All hail - King Curious unveils long-awaited debut album.
Image: Sequoia Ziff.
While a glance through his acting credits leaves you in no doubt of his musical talents, Jim Sturgess is still primarily known as the star of films such as Across the Universe, Fifty Dead Men Walking and Cloud Atlas. That could all be about to change with the forthcoming release, under the artist name King Curious, of his first album, Common Sense for the Animal.
Although Sturgess has been playing in bands since he was fifteen, it’s taken a long time to reach this milestone, as he explains. The original recordings for the album were made in 2019 with Toydrum’s Pablo Clements and James Griffith (formerly of UNKLE) in their Brighton studio: “a laboratory of instruments and vintage synths, drum machines and drum kits – it’s just a toy shop of great stuff”. When Sturgess had to head out to Vancouver to film the second series of Home Before Dark straight afterwards, the album was a “jumble sale of sounds” but he intended to return home after five months and start finessing the tracks. “And then COVID happened, and I got stuck out in Vancouver for nearly seventeen months, and then had a baby, so that took over a lot of stuff…”
He also had his acting career to keep on track: it’s been a busy period, although some projects were stalled or cancelled during the recent strikes, including a TV series called The Bends. “We shot this amazing pilot out in Berlin, and we went to Sicily. I was very, very proud of it, I thought it was going to be a great show.” But he’s just finished filming a mini-series for Disney+ that will go ahead; based on Playdate, Alex Dahl’s bestselling thriller about child abduction, it covers “quite difficult subject matter, especially when you’ve just had a child. So that was a fun way to spend your summer!”
Another forthcoming release that Sturgess is excited about is Apartment 7A, which imagines what happened in the few hours before the start of Rosemary’s Baby. “There’s a moment in Rosemary’s Baby where a girl has jumped out the window and committed suicide, just as they’ve moved into this apartment. Apartment 7A ends with that girl jumping out of the window. Who was that girl, and why did she jump out of the window? What was her story?” His co-star is Julia Garner, whom he’s admired ever since her first starring role in 2012’s Electrick Children. “I remember thinking that girl’s brilliant. I’d noticed her throughout her career, always picking interesting film roles, she’s always A+ in everything she puts her hand to.” Although Apartment 7A is set in New York, filming was an easy commute for Sturgess. “We shot it in London, madly enough – a lot of it down at the Hackney Empire, ten minutes from my house, so it was great! We had a good time making it, was good fun.”
“It’s unavoidable that there will be an expectation of soft and beautiful songs. There’s nothing you can do; you can’t start writing or thinking about that stuff too much. And it was never about that, it was always very, very personal for me, without much thought of how people would receive it”
He’s conscious that many colleagues have failed to make a successful transition from actor to musician and wonders if the two roles are in conflict, music demanding authenticity while acting is all about pretending. “With music, if it’s going to be real you have to put all of yourself out there.” Having fallen into a pattern of making music, enjoying the process of collaborating with friends but never taking it into a public arena, he needed a nudge from those around him to get it over the finish line. After years of being focused purely on the creative side, he reluctantly turned his attention to the form-filling, contract-signing, business side of music. “Then I had to start arranging what it was going to look like visually – the artwork, music videos – and it reignited a flame for the record, and I got up for putting it out. Once you get album artwork you start to go, ‘OK, this is an album, it’s not just a load of music that sits on my computer.’”
A largely electronic soundscape constructed from vintage synthesizers and samples, with tracks that evoke dark emotions interspersed among more uplifting songs, the album might surprise its audience, who could be forgiven for expecting the standard singer-songwriter fare. “It’s unavoidable that there will be an expectation of soft and beautiful songs. There’s nothing you can do; you can’t start writing or thinking about that stuff too much. And it was never about that, it was always very, very personal for me, without much thought of how people would receive it.” As a result, the album is what he describes as “a free-for-all: whatever feels like a good idea, let’s weave it in there and make it feel and sound unified, but throw in a load of different stuff.” His breakthrough role saw him singing Beatles songs in Across the Universe, and the band were a touchstone for this pick ‘n’ mix approach to influences. “The Beatles were very mixed in their songwriting styles, they threw it together into a giant melting pot of creativity, and out came Sgt Pepper or something like that.”
Image: Sequoia Ziff.
He describes the first single to be released, “A Premonition of a Lonely Soul”, as “an interesting and gentler ease in. We wanted to put something where I’m singing, and there’s some melodies, so it was a more gentle way to start introducing the music.” The accompanying video was directed by Ruffmercy (aka Russ Murphy), whom Sturgess first encountered after being blown away by ’88, his animated short for the Barbican’s Boom for Real Basquiat retrospective. “The first video was made for no money with my friend and artist Tobias Ross Southall. I mean, it was literally us waving a camcorder around. We shot it in about half an hour. But then Russ did his thing, gave it back and said, ‘It’s yours.’ And I said, ‘How much do you want?’ He said, ‘Nothing, this is for you, man.’ So it was a beautiful start to that next chapter.”
Sturgess’s hometown of London has had a significant effect on Common Sense for the Animal. “It’s unavoidable that your day-to-day environment is going to find its way into the fibre of the music,” he says. “A lot of the songs are written as I wander around the city daydreaming ideas. So it’s a big part of the record. I know the album would sound completely different had I been wandering around Los Angeles instead – it would probably sound more like the Beach Boys.” While the city’s atmosphere pervades the whole album, on stand-out track “Fears of London” the inspiration was more direct. “I’d always wanted to write a song about London but couldn’t really find a way in. So one night I sat on top of a night bus and just watched a Friday night unfold. I scribbled down what I saw and what I felt and the song kind of wrote itself. It’s a kind of weird, twisted love letter to my neighbourhood, I suppose.”
The latest single released is “The Hollowman Come”, featuring US soul singer Sister. Sturgess was again able to call on a trusted friend to direct the video – “to dive in and come up with ideas together, and get excited about what it could be, was amazing” – while the choreographer from Across the Universe organized the silhouetted dancers, whose role is deliberately ambiguous. “One minute they were politicians, one minute they were newsreaders, one minute they were refugees, one minute they were preachers … they were the disenchanted, they were the disconnected, it was all the things that you see in the news.” For Sturgess, shooting the video in LA was a high point in his music’s journey to becoming a fully realized album. “There were all these people helping out and coming together, bringing their brilliance and their time, for this bit of music I’d written in my bedroom. To suddenly hear it being blasted out on the speakers, while there’s all this commotion going around, was pure joy. I loved every minute of it.”
Common Sense for the Animal arrives early 2024.
Author: Rachel Goodyear
Updated 31/01/2024.