David Kitt is dancing his way from survival back to the guitar
It has been six years now since David Kitt last graced us with an album and in that time since The Nightsaver he has devoted himself to other projects.
There’s been Spilly Walker, the house music project with his brother Robbie, and then the more downtempo deep house sounds of New Jackson. In the last 18 months he became part of David Gray’s live band.
When it comes to his David Kitt stuff, the softly spoken Dubliner has welcomed the distraction these outlets have afforded him, allowing him to work away quietly on new material, and, particularly in the latter case, affording him financial security and peace of mind.
“You show up, you do your job, you take pride in it, you try to do as well as you can, and you get paid at the end of the day,” he marvels. “That’s very unusual for me.”
That element of balancing financial survival with the creative struggle is not something we give too much consideration to as fans but Kitt says there’s a lot of hustle going on.
“It takes a certain kind of thick skin to keep at it,” he notes.
“It’s quite ironic for someone who generally puts in 60-70 hours a week to never really get paid that much,” he continues.
“And I’ve just about managed to survive to this point in my life by having a couple of very understanding landlords and getting a couple of lucky breaks when it was just about to go absolutely pear-shaped and I probably would have to get another job.”
These breaks include his time in the ranks of Nottingham’s Tindersticks and his recent stint with David Gray. Both have been great learning experiences for him but in the midst of his recent exploration of underground dance sounds, the latter has helped reignite his interest in the electric guitar.
“I think sometimes it’s like you have to go away to come back in a way,” he considers.
“You have to miss something to give you that desire again. There was an element of that. I’ve been working on a lot of electronic music as New Jackson, and that’s been taking up a lot of my time. So I suppose the guitar style has become something that was more recreational or therapeutic. Something that was an escape or just something I did almost more in the way that I did before I made records or when I was making early records that I wasn’t playing for anyone.
“But also I’ve been playing guitar with David Gray and I was kind of using that opportunity to develop a lot of these sounds. Part of the brief from him was that he liked a lot of those textures that I created on my records and he wanted me to do that. And I used the guitar to do that in ways that I didn’t expect that I could use guitar.”
ICYMI: @CorkOperaHouse's The Cave. David Kitt & Margie Jean Lewis. July17 @ Mitchelstown Caves http://t.co/Q9Q5NSVIlX pic.twitter.com/qvQMJx027X
— Cork Information (@whatsoncork) June 28, 2015
Not only has the experience got Kitt match fit with his guitar playing, it has also enabled him experiment with creating different textures on the instrument.
This period has also got him excited about music in a way he must have felt when he was creating ripples of excitement with his debut release Small Moments in 2000.
“I always find you do the best stuff when you’re supposed to be doing something else, when you’re working for someone else, and you’ve got something else to do. You have one hour to kind of indulge in your own creativity. And when you have that sense that little hour is maybe a bit more precious, often you come up with better stuff. So rather than sitting there for 11 hours staring at a blank page with the third coffee on kinda trying to force it or something. It’s working, I think, out more or less the way I hoped it would.”
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