“Humans are just long versions of pigs – we crackle in the sun. It’s the little details that make you wonder, that open you up to something. Perhaps I should use animals on the songs – I could be the new Doctor Dolittle!”And then there’s my latent obsession with death,” he deadpans. Many of his songs are written in his grandmother’s big Sussex house. She died last July, just after the album was finished, and although he attributes its mortality metaphors to the break-up of a five-year relationship rather than her passing, its mustier corners are suggestive of an old, wilting sense of place.Despite being dubbed the “Donnie Darko of the piano”, he doesn’t lapse into adolescent morbidity. Instead, there’s a brassy clamour to his songs that sounds almost fit to be swept along in a musical. He’s claimed The Wizard of Oz as an influence – “That was just a phase,” he laughs now – and if there are contemporary comparisons to be made, Rufus Wainwright and the Magnetic Fields’ Stephin Merritt are near fits for their showtune dash and romanticism “Oh, they’re brilliant,” he enthuses “and I’ve got stuff more in that vein There’s a song called ‘Angels on the Body’.
The lyric’s about how when you love someone, they have two angels on their shoulders rather than an angel and a devil. I’m proud of it but it didn’t make the album.”There’s a sense of restless ambition about Harcourt that has you believing he’ll be around for a while. He certainly strains at the leash on stage that night; all bullish and frisky, flitting between guitar and keyboard. He looks forward to making the next album: “I want it to be a corker – louder, faster, intense, just 15 songs, bam bam bam.
Not garage rock, that’d be stupid, but an album people aren’t expecting I don’t have to tell people I’ve got other sides. They’re there; they just haven’t been released yet.” Keep watching that man.. Ask any orchestral player what they want from a conductor, and the answers are likely to vary from imagination, intelligence and sound judgment, to a clear beat, an inner ear and the authority to put his or her stamp on a performance. So, in choosing the Israeli-born Ilan Volkov as their new chief conductor, members of the BBC Scottish Symphony Orchestra must have sensed that his instinctive musicianship would probably colour the intellectual qualities that at present rather dominate his musical personality. Though engaged initially on a three-year contract, you get the feeling that he’s going to be around for long enough to make his mark.
