It’s been almost two years since James Page passed through an MRI scanner, his future about to change forever. Fortunately for us, this wasn’t the result of a medical issue, but the striking yet uncomfortable (for him) video treatment for ‘Better Man Than He’, the breakthrough that first introduced Sivu to our ears.
The song – ethereal, folky and introspective – marked a significant validation of Page’s groundwork for Sivu thus far. His first musical forays were in a band back in St. Ives, then upon moving to London he found session work “shit”, progressing through a succession of outfits in the capital. His solo songwriting developed slowly, weighted by anxieties and personal traumas, but found a benefactor in alt-J’s producer, Charlie Andrews, whose Brixton studio proved fertile ground for their blossoming partnership.
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‘Better Man Than He’
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“It’s nice having someone to bounce ideas off,” Page says of Andrews. “He does things in quite a leftfield way – it’s nice having someone who can say, ‘Let’s try this.’ In my mind, all I knew at the time was that I didn’t want to do acoustic songs anymore, I wanted to try to do something different.”
The pair collaborated on a handful of EPs, and the songs that would become ‘Something On High’, Sivu’s debut album, out now. When Clash first met Sivu – hot and hungover on our porch in Austin, Texas, during South By Southwest back in March 2014 – the songs were almost complete, recorded in the wake of the success of ‘Better Man…’
“When we were doing the other tracks in the studio,” he remembers, “it was a bit daunting to be like, ‘Well, this is a bit different from ‘Better Man...’ What do you want to do?’ But we just went with it.”
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The album is about my insecurities and my anxieties and the struggles that I was going through in my head, [and] I was looking into ways that those issues affected other musicians and artists…
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Six months later – long after the hangovers and tans have faded, with Page’s call centre day-job also a distant memory – his debut album is finally together. The songs, a perfect marriage of Page’s melancholic musings and Andrews’ lusciously layered and twinkling production, are imbued with spiritual considerations. “Are you afraid to die? / Cos I am too,” he sings in ‘Miracle (Human Error)’, while the sweeping ‘Communicate’ ends with the lines: “Life ends, we part / ’Twas a life in stars.”
The album title is drawn from letters by Van Gogh, who said of his painting ‘Sorrowing Old Man (At Eternity’s Gate)’, painted just two months before the artist took his own life, that “the strongest piece of evidence for the existence of ‘something on high’, namely in the existence of a God and an eternity, is… the fact that [anyone] can have moments of emotion that give him a sense of an eternal home that he is close to”.
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‘Miracle (Human Error)’
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“Because the album is about my insecurities and my anxieties and the struggles that I was going through in my head,” Page explains, “I was looking into ways that those issues affected other musicians and artists. [The painting] symbolises a guy full of dread and worry… He was kinda saying that this guy was the closest to ‘something on high’, meaning Heaven. I’m not religious, but I like that idea of something on high – the unknown – and I also like the emotion of being on a high. There are lows and highs on the record, and where I was at when I wrote it, it felt quite fitting really.”
This summer saw Sivu hit the festival circuit and cameo on the new alt-J album, while December brings with it a Bombay Bicycle Club tour support slot which will include dates at London’s mammoth Earls Court. Life is good for Page, then, as his songs from a darker, harder time carry him out into the light.
“It kinda feels like that chapter’s closed and it’s moving onto the next one,” he says. “Who knows what the next thing is gonna be?”
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Words: Simon Harper
Photography: Katherine Squier
‘Something On High’ is out now on Atlantic Records. Sivu online. See him live with Bombay Bicycle Club as follows:
December
3rd– De Montford Hall, Leicester
4th– Pavilions, Plymouth
5th– BIC, Bournemouth
7th– Apollo, Manchester
8th– Apollo, Manchester
10th– Civic Hall, Wolverhampton
11th– Usher Hall, Edinburgh
13th– Earls Court, London
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