Boozer banter, getting stoned by the canal, and heroic siblings – here’s the stuff that makes Hot Milk’s gobby singer happy.
“I'm really into [poet] John Cooper Clarke at the minute. I just stick him on shuffle. I think it's because I saw him, I got taken by my partner, and I just loved it. I’m the kind of person who, if I like one thing, that's all I'll listen to for about six months. In my life, there’ll be things that I enjoy, and then I kill it to death, and then I never listen to it again. Lyrically, he's very clever, and I love everything he represents. I love what he's managed to do as a poet in the 21st century. You can go all over the world and just read his little fucking poems. That’s fucking mad. I love that stuff.”
“I've tried margaritas every corner of this planet now, and even a bad one's good. I've never been to Mexico, though, which is so annoying. The best margarita I’d say is probably in Death & Co in LA, which is annoying, because I don't like saying anything in LA is good. But if I'm having a bad day, just get me a margarita, and suddenly the day's better. I make them myself, just on the rocks. I’d love to have a bar in the dressing room at festival season, have a little sign up saying ‘Free margaritas’ so all the bands can come in. That’d be mad.”
“I love a chat with an old man. You know when there’s an old bloke in the pub who's local and has mad opinions? You can sit and you just listen to them and be like, ‘Okay, Terry, right, okay…’ It’s good to try to understand how their brain works as well – I feel like that’s a very important thing to do. I think we need to listen to old people more, and pub chats are good for that, give them a platform for a minute. They love chatting, and don't we all love chatting?”
“One of my favourite things to do is go down the canal in Manchester, which is right next to where I live, have a joint and just walk around for an hour. Nobody else is down there, because they're all scared of the canal, so it becomes my canal. It's really like the back of my hand when I walk. You can walk to town from here – not that I can always be arsed to do so. But there’s just something about a canal path late at night, and especially when you know it's very quiet and you feel like it's you in the water. That's very nice. I feel like, this is my little world now, and no-one else can come into it. It's peaceful, and I end up getting everything done late at night – doing my dissertation at uni, anything like that. My mum's like that as well. She always wakes up in the night and does ironing and stuff.”
“She’s training to be a nurse, but she had an operation couple years ago, and it went very wrong. She was disabled, she had paralysis in her legs. Through lots of physio and stuff slowly get her legs back, and she's an absolute hero. I would have given up. Seeing her go through all of that is astonishing. Watching her come back from all of that and manage to get back on a nursing course and nearly complete it, despite the fact that she's actually in more pain a lot of the patients, makes her one of my favourite things or people ever. She’ll tell you she's just a normal person, but she's not. Going through that as a family as well, I think it teaches you to take stock of everything extraordinary that can happen to you in life. It really grounds you. She's one of my favourite people for a multitude of different reasons, but selfishly, because she makes me aware of how lucky I am.”
Hot Milk play 2000trees this month. Their new album Corporation P.O.P is out now via Music For Nations
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