An Audible Imagination
Thom Lewis
Thom Lewis helped take the North East's sound to the world as the producer of Sam Fender's two albums to date. Now, as a part of Generator's advisory board, he's helping bring the music industry to the North East. We spoke to him about making it in the industry, and why openness, collaboration and lending a helping hand are his trademarks.
Interview by Arlen Pettitt
Photographs by Christopher Owens
“Do you mind if I record too?” Thom Lewis asks, as I put my phone down in front of him.
I ask him if he’s planning to sue me, but it turns out he’s more concerned with background noise than any libelous lines I’m likely to conjure up.
For most people background noise is a problem, but for a music producer like Thom it’s just another instrument - he calls these recordings “audible ideas”.
We’re sat drinking coffee outside The Wheel House on Tanner’s Bank leading down to North Shields Fish Quay, and even on a weekday morning there’s the sound of sirens, alarms, car doors and the chatter of passing dog walkers.
You may not have heard Thom’s name - or even his workplace pseudonym Bramwell Bronte - but you’ve definitely heard his work.
Thom played a vital role in establishing Sam Fender’s sound when working with him on his early demos and first singles, played a part in getting the wheels turning by accompanying him to gigs and on tour, and produced his two albums to date.
It’s a collaboration which has resulted in two platinum UK number one albums and a Mercury Prize nomination for 2021’s Seventeen Going Under.
How does something like that happen? It starts, as you’d expect, with a love for music.
“From being really small,” Thom says, “I'd put my head against the speakers. Every morning, I'd put a record on and not necessarily be captivated by the music, but I’d be captivated by being overwhelmed by sound.”
"I stayed in the college four nights a week and I’d sleep on the studio floor "
Growing up in Greasby, a village on The Wirral which Thom calls a “very suburban, gentle, lovely place” his family ran the local butchers.
His parents were joined at work by an auntie, cousins, his brother, and Thom himself who from around the age of eleven helped out cleaning and doing the dishes, as well as occasionally making burgers and sausages.
At school, Thom was fine academically but didn’t enjoy the environment. Having studied music at GCSE - the obvious choice to him when faced with art (“I couldn’t draw”) or drama (“It would have involved writing”) as the alternatives - it was actually a careers advisor who suggested he go to college to study music production.
“I went to college in London and did a nine month diploma,” Thom explains. “The college was open 24/7 because it was all about practical experience, and everybody got set their studio hours through the week, including across the nights. Nobody ever turned up to them, so I stayed in the college four nights a week and I’d sleep on the studio floor so I could use their time. I’d probably crash at about 3 in the morning, sleep to about 9am, get up, go to my lecture then repeat the cycle.”
That graft continued once Lewis had finished college. While his flatmate - another former student at the same college - went off to his job assisting at a studio, Thom went to the local cyber cafe twice a day to do emails and print off CVs.
He took the first job offer that came along, at a place which it turned out was charging bands a lot of money to record, promising them the world and delivering not very much.
“I was desperate to get out and I got a call from a company called Miloco,” says Thom. “At the time they had five or six studios scattered around London - now they’ve got about 150 globally. I went in and met them and they gave me a job on the spot as a runner, running hard drives around London, opening studios for people, making coffees.”
That was supposed to be the gig for the foreseeable future, but a spot quickly opened up as a production assistant and saw Lewis in the studio.
“They put me in with Jamie T,” he explains, “he’d just signed with Virgin and was doing his first record. We were the same age. He was producing it himself, with his engineer Ben. It was wild. He was knocking up tunes on the spot. That started me actually, properly assisting people.”
In those days it wasn’t unusual for Lewis to go directly from one session to the next, sometimes in different studios in different parts of London. He recalls one occasion doing a session with The Kooks, who recorded and mixed three songs in 24 hours, before he then went across London to another 12 hour session with another band.
The high intensity reflected an industry and business model that was under pressure, with recording budgets going down and studio overheads going up. Well known studios like the Olympic and Townhouse closed during that period, and sessions themselves weren’t always the most useful for someone learning their craft.
“It depended on who you were working with,” Thom explains. “You might be working with someone who’s really stressed and they’re not interested in teaching you or helping you out - you either know what to do or you don’t. And if you don’t they’ll just do it themselves. Or you might get someone who is sound as fuck and really laid back and wants to help. But most of the time, it was just ‘got to get it done’.”
“Sam played me some tunes. I thought ‘fucking hell, this kid has got some chops’ and from there we started doing little bits in my flat. And I didn’t pack it in. I just let the bailiffs wait.”
After three years in London “working to the bone, getting absolutely fucking knacked”, Lewis moved to the North East, following his then girlfriend who was studying at Newcastle University.
A Christmas job at the music shop Windows in Newcastle turned into a longer term one selling guitars there, and Lewis started a uni course while doing bits of work at Blast Recording on Stepney Bank.
The recording work increased but money was always tight, and Lewis decided it was time to stop.
“The bailiffs were at the door. I couldn’t afford my bills,” he explains. “I was stealing toilet rolls from the pub opposite where I lived, I was hoping there’d be food left in the fridge when I went to the studio.”
“It got to the point where I couldn’t keep going, I was absolutely done in. At the time, this lad called Dean Thompson was assisting me while he was at college studying music production. Every now and then he’d come in and sit in on the session, and if something went wrong I’d talk him through how to fix it. Then at the end of the day I’d do an exam with him, recreating what went wrong and getting him to show me what he’d learned.”
“We hit it off really well, because he’s just a really bloody lovely lad, so when I was going to leave, I thought I’d better tell Dean. I took him for a beer and told him, he said ‘No, you can’t! You can’t do that! This is really good!’, I said yeah, but I can’t eat!”
Dean convinced Thom to hold off quitting until he’d introduced him to his friend Sam.
“He brought him round my flat one weekend,” Thom remembers, “and Sam played me some tunes. I thought ‘fucking hell, this kid has got some chops’ and from there we started doing little bits in my flat. And I didn’t pack it in. I just let the bailiffs wait.”
That introduction from Dean - now a music producer himself, but better known as Sam Fender’s guitar player - started a new chapter for Thom.
“Both Sam and I were really down and out. We were both fucked, so we were kindred spirits,” he says. “He was having a nightmare being on benefits and living with his mum in this tiny flat with black mold on the walls. He had a tough life. I was finding it tough, but nowhere near as tough as him.”
The two grew close, and one day Thom got a call from Dean, telling him to come to the pub to meet with Sam and his manager Owain Davies. Davies asked Lewis to work on some demos with Fender, an offer it later transpired had first been made to Dean, who’d stepped aside and suggested Thom.
“He did me a solid. He’s such an amazing man, he really is,” Thom reflects.
They started working out of a shed in Owain’s back garden, with Thom also working as an assistant in Owain’s management business - his other clients include Ben Howard and A Blaze of Feather.
“We’d be in his kitchen, the two of us, working away on the management side, booking flights, applying for funding. Sam would be in the shed making a racket. When he came up with something good, I’d go back to producing. It couldn’t have been more DIY.”
What they lacked in budget and equipment, they made up for in time spent and effort, and the first few singles started to gather attention.
“We deliberately did a Highlands tour for his first gigs with the band,” Thom remembers, “so they could cut their teeth, and the point of doing that was to get away from everyone. At the very first show two publishers and a label showed up. They’d traveled from London to the Highlands! They were there before us when we were unloading the gear.”
When they could hold them at bay no more and Fender signed with Polydor, he made sure he’d be working with Lewis.
“When he signed his deal, Sam insisted it be in the contract that I produced the first record,” Thom says, “which he didn’t have to do at all. The label would have been desperate to get in someone with a good catalogue who’d proven themselves.”
There was a benefit to it though, all those hours spent producing demos from the garden shed meant a creative shorthand between them.
“We got to a point where we wouldn’t have to speak to each other,” he continues. “He’d put his thing down, I’d put the beat down and it would get to what he was thinking. We could jump to the next musical idea without having to discuss it. It was intuitive.”
“It’s a region that’s been fucked over for hundreds of years and more often than not hardship breeds creativity, and it breeds stories that people connect to on an extreme level”
I ask Lewis about that collaborative process with an artist, how does he take their ideas and make them reality?
“You can almost pre-hear it in your mind,” he explains. “When I’m working on a track, or even if someone is just playing a tune to me on an acoustic guitar, in my head I can hear how the drums will go and the bass and picture the full arrangement. Then we can build it, we’re able to create it because it’s already imagined - audibly imagined.”
“It’s such a common thing for somebody to say to you ‘it doesn’t sound like I hear it in my head…can you get it to that thing?’ Then you have to start a dialogue to try to explain that completely abstract thing of sound in a visual manner - if something’s ‘bright’ then it’s probably got a lot of high frequencies in, or if it’s ‘harsh’ it’s probably got a lot of high-mids because the human ear is really sensitive to that.”
How is it working with other people, I ask, compared to the almost symbiotic relationship with Fender?
“The variety is mint,” Thom says. “Six years of doing Sam’s stuff was incredible, but at the same time the world’s a big place and being a producer isn’t about just working with one person. My main thing tends to be personality and understanding the people in the room. I tend to function on the basis of make it fun and make it honest and try to have - even though I don’t like the phrase - an open, safe space. I tend to find the more I’m open and honest with an artist the more they are open and honest back. If I go with my life on a plate they realise I don’t mind being exposed, that I’m fucked up too.”
“A lot of people come to me and say ‘can you do the Sam Fender thing?’,” Lewis continues, “and almost every time I say no, because you’re not Sam Fender. There’s a reason he sounds like that, his particular musicianship is completely unique. I’ve never met a single person in all the years I’ve been in studios, the amount of musicians I’ve seen perform, not one comes close to his fluid approach and awareness.”
It’s an unusual position to be in - an outsider to the North East who has ended up as one of the technicians of its current sound. I ask Lewis for his view of the North East and its relationship with music.
“I think it’s quite remarkable,” he says, “because it’s one of the few places where the music historically and traditionally leaks into its modern musicians, quite heavy-handedly. Like Aaron, who is in a band called Hector Gannet, so much of his stuff is influenced by Alan Hull and Lindisfarne, but it doesn’t sound like them. The songwriting has clear elements of homage to them, but the music doesn’t sound like them - it’s more modern, more grandiose. You see that across the board.”
The mention of Aaron from Hector Gannet is an appropriate one, as we’re sat outside the coffee shop he runs, and the Fish Quay more generally is a living example of what Lewis is talking about, with layer upon layer of history - and the modern and traditional co-existing.
It’s a bright morning, and as we walked from the car park we passed yellow-booted fishermen sitting enjoying a morning coffee. Ropes and fishing nets sit piled on one side of the road, while the shutters come up on restaurants and cafes on the other.
“If you took Manchester,” Thom continues, “where Manchester bands are influenced by The Stone Roses, Oasis, The Smiths, they do tend to sound heavily like them. It’s rare you hear a new act in the North East and you think it’s just another one of them - another Maximo Park - people take more influences, and the scene is massive. There’s so much neo-soul at the moment, the punk scene is fucking great. Pigs x 7 as a band are incredible, such heavy shit. I can’t think of another city that’s knocking out one of the best heavy bands around, along with one of the best indie pop stars. That’s crackers. For a tiny place as well.”
Is there a thread that runs through it all I ask, even as diverse as it seems?
“It’s turmoil and loss,” Lewis says immediately. “It’s a region that’s been fucked over for hundreds of years and more often than not hardship breeds creativity, and it breeds stories that people connect to on an extreme level. Everyone has a shit day, but when someone puts it in a form people can truly connect with it steps music up another level. The Geordies are fantastic storytellers, fantastic lyricists.”
Lewis talks as well about musicians working together, and a hugely supportive environment, listing off local musicians playing in each other’s bands, and all the connections between them.
“There’s so much cross-pollination and genre-jumping - someone might have been in this beautiful folk band and suddenly they’re in this queer punk band. It’s really accepting,” he says.
“In my experience, almost every single opportunity that’s ever come my way and paid off has been because I helped somebody. I never would’ve met Sam if I hadn’t been helping Dean, I never would’ve got Sam’s records if I hadn’t been helping Sam.”
Lewis is part of a music industry advisory group for Generator, an organisation which aims to build a sustainable music industry in the North East, and talks enthusiastically about its work and the importance of connecting people in the industry together, and fostering that accepting and collaborative ecosystem.
“With Generator and what Mick Ross the CEO is doing,” Thom says, “connecting people and providing support across the board, support with funding applications, advice from managers with experience, legal advice, things are changing for the better. Doors are being opened more and more. There’s so much talent that’s been lost over the years, and Generator are going to try to make sure that doesn’t happen again.”
“Mick sees it as there needing to be an industry here, not just a scene,” he continues. “That requires education, because we need North East crew members, because there aren’t enough people to run the venues and do a good job. We need access to the larger industry, the top level agents, managers, lawyers, the major labels. That is coming, Generator are bringing all of that to the table, but it’s not going to happen overnight.”
Lewis talks as well about changing the culture of music production specifically, to make it a more accessible and welcoming environment - not just the preserve of white men. He mentions particularly the Arts Council funded Women in Music Production programme run by producer and teacher Lisa Murphy, which aims to increase the number of women working in those roles in the North East, through a programme of hands-on training, workshops and mentoring.
Thom explains why he thinks it’s important to be proactive: “If somebody does well and you’ve helped them, you’re slowly creating a culture of that approach - that spreads out. They might turn around and go ‘I should help people too’. In my experience, almost every single opportunity that’s ever come my way and paid off has been because I helped somebody. I never would’ve met Sam if I hadn’t been helping Dean, I never would’ve got Sam’s records if I hadn’t been helping Sam.”
“The classic phrase is you create your own luck,” he continues, “but that’s bullshit - you create your own support. If you’re good to people, people think of you again when something’s good for you.”
It’s a simple ethos, but one which has served him well so far.
I ask Thom who he’s working with at the moment, mostly so I can make a mental note to look them up later.
“I’m down in London next week to do pre-production with a Dublin band called Basht,” he says. “I’m sorting out doing something with a band from Bristol called Saloon Dion - it’s a fucking great name, the name describes the band, it’s all about fun. Ernie, up here, I’m doing an EP with Ernie. Fiona Lee from Yorkshire - she’s one of the few artists who I’d work with who is a bit like Sam, but she’s got her own twist on it. A lass called Sofie Mae, who’d I’d describe as acoustic, sneering Lily Allen - really beautiful, sweet voice but her lyrics are very witty and snarky and cutting, tearing people down.”
And what about for him, what does he want after the Number Ones, the gold and platinum records, and the Mercury nomination?
“Longevity is my goal,” Thom says. “Keep working. Keep making records that people consider to be honest. That means a lot to me, hearing from people that my music got them through a hard time. It’s a weird sensation and it means more - way more - than any of the achievements.”