Sparky Deathcap
R N Taylor is the first to admit he’s an unlikely candidate for viral stardom. Operating proudly outside of the mainstream, for the past decade the Newcastle-born multi-instrumentalist has put his solo work as Sparky Deathcap on hold, balancing a thriving career in editorial illustration with playing in adored indie-pop collective Los Campesinos!. And yet, almost 15 years on from his final EP, Taylor’s alt-folk solo project is now getting a much-deserved reappraisal, entrancing a whole new generation of listeners.
Open TikTok today and you’ll find his beautifully bruised pocket symphony ‘September’ soundtracking more than 750,000 creations. On Spotify, the remastered version has racked up over 36 million streams in just under nine months. Taylor is as taken aback as anyone by the song’s sudden resurgence.
“When people ask me how I pulled together the circumstances that made ‘September’ a viral hit I'm like, if anything I did the opposite by only having it available on Bandcamp,” he laughs. “But maybe by making the song harder to get hold of I added to the mystique.”
Championed by prominent Twitch streamer/YouTuber and Los Campesinos! superfan Wilbur Soot, the song’s reach expanded exponentially throughout 2022. Now, Cardiff-based indie imprint Heart Swells are delighted to release a newly mixed edition of its parent EP, Tear Jerky.
The roots of the five-track collection date back to 2008, when Taylor was living in London, having completed his MA in Kingston. Skint, sharing a dingy flat in Waterloo and still reeling from the collapse of a long-distance relationship, Taylor poured all his energies into songwriting, capturing his experiments using an old microphone, £15 headphones and a cracked version of Logic Pro.
A self-taught multi-instrumentalist and producer, Taylor’s “trial and error” creative approach dates back to childhood. Raised in Cheshire, he began playing guitar aged nine, having been sold a second hand instrument by a friend of his parents. Taylor became progressively less interested in learning other people’s songs and by the age of 12 he was writing his own, using the karaoke function on the family record player for the purpose of rudimentary multi-tracking.
By his mid-teens Taylor was regularly recording demos using a ragtag bag of semi-broken audio equipment donated by his next door neighbour, supplemented with items purchased by scraping together pocket money. His big influences at the time were Beach Boys, Pavement and R.E.M. By the time he left to study English Literature in York, Taylor had fallen hard for artists including Leonard Cohen, Jason Molina and David Berman of Silver Jews, and began applying a similarly evocative, often poetic lyrical approach to his work as Sparky Deathcap.
Looking back on highlights of the time now, Taylor cites sharing the album Let’s Build a Fire through French label Pulsar Records, and opening for artists including Jason Molina, Shearwater and Jeremy Warmsley. He was also invited to join Daniel Johnston’s UK touring band in 2007 – as immortalised in the concert film, The Angel and Daniel Johnston: Live at the Union Chapel. And yet, by the time he landed in Waterloo, Taylor was feeling disillusioned by what he (unfairly) perceived as a lack of career progress. He resolved to write an EP as a “last hurrah” for Sparky Deathcap.
Tear Jerky took shape while Taylor was working at a bookstore on the Charing Cross Road, with lyrics scribbled on customer order slips and demos sneakily played through the shop’s stereo system. Every night, he would head home to re-record ideas, crafting multi-tracked recordings so complex that some songs featured up to 200 tracks. Meanwhile, Taylor’s defiantly DIY set-up often resulted in songs cocooned in tape hiss and background noise – idiosyncrasies that only serve to make the EP sound more human.
Musically, you can trace the influence of Phil Elverum’s Microphones, of Magnolia Electric Co and Sufjan Stevens, and of Ys-era Joanna Newsom. From the beautifully lo-fi baroque-pop of ‘Glasgow Is A Punk Rock Town’ to ‘Send It To Oslo’s’ maximalist mix of analogue sounds, these ambitious yet intimate compositions prove the perfect foil for deeply autobiographical tales of heartbreak and recovery.
Written in the aftermath of a romantic betrayal, you could argue the EP follows the Kübler-Ross grief cycle, moving from denial (‘Winter City Ghosts’) to anger (‘September’), depression (‘Glasgow Is A Punk Rock Town’) to acceptance. ‘September’ was stylistically inspired by the work of American essayist Lorrie Moore, finding Taylor ricocheting between revenge fantasies and appeals for unity, declaring “I want to see the way the skin splits round his bones” one moment and confessing “I would have moved out there to be with you” the next.
For all the pain and anger, there’s a refreshing amount of black humour included too. On ‘Berlin Syndrome’ Taylor tells his ex, “You're the William Shatner of this elite genre of women that I have loved and lost.” Elsewhere, ‘Glasgow Is A Punk Rock Town’ sees him mocking his own naivety at missing his partner’s infidelity, referencing, “The weird inclusion of a boy’s name in the letters that you wrote me.”
Thank recent external validations, or on 14 years of emotional growth, but Taylor feels far prouder of Tear Jerky today than he did upon its original release. “For a long time I felt it was very amateurish, but now I realise this is actually good,” he explains with trademark self-deprecation. “I made some really good choices at the time, because I used my ears and I listened. And it’s strangely overwhelming when people say your music means so much to me. It's a shame I couldn't have known that years ago.”
Yet the reissue of Tear Jerky is less an ending, than the beginning of an exciting new chapter for Sparky Deathcap. And with new material in the works, Taylor is looking forward to seeing what the future holds. After all, if the past 18 months have taught him anything, it’s that you never know what’s round the corner.
-Gemma Samways 2023
