A Matter of Choice: Kiran Leonard interviewed

Faced with overwhelming choice, some will retreat, daunted, while others will leap gleefully into its volumes of possibility. For example: at the end of February, Jake Bugg played the BBC’s much-vaunted 6 Music Festival at the Victoria Warehouse in Salford; a champion of the outdated vagaries of what supposedly constitutes Real Music – having bashed One Direction for not writing their own songs (while having co-writers for his own material) – Bugg’s hugely reductive style almost proudly refused to accept anything other than a hackneyed caricature of guitar-led music, as he pretended the previous 50-odd years of popular music had never happened.   

Earlier that day though, on the same stage as Bugg, another songwriter born in the mid-90s ripped through a set that criss-crossed through different terrains like a slalom skier – doing so with a gloriously uninhibited freedom as he and his band swept through everything from operatic camp to hard-driving kosmische.

At 18 years old, Kiran Leonard is a musician who views choice as something to be embraced; his music – represented most comprehensively on last year’s album, Bowler Hat Soup – is a patchwork torn apart to reveal fantastical worlds, with narratives taking in everything from alien abduction to Brunswick Street’s hipster critique and tales of his native Saddleworth – a sleepy parish to the north-east of Manchester. Fans of the wilful kitchen sink approach and histrionics of Of Montreal’s Kevin Barnes or Sufjan Stevens can expect to find an instant affinity with Leonard – Bowler Hat Soup contains 22 instruments, ranging from the orthodox to the improvised, such as the hitting of a radiator to replicate a cowbell sound. 

It all points to a palette that started out skewed from the off and has only pooled into more beguiling shades at the touch of an artist who believes that it is not enough to simply collect styles, it’s how the styles are edited and pulled together that’s important. Meeting Leonard at Nexus in Manchester’s Northern Quarter, the teenager admits he skipped out on the developmental phase of getting into music. “I had an older brother who did all that for me,” he says. “Then he started getting into things like The Locust and The Mars Volta and that’s where I started, I suppose.”

“When I first heard Water Walk by John Cage it really provided a focus and an inspiration for me – using instruments that aren’t meant to be instruments” – Kiran Leonard

Leonard was born into a music-loving household as the fourth of five siblings; his dad was a professional guitarist in the 70s and 80s and as such he grew up in a house filled with instruments and recording equipment – something he only started taking full advantage of a few years ago. “I actually started making electronic records, and did about a dozen albums between 2008 and 2010,” he says; “but I wasn’t even using hardware, it was just Ableton software straight on to the laptop – with a greater understanding of recording equipment came more instrumentally-led music.” Some of those early recordings remain, on a compilation called A Seed is a Sovereign, although the rest he has since deleted for “not being good enough.”

Shorn of a physical music community to interact with in rural Saddleworth, Leonard took to music social networking sites like Last.fm to “look for other 13-year-olds who were into The Mars Volta.” Among several online friendships he formed was one with a drone artist going under the name of Jane Barbe. This led to a split release on a small Canadian cassette label, Prairie Fire, with Leonard going under the name Akrotiri Poacher and providing a side of abrasive noise collage. A project he’s revisited since, with a 2012 release on the same label as well as a self-released split alongside local improv rock troupe Locean, such truly outré explorations haven’t as yet found their way into his self-monikered music over the last couple of years – although he derives plenty from the avant-garde when finding the sounds that make up his schizophrenic pop mini-operas. “When I first heard Water Walk by John Cage it really provided a focus and an inspiration for me – using instruments that aren’t meant to be instruments,” he says. “But a lot of my improvisations are just because I’m lacking the actual instrument I need – for instance I didn’t have a cabasa; so I had to wrap some sandpaper around a wooden block and scrub it with a brush. Pulling songs together does come quite quickly.”

Leonard took control of every part of Bowler Hat Soup, the genesis of which can be traced back to a recording found on his Bandcamp, The Big Fish. The in-and-out piano-pounding histrionics of Dear Lincoln was also written around the same time – at just 14 years of age – the other tracks following more or less in order. “I wrote that whole album chronologically,” he reveals. “I kind of write records as records and then only if there’s sometimes a gap I’ll write a song to fill it, in order to make the cohesiveness and the chronology of it work. But the stuff I write that I don’t like, I simply don’t record – it’s not like there are any outtakes from Bowler Hat Soup.” Dear Lincoln’s only hints at the youth of its writer are thanks to the mispronunciation of the name Nietzsche in its verse – everything else is impossibly perfect; short, punchy, with a hook as memorable as the one on the first 7" you owned, but somehow containing a depth that suggests you could dig deep beneath its saccharine sweet pop for an eternity without finding its crystalline sugared base.

To talk to Leonard now about an album that was originally self-released at the beginning of 2012, before being snapped up for an official launch by Mary Epworth’s Hand of Glory label last year, is to find an artist already dismissive of its contents – not out of self-deprecation, more an eagerness to progress and a desire to move on from songs that he’s been playing for the best part of four years. “There was a musical narrative but a lot of the words were gibberish,” he says. “I wrote them as I was recording. I’ve started taking lyric writing more seriously – particularly with the new record; but I never used to, I found them a bit tedious.” Not that Bowler Hat Soup is a record without lyrical content. Take Brunswick Street for instance: “It’s this street in Australia in Melbourne that’s full of hipsters,” he explains, fully aware that we’re sitting in a café in an area of Manchester that shares plenty of Brunswick Street’s traits. “And I remember walking around it and thinking it was full of fucking arseholes… but now I’m one of them!”

However Leonard is still relatively new to Manchester as a city; his live experiences were largely confined to playing DIY all-dayers in the basements of its suburbs and the bar room floors of the Northern Quarter, until he was suddenly plucked to play at the BBC’s two-day event alongside the likes of Bugg, The National, Damon Albarn and Wild Beasts among many others. “It was quite stressful,” he says of jumping up to play in front of hundreds of people. I wouldn’t say it was unpleasant, but it was surreal.” It’s something you suspect Leonard can expect more of, as he continues to make the most of the choices on offer.