to funnel all this stuff out is through music.”
“Every song is a diary entry. Some are a bit more cryptic, but it’s all stories about my life, growing up here in the North East, feeling like a bit of an outsider, maybe struggling mentally.
All relatable stuff, I think.”
Pink Headaches talks through those feelings you get when you go back to your hometown and it’s the same, but you’ve changed. Hold Yr Horses is written from the viewpoint of a lad hanging out drinking in parks and the false bravado of talking up his fighting skills. Awfully Strange charts a drunken and emotional Christmas period, and anchors itself in place with mentions of Cramlington’s Brockwell Seam pub and Parkside roundabout.
“There’ve been a few pals I went to school with, lads who are side characters in a lot of these songs, without maybe knowing,” Joe says, “and I’ve had a couple of lads say it reduced them to tears. The lead single Awfully Strange, there’s place names and stuff, they know that world.”
“I don’t want to be responsible for reducing anyone to tears, but it’s comforting,” he continues, “because, particularly that song, it’s all about me feeling completely alienated from the rest of me pals. I’ve moved elsewhere and knock about with a bunch of creative people who are “heart on their sleeve”, and these guys are still very much stoic lads who kick about in Cramlington. To hear that they are moved to that extent by stuff, it’s like I wasn’t alone back then, these are good lads.”
I ask how it feels to have had that effect on a bunch of lads from Cramlington.
“As a listener, as a music fan,” Joe says, “I know I get a huge kick out of hearing other bands talking about their inward feelings. The prospect of me doing that for others, that’s unbelievable, I couldn’t ask for much more as a songwriter.”
That response encourages him to share more, he says, and go deeper into the themes. He calls himself and his musical identity a “work in progress”, and cites a few influences which have helped shape that including The National and the lyrics of Matt Berninger, and Big Thief frontwoman Adrianne Lenker.
But there’s one influence which stands out.
“The biggest influence sonically and lyrically is Frightened Rabbit, the Glasgow band with Scott Hutchinson,” Joe says. “The first time I heard that album The Midnight Organ Fight, I was about 15 or 16 and he’s singing about being mortal at a party and I just remember having a bit of a moment.”
The album’s tracks felt like entries in his own diary, Joe says, and Hutchinson’s heavily-accented vocals, open to the point of transparency, showed a different way of writing songs.
“Ten years ago when I first heard that Frightened Rabbit stuff,” Allan says, “it was even more ‘wow, this is incredibly raw, he’s not leaving much to the imagination’. The gap’s probably closed a bit now, I think bands and artists are doing more of that, hopefully people generally are a bit more open and comfortable now than they were when I was growing up.
“If my stuff can do that,” he continues, “if people can find a bit of solace in that, and feel compelled to tell their own stories, I couldn’t think of anything better - more so than exterior stuff, hitting numbers, that’s way less important.”
I suggest that like Frightened Rabbit being inherently Scottish, there are a set of songwriters in the North East’s current crop who are very firmly rooted in the North East. As well as ERNIE, I mention Aaron Duff of Hector Gannet, and of course, Sam Fender.
Is that important I wonder, being recognisably from the North East?
“It’s crucial,” Joe says. “It plays an enormous part in everything I do. There’s a, not like a stoicism, but it’s a bit rough around the edges. My stuff, Aaron’s stuff and Sam’s stuff, it’s just rough around the edges. It’s honest. You get that elsewhere, of course, but there’s a quality in the music that’s made up here that comes from feeling like a bit of an afterthought, or being parodied or not noticed. There’s something about this area that means you’ve got to shout a bit louder, or dig a bit deeper, and be a bit more honest with what you do.”
There’s a thriving scene in the North East, with musicians of all genres telling stories from the region. There also seems to be a great sense of camaraderie, and Allan agrees.
“There’s definitely this sense of community,” he says. “Working in Blank Studios with Josh a lot, there were so many different bands coming in and out every day - metal bands, indie pop, rappers - and if you want a favour, or want to borrow a bit of gear, or swap advice, everyone’s kind of in it.”
Joe sees Sam Fender as playing a big part in that, boosting the region and encouraging others.
“I think the region has seen what he’s done with little resources,” he says, “and thought ‘I’m going to give that a go’. There’s a buzz. The difference now is people are watching, there’s eyes on the area. There’s something in the water.”
“I like that he peddles that ‘you don’t have to hoof down to London’ kind of narrative,” Joe continues, “because it is true. There’s nice stuff happening organically up here. I’m very, very proud to be from the North East and there’s loads of good stuff happening at the minute.”
I ask who else we should be listening to at the moment, and he has a few recommendations.
“I think Melanie Baker is a brilliant singer-songwriter from up here,” he says. “She wears her heart on her sleeve, sings a lot about her own internal battles, sings a lot about her queer identity and how much of a struggle that is generally.”
“I love Theo Bleak,” he continues, “a singer-songwriter from Dundee who we’ve done a few dates with. Really cool indie music, again really emotionally raw. I love that band Divorce, we’re label mates, they’re the UK’s answer to Big Thief. They’re so strange!”
When it came to recording his EP, Allan was certain that he needed to feature Northern musicians. As well as the core band, that meant collaborating with other singer-songwriters who provide backing vocals.
“On every tune on the EP there’s additional vocals, all from singer-songwriters from the North East,” Joe says. “We’ve got IMOGEN, Brooke Bentham and Lizzie Esau doing backing vocals on all the tunes. I personally gravitated towards all three of them, rather than having the record label saying ‘ah, go with this person instead’ because it would be mutually beneficial. But I purposefully wanted people from up north who were in the same boat, juggling and doing the hospitality thing to fund the music thing.”
“There’s a quality in the music that’s made up here that comes from feeling like a bit of an afterthought, or being parodied or not noticed. There’s something about this area that means you’ve got to shout a bit louder, or dig a bit deeper.”
As well as hospitality being a convenient profession for musicians because of its flexibility, there are lots of parallels between kitchen work and music.
“Working a busy service in a kitchen, the only other thing I can liken that to is performing live,” Joe says, “doing a live gig. It’s time sensitive, it’s nerve-wracking, but there’s little dopamine hits here and there. There are so many parallels.”
“So many chefs I’ve met - myself included - have slipped through the cracks a bit,” he continues, “and maybe haven’t found their voice or whatever, and they’ve got this cool, expressive, creative thing they can do and it nourishes people and it’s comforting. That’s how I see music and food.”
The idea of nourishment through music is an interesting one, and I wonder if the audience for ERNIE is actively cultivated to match that.
Not really, Joe says, but in the studio they do think about how it might connect with people.
“When you get people singing about the inner workings of their mind,” he says, “and that they don’t really know how to deal with it all and it’s all quite difficult. Hearing that as someone who can relate to that, it’s super cathartic and comforting.
“It’s people like that I’m hoping the songs get to,” he continues, “people who might be a bit disillusioned by what’s going on around them, and might feel a bit lost and muddled up. If they hear one of my tunes and draw from the lyrics and apply it to whatever they’re going through and feel something. Feel not as alone with their inner thoughts. That’s ‘job done’ for me.”
What about Joe Ernest Allan himself, does he get fulfilment from his music?
“Because I’m so inward,” he explains, “and I enjoyed the process of making this batch of songs so much - being around Josh’s house, crafting them together in a safe, comfortable environment - I haven’t stopped to think too much about what’s going on now. Which is interesting, because I thought I would become obsessed with the numbers, seeing what’s happening on Spotify. That catharsis of getting them out on paper and getting them recorded, I’ve got my fix there.”
He’s in that process of songwriting and pre-production on a new batch of songs, and it seems an incredibly healthy place to be for him to draw enjoyment and reward from that, rather than the external validation.
Joe also seems like he’s soaking it all up, and learning as much as he can, having reconnected with his creative self. That includes pushing out of his comfort zone when it comes to live performance and learning to be a frontman while cultivating his identity as an artist.
“This is the first time I’ve been this vulnerable - if that’s the right word,” he says. “It’s all very much a work in progress. I’m a super inward person and being front and centre is all very new to me, it’s all still a learning curve.
“I’m still clawing back that creative identity that I lost over the years,” he continues, “and I’m still feeling it out and seeing what happens. People have organically come to us, who have listened and had their own shit going on, and found some comfort in what I’m singing about. Those people have gravitated towards us, and I’d be chuffed if that’s our demographic, people who are after a bit of a safe space and find that through music.”
Allan is self-aware and thoughtful about the conflicts at the heart of a musician, and probably all creative people.
“Some of the musicians I know,” he says, “myself included, it’s a weird blend of being so inward that you don’t really want to chat to anybody and you don’t know what to say, you feel a bit weird putting yourself out there, but at the same time you’re compelled to get your stuff out there on stage. It’s a strange thing this inward versus wanting to be this extrovert blend that most musicians have - it’s bizarre.”
“The songwriting, I don’t think there’s anything else I could do, except the cooking,” he continues, “and that’s been a happy accident. But, performing live, getting my photograph taken, that’s a work in progress, but it comes in time and with everything I do I get a bit more comfortable doing it.”
There’s a benefit from all that though.
“The songs are all about the inner-workings of my slightly odd mind,” Joe says. “I think if I was super self-assured and putting myself out there came naturally, then the lyrics wouldn’t sound like that. It’s a bizarre blend, but I really love it.”
For ERNIE, 2023 closed with a set opening for Lanterns on the Lake at the Glasshouse in mid-December. This year is about playing live with the full band as much as possible, while working up new material - again with Josh Ingledew and Thom Lewis - for a possible new EP later in the year.
It should be an exciting year for an artist who is already doing great things, even while learning his trade.