When people ask what you do, it must be nice to say, "I'm in Deep Sht." Tom Watson has that pleasure. He makes gauzy, noisy songs that roll through town like a thick, eerie fog. Tom lives around the corner from me in north London. His debut 7-inch Weird You is out now on No Pain In Pop. I spoke to him about legal wrangles, the genius of Mark E Smith, and Ipswich Town FC AKA Roy Keane's blue and white army AKA the finest football team the world has ever seen.
Download: Deep Sht, "Sidetripping"
On the cassette version of your Weird You EP there is a cover of The Fall's "The Container Drivers." Have you read Mark E Smith's autobiography? He's amazing.
Yeah, he's a really fucking funny guy, very tongue in cheek and very surreal. I always find myself laughing when listening to a new Fall record. I met him once, outside a pub in Croydon. I told him I was an admirer of his work, he laughed and said "cheers" in a very sympathetic voice.
I read on your blog that Deep Sht is now a solo operation. Did you sack the band in tribute to Mark E Smith?
Well, Deep Sht has always been a solo thing, recording-wise. I played a few shows with my friends Richard and Jack as a kind of power chord heavy three-piece rock band, but that was getting a bit boring. They've since fallen out and have embroiled themselves in a bitter legal feud, so to preserve their sanity we stopped playing live. I've done one solo show out, and I'm going to do one more at my house next week, then try to put a really weird and intense live band together next year.
This EP was recorded in your bedroom. Ideally, where would you record the next one?
I think I'd like to record it within the bomb bays of an airborne B-52 bomber, perhaps whilst the exhumed carcass of Screaming Lord Sutch is served from a nearby rotisserie. Maybe near a volcano. That's a level of cosmic heaviness I'd like to achieve. Either there, or at my friend Tyler from Twin Lion's house.
The vinyl release of Weird You is coming out on No Pain In Pop. They just one a Best UK Blog award. What makes them so awesome?
I think their appetite for finding new stuff is impressive, and their Peel-esque disregard for generic constraints is awesome. They were also nice enough to put my record out. However, one of them is sitting next to me at the moment so I don't want to go on about how great they are or I shall be reminded of this on a regular basis.
I first got into you because of your song "Zondervan." I grew up in Ipswich and Romeo Zondervan [ex- Ipswich Town FC footballer] was a hero, mainly because of the awesome name. Did you grow up in Ipswich too?
Ha, I wanted to call an old band of mine Zondervan, but apparently it sounded too "wizardy," whatever the fuck that means. It;d make a great name for a really heavy stoner band. People in that band would have to have great beards and wear blue shirts with "Fisons" written on the front.
Actually I'm from a little town half an hour down the road from Ipswich called Bury St Edmunds. It has a sugar beet factory, a brewery, a ruined abbey, and is mainly inhabited by drunken old people. Until a few years ago, you could walk around the center of town and fairly suppose that it was still 1955, but recently they've redeveloped everything and have made a bit of a hash of it. I live in London now; there is more stuff to do.
When I was in my early teens, me and some friends broke into Portman Road [ITFC's ground] and ran around on the pitch pretending to play football. Then we tried to climb a floodlight and got really scared. We were... IN DEEP SHIT. What's the deepest shit you've ever been in?
That's cool you got on the pitch. Er, I'm not sure. The deepest shit I've been in today is when I realised I've spent the last three days playing PES and haven't done any of the things I've been supposed to do for today. Which really, as shit goes, isn't all that deep.