Daniel Alexander Copyright: Daniel Alexander

When Welsh multi-instrumentalist Ali Lacey was asked to provide the music for a TV ad campaign for a deodorant in 2015, he axed Axl Rose's screeching rock vocals and slashed Slash's screaming guitars.

The result,an atmospheric, sweeping ballad in the vein of Bon Iver and Sufjan Stevens found itself nominated for a handful of advertising awards.

Three years on, Ali - who records under the name Novo Amor, says he would rather forget about it.

"It is weird, I was making music before that but I guess it was a launching point where people could hear my music," he admits.

"I did the cover especially for the advert, I mean Guns N' Roses are great but I couldn’t see myself covering their music.

"Looking back at it, there will be a time when I want to take it off the internet if I can. The advert is dead and gone now."

The 27-year-old, who grew up in Llanidloes, Wales but now calls Cardiff his home, has been a musician since his formative years, playing drums since the age of 12 and the guitar since he was 15.

He started producing music "at about 14".

"I never gave myself a Plan B," he adds.

Quote Message: I was a drummer in an indie rock band and a lot of the stuff I was making was rock and metal music. It was very, very different but I feel like a lot of the stuff comes through in my music now... but the songwriting is completely different as is the sound. I was a drummer in an indie rock band and a lot of the stuff I was making was rock and metal music. It was very, very different but I feel like a lot of the stuff comes through in my music now... but the songwriting is completely different as is the sound.

Quote Message: I am a soft singer and it doesn’t really work with the heavier music. I am a soft singer and it doesn’t really work with the heavier music.

Lacey credits a trip to the US six years ago, to upstate New York specifically, to shape his current musical direction.

That and a particularly bad romantic break-up.

"I started listening to folk music. I was producing film scores, not professionally but I was an aspiring film score composer and I was reading books on orchestration and ripping videos off YouTube and re-scoring them.

"A lot of my music is quite cinematic, with strings and such but I started listening to stuff like James Vincent McMorrow and Keaton Henson and Sufjan Stevens and - it sounds like a cliche - but I went through a break-up and a lot of the songs started to feel more relevant to me than they had before. It's all very cheesy looking back on it now."

Lacey's first Novo Amor EP, Woodgate, NY, was released in March 2014 and, later that year, he released several tracks with fellow producer Ed Tullet.

Their collaboration bore an album, Heiress, which was released in 2017.

Lacey's forthcoming Birthplace LP marks his debut as a solo album artist, though he says some songs were written while they worked together "so a lot of the ideas were ideas that we came up with together... but it is very much a Novo Amor album."

He has shared the title track from the record, which comes hand-in-hand with a stunning video (above) which recently won video of the year at the Association of Independent Music Awards and has been shortlisted alongside artists including alt-J, Gaz Coombes and Young Fathers at the UK Music Video awards.

It's eerily moving as a fully-clothed man swims silently through coral reefs before coming face to face with a whale made entirely of discarded plastic waste.

It seems to talk about mankind's fragile relationship with nature and the environment and addresses issues like pollution of the seas.

"Videos are a really important aspect," says Lacey. "For Birthplace, we got pitched the idea and thought it was too good not to use.

"I don’t really want myself in the video, I don’t need a slightly egotistical video of me singing.

"After that video, it’s harder to find what to do next to raise the bar."

While the musician says the director's interpretation of the song and its lyrics may be different to his own, the visuals work.

"I don’t have any political or environmentally charged songs. The track is more about looking back at a place, looking at something with loving eyes but realising you’re better off without it."

In fact, Lacey says he shies away from becoming a message songwriter, preferring to leave politicising to others.

"I listen to music like Rage Against the Machine or Enter Shikari or artists who have a political message and I love their music. I’m not necessarily big on the music lyrically but I love what it can do to create groups of people who stand up for things.

"But it’s not something I want to write about or feel comes naturally to write about, it’s not really me."

Though much of the new album is solely Lacey playing (guitar, bass, banjo, keys, drums etc etc), on the road he is joined by more musicians.

He insists he's "not much of a frontman", adding he is "much more comfortable at home working on ideas and being able to throw them away if I don’t like them".

"The live environment is completely different, if you mess it up, you mess it up. I’m just not from that background and I’m not much of a singer."

His first solo performance, four years ago, was "kind of horrible... I think I drank a bottle of wine before I got on stage and there were about 10 people.

"I kept messing up the tuning on my guitar, it wasn’t very good."

But if the start was a bit wobbly, the name of his debut album points to new beginnings.

"I guess Birthplace as a song, represents change and the release of an attachment to something, it’s a theme that inadvertently started to manifest within the record as I was making it.

"I’ve always been inspired by sudden changes and the creation of this record has been the output of this.

"Novo Amor - the translation is 'New Love', which is awfully cringey, but that’s why I started making the music, to make a new love for myself and give myself a new direction."

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