This week Ben Watt will be performing in the Great Hall for Friday Nights at Italian Masterpieces. Here, we asked him a few questions about music and art. Book tickets now.
Describe your sound in 5 words or less?
That is someone else’s job
If your music was an artwork what would it look like?
A landscape of light and shadow.
Who’s your favourite artist/artwork?
Tom Killion’s woodcuts of the Californian coast.
What’s your favourite gig you have played to date?
My solo comeback at the tiny Slaughtered Lamb folk n’ blues basement in London last August took some beating.
What inspires/influences your music the most?
If I knew I would write every day. As it is I have to wait until ideas mysteriously arrive.
What song do you wish you wrote?
You’ve Lost That Loving Feeling.
What part of making music excites you the most?
The moments before anyone has heard my newest song.
What can a punter expect from your live show?
Urgency, humour, new stuff, old gems and the stories behind the songs. Plus a gorgeous 1959 Gretsch Single Anniversary in Smoke Green.
Tell us about the last song you wrote?
It is called ‘The Heart is a Mirror’. It closes my new album, ‘Hendra’.
It is about self-absorption, and how it can blind us to unconditonal affection that is being handed to us.
The collection of the Spanish royal family formed the basis of the Prado Museum collection. If you could develop a collection including any artists past or present, who would be your top three?
Caravaggio, Georges Braque, Dan Flavin