Yahoo News Childhood's Ben Romans-Hopcraft: 'Living as a young person in London can feel thankless'
Even outside Brixton Tube station — regular haunt of preachers, steel-pan players and string-vested day drinkers — Ben Romans-Hopcraft is causing a minor stir. Two separate girls catch his eye and wave. One passing bearded guy stops to shake the 27-year-old Childhood frontman’s hand and congratulate him on a video the band recently shot around the corner. “Yeah, I paid him to say that,” deadpans Romans-Hopcraft, as the fan leaves. “He made it sound pretty natural, to be fair.”
Joking aside, it’s not a huge surprise that this south Londoner — a conspicuous 6ft 4in, with a loose, windswept afro, and today decked out in flared brown trousers and an open cream shirt — suddenly seems to be enjoying local folk hero status. Having previously only troubled the playlists of indie insiders, Childhood have just conjured one of the year’s most appealing pop sneak-attacks.
Universal High — their second record, released last Friday — represents a fascinating, creative pivot from the soaring Nineties revivalism of Lacuna, their 2014 debut. Dripping hazy sun-frazzled soul, catchy bursts of falsetto and bags of synth-driven 1970s swagger, it arrived aboard a swelling wave of mainstream radio support (its irrepressibly funky lead single California Light made the BBC Radio 6 Music A-list), high-profile praise (“Lianne La Havas sent me a picture of her in one of our new T-shirts, which was just bizarre,” laughs Romans-Hopcraft) and multiple “sound of the summer” critical hosannas. Even the band’s new look took shape after Romans-Hopcraft received consultation from in-demand menswear designer Grace Wales Bonner. Not bad when you consider this new direction began life with the skint singer forced to relocate to his mother’s place in West Norwood.
“I couldn’t afford to live independently at that point so I moved back,” explains Romans-Hopcraft, once we’ve migrated to a sunny nearby pub garden for coffee. A reappraisal of his mother’s old soul records mingled with his own experiments with the likes of Shuggie Otis, Marvin Gaye and Gil Scott-Heron to provide a blueprint for how Childhood would move from the “mixtape vibe” of their first record to something more “cohesive”.
“I got really into the atmosphere of those records,” he adds. “Not just the songwriting but the production; those very cinematic landscapes that Marvin Gaye is very good at.”
So, armed with this new vision, Romans-Hopcraft headed to Atlanta for six weeks (joined later by other band members Leo Dobsen, Thomas Fiquet, Max Danieli-Fantin and Jonny Williams) to write and record with former Gnarls Barkley producer Ben Allen III. While he also experienced new wave hip-hop in local “trap” clubs (“It seemed the customary way for a trap night to end was a massive fight breaking out,” he smiles), it was in the American South that Romans-Hopcraft found another major plank of Childhood Mk II.
“Going to the home of a lot of black civil rights and black Western culture in general was really humbling and fitting,” he says. Romans-Hopcraft also talks about much of Universal High being influenced by comparisons between the US and his south London home. And, for all its honeyed harmonies, lead single California Light is inspired by a drunken incident on a pre-university trip to San Francisco.
“Me and my friends were super-inebriated and we were like, ‘Oh my god, these lights are just amazing’,” he chuckles. “Then all of a sudden we hear, ‘Don’t move!’ It turned out the lights were actually police lamps on the top of squad cars. They had guns pointed at us. It was insane. We ran and most of us got caught by the police. In the end it was fine, they didn’t arrest us or anything, but I always had that in my mind as the most sobering and disappointing comedown moment ever. You think you’re in this amazing scenario and the reality is you’re just in the shit.”
Look back at Romans-Hopcraft’s upbringing and this songwriter’s eye makes complete sense. Raised near Herne Hill, he is the son of Hopal Romans, a dance teacher, and Robin Hopcraft, trumpet player and founding member of semi-legendary Brixton band The Soothsayers (“He actually wrote the new horn arrangements for Childhood”). Even Romans-Hopcraft’s twin brother Miles — whom he currently shares a Brixton flat with — DJs and produces under the name Wu-Lu.
Music, Romans-Hopcraft reckons, stopped him “being defined by his surroundings”. “I know certain people that have taken a completely different route in life to me,” he continues. “But creativity was always a big source of distraction [for me]. I played clarinet in my dad’s band when I was a kid and, having those experiences at festivals when I was young made me realise there was more to life than what I saw around me. Even if [my area] was quite shitty some times, there was always something beyond.” Although Childhood formed while Romans-Hopcraft was studying American Literature at Nottingham University in 2011, Brixton has been a long-time muse for the band (early track Sweeter Preacher references those aforementioned street evangelists). Earlier, he pointed out a much-missed, dirt-cheap Portuguese bar forced into closure by the redevelopment of the railway arches. What does he make of the gentrification war in his postcode?
"This area hasn’t changed as much as some,” he says, evenly. “I still see a lot of the same people I’ve seen knocking around throughout my life which is good. And I’m not anti-anything because, honestly, who doesn’t like a bit of nice tapas or whatever?” This is tempered by a healthy dose of millennial reality, though. “It can feel like quite a thankless task living as a young person in London these days,” he adds. “You work really hard but you don’t make enough money to really live. You fight for your community but sometimes you feel let down by your local council. So it can be exhausting.”
With plans already afoot for album three (“We want to get in the studio before the year is out”), Romans-Hopcraft has not ruled out challenging his “village mentality” with a move to another country. But he’s also quick to point out that an attitude born of the occasionally cash-strapped, frantically experimental south London music community he’s still embedded in (his side project, Insecure Men, features Fat White Family’s Saul Adamczewski and Sean Ono Lennon) is directly responsible for his current career uptick.
“I’d like to make money but it’s definitely not the reason I’m in music,” he says, slurping the dregs of his Americano. “And that’s why I felt a lot more confident about changing it up. I knew I couldn’t bank on this making me rich, so it was freeing. Instead of thinking I needed to consolidate and appease people that were paying my bills, I felt a lot more liberated and I realised that the specific reason I’m here is to make myself happy creatively.” Well, he’s making a growing number of other people — and a sizeable chunk of Brixton — happy while he’s at it.
Universal High (Marathon Artists) is out now
