Ghostpoet: “I’m very comfortable with the direction I’ve gone in now”

Nursing a gin and a football hangover (“Liverpool pissed me off yesterday! It’s annoying for me because they get put into this sense of security,” he says following his club’s 3-0 loss to West Ham), Ghostpoet is readying himself for a mid-afternoon Radio 1 / NME Stage slot at Reading Festival.

Yesterday saw Obaro Ejimiwe showcasing new album ‘Shedding Skin’ at Leeds. A more percussive, hard-hitting work than the Mercury-nominated ‘Peanut Butter Blues & Melancholy Jam’, in a strange way this city-centric record is built for festivals. Ghostpoet is in agreement. “I wanted the band to make sure they could translate the record as well as possible. I did a couple of tiny shows before we did any official ones, just to test the material and see how people react to it. It was really good, exactly what I hoped people would think,” he says. “They got it immediately. The other records were more atmospheric - you need to be in the live setting for a while in order for it to click.”

‘Shedding Skin’ saw Ghostpoet going bigger and bolder from all sides. It should earn him another Mercury nod (he judged the prize last year, where Young Fathers were crowned victors). But Ejimiwe is aware that “bigger” doesn’t always equate to “better”.

“My immediate thought when I was starting thinking about the next record was: ‘I wanna be bigger!’ But then I thought about whether that would make it more artistically interesting,” he states. “I’m very comfortable with the direction I’ve gone in now, and I wanna continue down this road. But I need to make sure it’s still artistically interesting, for myself and the listener. Music that’s led by guitar can become very repetitive and predictable. I need to find a happy place between that. I don’t wanna do ‘easy’, and it’s easy to just use more amps and get a louder sound.”

Ghostpoet plays the Radio 1 / NME Stage at Reading Festival today, 13.50.