Having separated, Hayden Thorpe then had his mid-life crisis: following the lengthy divorce between the Wild Beasts singer and the band which he’d called home since he was a teenager he headed off to California to, in his own words, ‘lose my mind’.
Whilst some of the past came back with him, not all of the man he was before it seems did. Part of the reason for this trip was to break free from inertia, as contractual obligations had meant that there was a year between taking the joint decision to split one of Britain’s most successful indie bands and an actual parting of ways. When it was done the quartet scattered, only Thorpe remaining in London.
Heading back to his home rehearsal space immediately to begin work on the songs that would become Diviner, Thorpe realised straight away that if anything needed paying back in earnest it was what was owed to the sliver of himself that had always remained outside of the Wild Beasts bubble.
Thorpe isn’t the first artist whose response to being outside the tent for the first time in decades is to strip everything back musically and shed some skin; Diviner was written mostly at the piano, and at its core rarely employs much more than that, unobtrusive guitars and a voice now pushed right to the forefront on a batch of tactile, vivid songs.
The instrument is the most essential of choices for anyone wishing to mine the full range of emotions, such is the meter and tone of it able to convey anything; the sombre melancholy of In My Name rubs shoulders here with the delicate synth pop of Earthly Needs, each taking different routes to bring the listener closer to a man often misunderstood in times past.
The titular opener is by contrast something of a postcard from his frozen Lake District self to Los Angeles, a place where everything felt possible, the generous sunlight echoing from chords that speak to the openness and exhilaration brought about by an unknown road. At the other end – or more correctly the closing of this first chapter of a different volume – Impossible Object is about being too close to life to understand its contours in full, the eyes deceiving, while the blurry ambient dapple of Spherical Time emerges from an idea originally conceived half a life ago.
Amongst these echoes though a vivid distinction is drawn between the tempting blind creative alleys of a solo project and the determined battle of starting a solo career, the beguilingly thoroughbred tones of Straight Lines and Stop Motion’s timeless, poignant melody both drawing deep from a natural talent adapting quickly to the new joys of self-reliance.
Such was his uncertainty at one point that Thorpe has confessed he considered releasing these songs pseudonymously before changing his mind; in many ways though the name makes no difference as the creator isn’t selling the past. You don’t always have to leave yourself to find yourself, but Diviner is a tattoo, new birdsong and a blank sheet of paper on which a man has made fresh signs in a new language.
