'Most people steal music - God knows I do'

Beardyman’s album is eclectic, energetic and colourful, trying to strike a balance between novelty and serious music

THERE ARE certain unspoken rules when it comes to interviews with musicians.

One of them is that the artist on the other end of the tape recorder is there to plug a new album or upcoming show. They’re certainly not there to tell you that no one is going to buy their new album.

Darren Foreman is the fast-talking buck known as Beardyman. His new album, the energetic and shape-shifting I Done A Album, has just gone on release so I ask him how he reckons it's going to do. It's the polite thing to say.

“Well, I’m not going to make any money out of it because it’s not going to sell loads, is it?”, he says breezily. “No one makes money from records any more unless you’re someone like Rihanna or Justin Timberlake and making music which appeals to the lowest common denominator.

“What I do is challenging and I don’t expect it to sell loads. If we sell 40,000 or 50,000 albums, we’ll make the money we invested back. But these days, most people steal music. God knows I do.

“But I do use iTunes a lot because it’s easy and it’s there and I believe that artists should be paid. If you’re going to pay for chocolate or to go see a movie or go to a football game, you should pay for music as a valuable service. But I can’t change the weather so I know it’s not going to sell loads.”

What the new record will do, Foreman hopes, is entice more peopIe to check out a Beardyman live show. For the Londoner who came of age as a champion beatboxer, it’s the live show which has been gathering all the plaudits. A constantly evolving sonic delight, a night out with Beardyman involves Foreman looping and layering a wide selection of sounds through his mixing desk to keep you on your toes and wondering what comes next.

Foreman sees the album as “an advert for the live show. People have been bugging me to make an album for ages and I wanted to go into the studio to make some stuff so it was a chance to do some experimenting.

“I think I managed to capture quite accurately the vibe of what I do live without just replicating a live show. If I wanted to do that, I could have just taken people on a really crazy, anarchic journey through genres. But I had aspirations to get something with higher production values than at a gig so the album is what I can’t do at my gigs.”

I Done A Albumis a colourful and eclectic affair which covers a lot of ground from skittery electronica to cheeky poppy grooves, though Foreman reckons it's a little tame. "There is some pretty out-there stuff on the album, but I could have done far more, to be honest. I love the idea of having an album that is as eclectic as my iPod on shuffle, but this album is nowhere near as eclectic as my iPod.

“There were house, techno, twisted electro, ambient, singer-songwriter and weird downbeat tunes I didn’t put on to keep the album cohesive. For all that, people are saying the album is too disparate or that some of it sounds too similar, so people are divided. Maybe I should do the next album as just one continuous mix.”

He’s a little concerned that the album might see him perceived by some as a bit of a novelty act. “That was never my intention and I’ve always tried to have a decent balance between novelty and serious music. My favourite band is Radiohead and I admire them hugely for just piling forward and not caring about whether or not their fans are going to come with them on their journey. I don’t want to be the kind of person who would not care if people were going to come with me, but I think you can care too much.”

Over the last few years, Foreman has also done a few shows at the Edinburgh Fringe which meant playing to audiences who mightn’t have been on the Beardyman buzz to begin with.

“They were comedy shows, comedy-music shows I suppose, though I don’t like drawing a line between the two. The real difference comes if the shows are seated or standing. With a seated show, you can get away with more cerebral stuff. It’s more difficult to do that kind of material to a standing crowd because if you start talking to them for any length of time, they’re just going to walk off or start talking to each other.

“You’re dealing with a very different person when they’re standing up compared to when they’re sitting down. You get more compliance when they’re sitting down.”

Foreman came up through the beatboxing scene and won the world beatboxing crown on two occasions. These days, he prefers to look on at that scene from the sidelines. “Like many my age, I saw (US beatboxing innovator) Rahzel doing it and decided to have a go,” he says. “I gave it my all, but got bored of it. I won the competitions and moved on. I’ve done my time and I’ve got people’s attention so I can do the things I really want to do.

“I think beatboxing is over in a way, but it will still continue and new beatboxers will emerge. There may even be someone who comes along and reignites the scene because he’s so good and has sounds no one else can replicate and may be as good as Rahzel.

"But I've yet to see a single beatboxer who's better than Rahzel. I tried to be for a while and I realised that no matter what I did, I wasn't doing anything that was wildly different to him."