‘What kind of god builds a world on this forgotten town?” Richie Culver seethes on Curse, closing out his dark, cinematic album I Trust Pain. He’s referring to Withernsea, a faded seaside resort near Hull, where he grew up and then desperately wanted to leave. “I remember feeling so resentful,” he says. “I heard Tracey Chapman’s Fast Car and thought: is this song about me?” He duly got out aged 17, eventually settling in London and finding success as a visual artist and musician.
But in recent years, the 46-year-old began hearing younger avant garde musicians “talking about their satellite towns” in other often forgotten corners of the north. “I’d never looked at the north like that, in the way these artists are unravelling these narratives.” Having dabbled in music for decades, he was inspired by these acts to embark on his first serious records, with Withernsea as his muse – finally seeing his old town as “ripe for storytelling”.
