It was dusk as the plane began to descend over the South China Sea towards land, and the sun was gently climbing a curve through the sky. Archy Marshall hates flying. Something about floating through the air at 900km/hour in an aluminium tube feels unnatural to him, and this was his 22nd flight of the year. But as he peered down onto the pastel blue sea, dotted with little red ships and industrial cranes, he felt visually stimulated – his eyes had never seen a landscape like Hong Kong’s. It was February 2014. By this point Archy and his band had become vampires, nocturnal animals, blooming moonflowers; touring the planet, playing shows every night, partying until the sun rose, and then waking up in places like this. As the taxi to the hotel sped through Kowloon, he pressed up against the window and observed the hugeness around him, skinny soaring buildings disappearing like stalks into the clouds, as people leaned out from vertigo-inducing heights to casually hang their washing. At the window of the room in his skyscraper hotel, he gazed all the way down to earth; onto the city and all the roofs below, and all the water and mud that had gathered on those roofs, and thought to himself, “I’m pretty fucking lucky.” It was a moment he had almost imagined a year earlier, when writing his debut album, Six Feet Beneath the Moon.

© Joshua Gordon

The world had been waiting for an album from Archy Marshall ever since he appeared on Bandcamp in 2010 as Zoo Kid: a red-haired 16-year-old guitarist with the sandblasted vocals of a 74-year-old whisky drinker. His demos were good, too good. Songs like Out Getting Ribs and Baby Blue were vivid and lyrical distillations of metropolitan dreams and nightmares that made critics delirious. By the age of 18 he’d changed his name to King Krule, released an EP via True Panther, and been nominated for the BBC Sound of... poll. When the debut album was finally released in 2013 it was a raw and melodramatic account of teenagehood. His fans loved it. The critics, once again, loved it. Frank Ocean sang his praises and Beyoncé shared one of the album’s tracks to her 64 million plus Facebook followers. Superlatives like “the voice of a generation” began to thrum around his name. “I thought that was it for me,” he says. It’s 8.12pm on a Friday night, and he’s sitting across the table from me in a South London beer garden, wearing a heavy jacket with a thin silk scarf and a black beret. At least I think that’s what he’s wearing – I can barely see him; there’s no outdoor lamps near us, and the moon is one of those weak and fading crescents that’s no help at all. His new album The Ooz came out today; he celebrated with a homemade Full English. By his right hand side is an ash walking stick with an ornate golden handle. At first, I assumed it was a fashion statement, something to accentuate his status as the unofficial King of South London, but when it took him more than 30 seconds to shake my over-committed and outstretched hand earlier I quickly realised it was actually keeping him upright. He badly hurt his knee while drunk two days ago, messing around up a hill nearby which has “the best views of London”, and he could barely move onstage at the album launch show last night in Kingston-Upon-Thames. It’s clearly plaguing his thoughts. It’s even infiltrated his dreams: his subconscious mind took him on a jog with Sky Ferreira and her ‘dad’ David Lynch last night, but all Marshall could do was limp along behind them.

Photography: Joshua Gordon

Screen print: Marcroy Eccleston Smith

He slides a match out from a box and lights a rollie. It briefly illuminates his face and the golden cap on his front tooth flickers. He blows out a beam of smoke and picks up where he left off, recollecting the release of 6 Feet Beneath the Moon: “I remember thinking, I’m gonna be huge, I never have to worry about anything again.” It felt like that for a while at least, as his prodigious talents sent him across Europe, Asia and North America. But, as artists of every generation discover time and time again, critical acclaim doesn’t always equate to financial success. “It was one of those records that resonated with people,” he explains, “but those people didn’t necessarily put money in my pockets.” As his world tour came to an eventual end, he began a turbulent descent back to earth. He returned to London to find he’d been kicked out of the flat where he lived alone, and all of his possessions were now back at his mum’s house where he grew up in South London. “I’d done all these things, but I didn’t have much to show for it,” says Marshall. When friends asked how it was to tour the world, he’d say, “Yeah, it was alright.”

© Joshua Gordon