“There might be any number of kids reading this who don’t have funds or a background of privilege that allows them to get started easily. I don’t want those people to think there are barriers,” he says, insisting that ideas come first. He cites his 2009 album ‘Solo Electric Bass 1’, a collection of bass solos, as an example of how his process can be incredibly stripped down. “Companies erect this edifice that you need this, this and this to sound great. Here’s matey boy in his studio and he looks hip and happy with his mixer.”

It’s an ethos taken to extreme levels with the album artwork and video for forthcoming live shows: they were made on the same Commodore Vic-20 he programmed to play beats to practice riffs along to as a kid in 1986, and used as a drum machine on ‘Be Up A Hello’.

MORAL OBLIGATION

In January 2018, while on a Norwegian island, Tom fell and broke his wrist. “It was a harrowing time,” he says. He damaged his scaphoid bone, which can require an operation and potentially lead to nerve damage — a huge cloud over someone who has played bass guitar since he was 11-years-old. While he’s thankfully recovered, it allowed him to indulge in his love of the feeling of a Year Zero moment, “Even if it’s an illusion, the feeling of wiping the slate clean. Looking at a box as a set of possibilities, rather than it having a sound or even a genre associated with it.”

Back at home in Essex, he dug out his old kit and set a rule of making a piece a day, then recording it. “I love crazy music, I loved music with a non-linear flow to it, but I also love house music out of Chicago in 1987 - the simple groove, the economy, the funk, the way the intensity builds up through repetition.” During this period he made what sound like straight-up house tracks, but they’re unlikely to reach fans. “I don’t believe there’s anything new in it and I don’t want to waste the public’s time,” he says when we ask why. His forte, his believes, is being idiosyncratic and innovative, and he feels a moral obligation to do this, rather than further clog up an already sentimental culture.

This process, though, led to him spending two days on a track, then abandoning any rules and developing it into the crazed opus that is ‘Be Up A Hello’, “Trying to consciously do something original”. This brings us back to his annoyance at retro culture gear fetishism: the idea that if you want the sound, you need the kit. “It turns gear into investable commodities, which takes it out of the reach of working musicians. And particularly out of the reach of people just starting out. It makes it this pointless holy grail.” Nobody can deny a 909 sounds great, he adds, but if it’s not there, it doesn’t matter.

His 909 is on every track on the record, except those without drums, but he still tried to squeeze out novel sounds: getting a liquid effect by using a midi process that sent dense streams of information to the instrument, closely packed triggers varying in velocity and frequency. “You get these big oceans of sound that pulsate. There are moments when the 909 becomes more like a synth.”