Mike
Mike is the lead singer of Clean Cut Kid.
He wrote the album A Crisis of Faith at the Death of a Loved One after his grandad Jimmy died in 2021.
“On that last day, each little node of the family had time to say goodbye. We were in this room that was barely lit and my granddad was this tiny thing in the bed.
I gave him a kiss on the shoulder and it was like kissing a bit of Iberico ham. I put that detail into Handsome Devil - “trembling hands to his salt-beef skin.”
My mum and dad were on one side and me and my brother were on the other. We were all wearing masks so we could only see each other’s eyes. But at that moment I looked at them and they looked at me and we all had this telepathic thought.
It was the strongest thing I’ve ever felt.
And the thought was: We’ll be you before we even know it, and you’ll be in the bed. And I’ll be giving you this kiss.
We all felt it. And it’s not said in any of the songs on Crisis, except it’s also the most said thing.
Crisis is so honest with all the names and personal details that mean nothing to anyone outside of the 40 or so people who know us well. There was no way to backtrack into vague translatability. The album’s really a love letter to my family.
I’m not writing for the audience whatsoever. I’m trying to tell my mum that I can feel her pain.
Why do I write from a personal place? I don’t think anybody from any walk of life gains anything from not being emotionally vulnerable.
People are so closed down. I mean, when they’re half-pissed on a Saturday night and they’ve got their arms around each other - maybe you see a bit of emotion then, but that’s after five or six pints.
I’ve seen some terrible things. I’m hardened, in a way. The normal emotional fluff you could start building a song on does nothing for me. But real music can have me bawling my eyes out at half nine on a Monday morning. Nothing else comes close.
Our songs have a personal weight to them - so Emily, for example, is about depression. We’ve always had people saying things like, “This saved me”. I wouldn’t begin to make music for a second if it wasn’t from a place of me being wide open.
With Crisis, though, it’s been on another level. There’s been hundreds and hundreds of unbelievably personal messages. These aren’t people who are shouting about the album online. They’re not talking publicly about grief being something in their life. They’re just writing directly to me.
It’s like the album’s a two-way door for people to share their story with me the way I’ve shared it with them.
“It’s like the album’s a two-way door for people to share their story with me the way I’ve shared it with them.”
When I’m getting ready to write an album, my subconscious brain starts looping. I’ll start taking in new music, watching plays, reading books. Someone’ll read me a poem and a single line will start haunting me.
You’re your own voice and your own narrative, but absorbing other people’s perspectives is a superpower.
That idea that grief is love’s lonely younger brother comes up in our song Grief. I got that from Nick Cave’s letter to a fan after his son died. Him talking about the exact amount of love you feel for someone, that’s the exact amount of pain you’ll feel when you grieve for them. It’s just the same as love, but it hurts.
Another thing that blew my mind was W H Auden’s poem Funeral Blues. His partner died and he writes about everything stopping and shutting down.
And then he writes Musée des Beaux Arts about Icarus falling out of the sky and Jesus being crucified and while all that’s going on there’s a horse scratching its arse on a tree - like, no one cares.
I mean, the duality of those things! The perspective that those two angles gave me!
I think it’s amazing the way that artists like Lucian Freud or Francis Bacon paint all the stuff we feel, not what we see.
With music, I’ve got a paintbrush. And you can use that power for good or evil.
I could use any musical ability I have to produce a mixture of the last five Dua Lipa songs and have the commercial gain that goes with it. But that doesn’t interest me at all.
The band’s attitude is “We’re going to feel all the stuff that Mike felt via Mike.” I’m so unbelievably lucky. It’s ride or die.
I feel these feelings for these people and then I make music. That’s it.
It’s the only thing I know how to do.”