Acclaimed actor-turned-musician, singer-songwriter and producer, Jim Sturgess, aka King Curious, continues to make a name for himself in the music scene, having this month dropped off his poignant debut album, Common Sense For The Animal. The eleven-track project blends a rich tapestry of iconic British culture with electronic and alternative and indie influences. Balancing King Curious seamlessly transcends from frantic vulnerability to powerfully emotive – and creates a clear marker of London’s alternative musical blueprint.

Renowned for his breakthrough acting role in cult hit film, Across the Universe, and going on to appear in Hollywood smash The Other Boleyn Girl with Natalie Portman and Scarlett Johansson and Cloud Atlas, before landing the lead role in the smash 2011 film One Day alongside Anne Hathaway – recently reinvigorated as a hit Netflix series. Jim Sturgess aka King Curious, has quietly become one of the most innovative and experimental talents coming through right now.

With considered eye on music, and with the kind of deeper introspection that underlines a keen intelligence, the London polymath looks set to underline himself as a formidable rising musical talent as well as one of the UK’s most prominent cult actors. We caught up with Jim, aka King Curious…

Listen to the new album…

Read the interview…

Hey Jim! How has your year been so far?
I’m good cheers. Yeah it’s been a pretty mad year to be honest.. but a good one. I’ve been trying to get organised for the release of my album which has taken up a lot of brain space. But also been out in Australia and Dublin shooting a film called Mixtape, which we just finished. So I can now fully put my head back into the release of the record and focus on that for the next few weeks. Which feels good.

What are your musical origins? How did you first develop your interest and nurture your talent?
The first album I remember buying and owning was Michael Jackson’s BAD album. I was obsessed with it as a kid. Back in those days you just didn’t have the access to all this music like you do now, so I really only had that one cassette which I would play on repeat. I definitely remember the Beatles being played as a kid. I had a pretty intense relationship with the Sgt Peppers album when I was really young. It was just this mad colourful and vibrant album that I loved growing up. I knew all the words but obviously had no context or understanding of what they were actually singing about. It was just like cartoon music to me as a kid. Vivid musical stories that really created a whole world in my head. Then my older brother got me into Hip Hop music at a pretty young age. I must have been about twelve or something and was completely immersed in American 90’s Hip Hop for a long period of time. Bands like A Tribe Called Quest, De La Soul, Souls Of Mischief, Pharcyde, Black Sheep. But as I got a bit older my friends were more into Indie guitar bands.. so I got into that as well.
I was also mad into skateboarding growing up and so I would hear loads of different styles of music from the skate videos I was watching.

When I was about 15 years old I joined a band. We were young but we were into it. Rehearsing in my mates garage, learning covers and then writing our own songs. It was our life back then. We would skate around the local car parks and spots and then rehearse and write music with the band in the evenings and weekends. And we got pretty good at it. We ended up making a demo tape of about 6 tracks and the tape got passed around the school and the local area, and in some weird micro suburban way, those songs became pretty popular amongst our friends and peers.. and I got a taste for it.

How would you define the essence of your sound and approach?
I really don’t know ? It’s been a bit of a weird hurdle trying to figure how to explain what the sound of the record is as it’s pretty eclectic. The essence is that it’s predominantly based around beats, melody and lyrics. I’ve never been much of an electric guitar fan. I’m way more into beats. But i’m also really into beautiful melodies and lyrical patterns. My approach when i’m writing songs and music is to just feel free and honest in the moment and give the song the space to be what it needs to be. I’m never really aware of the influences in the moment but more focused on the emotion of it, if that makes sense. It’s only when it’s finished that you might hear certain influences coming through. The songs on the record often started with different approaches. Some started with a few ideas on the piano and then built from there. Some started from strumming my guitar, and some started with me singing and rhyming words over a beat or a simple riff.. and I think that all creates a different energy. I tend to not like repeating myself too much, so if i’ve just written a sad and introspective song then the next song would most like be more expansive and energy driven.

Congrats on your recent debut album Common Sense For The Animal. How did release go and did you do anything to celebrate?
Thank you. Yeah it feels good to finally have it out there ! The release went great. We did a kind of launch/listening party at a local cinema with this event called ‘Pitchblack Playback’ who hold music listening events all over the country. The idea is that they hire out spaces and create an environment to fully immerse yourself in music. They turn all the lights off and give out eye masks so that you are indeed sitting in complete darkness.. and then blast the album through the speakers. It’s a pretty amazing experience. I’d been to a few of their events in the past so I was thrilled that they did it for my record. I think for anyone making music there’s this kind of necessary wild fantasy that people are going to hear the music in the same obsessed detail that you had making it. But the sad truth is that people are busy and distracted. So it was nice to, just once, shut out the outside world and get lost in the record in the way it was intended to be heard.

Who have been your main musical influences for the project?
It’s a really hard one to pin down because, as I said, I wasn’t particularly conscious of any actual influences whilst I was making it. That’s more in your subconscious as you’re trying to best convey the emotion or the themes and story of the song. But listening back I hear so many influences coming through. 60’s Psychedelia, 70’s Punk, 80’s Synth music, 90’s Hip Hop, 00’s Guitar bands and with a definite nod to the future with a kind of vintage nostalgia as well. It’s all in there.. I think?There’s quite a visceral electronic punk track called “Bright Light / Black Star” that sits side by side with a very stripped down piano ballad called “The Makeshift Numbers”.. and my hope is that there is a cohesive unity to it.

What was the overall process like for creating the album? What was the most difficult part of putting it together?
The process of creating the record stated off with me writing a collection of songs at home. When I felt like I had enough songs and ideas I took some of those ideas to a good friend of mine called Rick Hornby who’s an amazing guitar player and all round musician. He’s a great guy and his enthusiasm for the project and his ability to see what it was that I wanted to create, really did set me off on the path to believe it was a journey worth taking. We fleshed out some of the tracks at his place in West London and started to get a sense of what these songs could actually be. Once we demo’d a few of the tracks I went to my friends Pablo Clements and James Griffith’s studio in Brighton. They have this mad place down there that’s full of old vintage synths and keyboards and drum machines and pianos etc and together we started building the record. They are amazing at what they do and it was an incredible experience working together and hearing the songs fully come to life. The truly difficult part was after all the recording was done. The sessions in Brighton were beautifully chaotic but I now had the task of mixing the record, which is something that i’d never done before, so it was a huge learning curve for me. I was lucky enough to get together with a mixer and engineer called Chris Steffan and together we sat side by side and he helped me pull it all apart and then put it back together in some sort of cohesive and unified manner. I was pretty fatigued by the record at that point so I sat on it for a while and kind of forgot about it. I then played a track to an artist friend of mine and we started talking about visual ideas for the project and music video concepts etc.. and that reignited a passion for it again. So once we started to make some videos I knew I had to release it.

Sonically, what inspired your choices on the project?
I think what inspired it sonically was each song and the message of the song itself. I think I knew I wanted the record to sound quite big. After years and years of playing in bands I knew it was going to be my first proper released record.. so I think instinctively I wanted to throw everything at it. Just being in the studio in Brighton with all this amazing old gear and equipment informed how the record was going to sound. Of course I wanted to utilize all that while we built up the tracks. There’s a real vintage quality to the record too I think. The producers Pablo and James would often welcome mistakes and outside noise and hiss into the microphone..so that nothing sounded to clean and perfect. I actually recorded the piano for a track called “The Makeshift Numbers” at home while there was building work going on in the house next door. You can hear builders whistling and talking in the background in places and so I assumed we’d redo the piano part at the studio..but Pablo and James wanted to keep it as they liked the vibe of it and the kind of makeshift feel it had. So when the strings were added you can’t really hear all the commotion on the recording in the background.

What is the album’s perspective? What are you saying, in terms of themes?
I guess the themes of the album are quite eclectic and varied as well. It’s a kind of kaleidoscopic journey into my brain and touches on both my personal hopes and fears and struggles as well as making commentary on the collective concerns and downfalls of the times that we’re living in. There are tracks like “The Hollowman Come” or “Another World” that lyrically are a more quick fire approach to trying to make sense of all the madness out there. I’m basically trying to digest and process a lot in that one song. Religion, power, war, human displacement, technology, mass shootings, sexual misconduct, space exploration etc. And then songs like “The Makeshift Numbers” or “A Premonition Of A Lonely Soul” are much more personal and about my own struggles and experiences. I think ultimately it’s just trying to be a piece of work that is about the Human Experience with all it’s beautiful flaws and problems, ideas and complications. I think that’s why I ended up calling the record Common Sense For The Animal.. it seemed to be a phrase that somehow abstractly inhabited all of that.

Which is your favourite track from the LP and why?
It’s hard to talk about a favourite as they all mean something to me in different ways. I think i’ll pick a track that I feel often gets overlooked and give it some well needed attention.. which is a song called “Fears Of London”. I’d always wanted to write a song about London as it’s such a huge part of my life and my experience in this world. It informs so much of who I am and how I perceive things. I’m so sensitive and influenced by my surroundings that I know that the record would not be this record without the city I live in. But it’s not easy writing a song about a city without it sounding a bit naff.. so I needed to find my own unique way ‘in’ that felt authentic to me. So I ended up getting kind of altered and intoxicated and sitting on the top deck of a London bus, which is a place I guess I write a lot of songs and have quite a few of my ideas. I purposely sat up on the top deck on a busy Friday night, on my own, with all the crowds and madness and just stayed up there, in a slightly surreal and vulnerable state, looking out the window and absorbing everything I saw until I had the song. And that was how the song was born. I love the track lyrically.. and musically it has this kind of mad sinister otherworldly urban feel to it. A Kind of Hunter S Thompson Fear and Loathing in Las Vegas approach to it.

What else have you got in the pipeline this year? Anything exciting to mention?
I’ve just finished filming a project in Australia and Dublin called ‘Mixtape’ which I don’t believe will come out till next year. So the main thing I have coming out this year is a film called Apartment 7A which is due out this September I think? It’s a kind of psychological thriller that very much plays as a prequel, or better still, a kind of companion piece to the 1960’s classic horror film Rosemary’s Baby. The film is very cleverly set only a few days or hours before Rosemary’s Baby takes place so there is some fun and interesting cross overs between the 2 films But at the same time is a completely individual and separate story. Rosemary’s Baby is about a young and excitable couple who move into a new apartment block in New York city who are oddly conversed into the work of evil by the most unlikely old couple living in the apartment next door. Apartment 7A is about what happened in one of the other apartments. It stars Julia Garner as a struggling Broadway dancer trying to make her way in the industry, and the lengths and obstacles she faces in trying to achieve her dreams. The film is set amongst the backdrop of the Broadway Theatre scene in New York during the 60’s and I play a somewhat sinister and well established theatre producer in the film. So it was an interesting world to be a part of.

Where do you see yourself musically in five years, and what can we expect from King Curious in the near future?
Shit. I’ve no idea where i’ll be musically in five years? I’m always writing music and playing around with tracks and ideas. It’s instinctively what I do. There are always songs popping into my head. Whether I want them there or not! I guess now that I have experienced the process of creating and releasing a record from start to finish the idea of doing it again perhaps doesn’t feel like such a daunting one. I feel like I created King Curious as a kind of avatar for myself where I can exist in my own artistic and selfish space.. a kind of tonic from the constant compromise of film making.. which is a much more collaborative art form. And I love it for that. Making this record actually made me fall in love and appreciate the world of acting and film making even more to be honest. To embrace the social and collaborative way that film making works and to respect and appreciate that. With making a film the joy is being a part of something bigger than yourself. To be a smaller cog in a much bigger wheel. To give everything of yourself to the moments that you control and then hand the baton over to the process. But with that comes a fair amount of creative compromise or decisions being totally out of your control. Particularly with the business side of the industry so often getting in the way of something great. But with the King Curious project it’s my opportunity to be in the driving seat of my own universe. So I’m sure I’ll find myself back there again… but I’ve got no idea how, when, where or with what?