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Ask most musicians, and it's The Beatles, Bob Dylan or another similarly classic artist who provide aformative musical influence. Not Gary Go. The 24-year-old Londoner's dad worked with Jim Henson and his childhood heroes were The Muppets. "They were the real stars,"he says."Kermit The Frog's duet with Ray Charles on Bein'Green was really deep."
With his smart specs, fresh-faced looks and fondness for children's puppets, Go -real name Gary Baker -comes across more like a grown-up Harry Potter than a one-man Coldplay.
But he has picked up the baton marked "melancholyepics" only recently discarded by Chris Martin and co. Go's self-titled debut album, released in the spring, is stuffed with songs that he
describes as "self-help guides set to music".
"It's a mixture of many 'nesses'," he says. "Heaviness, emptiness, loneliness, positiveness.Is that a word?"
Go got an early start in the musi cbusiness .At 17 ,he worked in the post room at Zomba Records, home to Britney Spears. After being turned down for a job at Peter Gabriel's RealWorld Studios (Gabriel told him he should concentrate on his own music instead), he seized the offer of free time at a friend's studio in NewJersey. Moving into a house in Hoboken, he composed a new song, Brooklyn -a'50s-style crooner that stood apart from everything else he'd written. "Then I found this plaque," hesays, "It turned out that I was living in the house where Frank Sinatra had lived in his teens. I was possessed by the spirit of Sinatra."
0l' Blue Eyes aside, Go professes a love of Nine Inch Nails and envies the creative career of main man Trent Reznor. But he's sanguine about the inevitable Cold play comparisons. "If people compare me to Coldplay, well, they're one of the most successful bands around. If you started comparing me to The Tweenies, that's when I'd have a problem."
Mic Wright
Q February 2009
RECOMMENDED TRACK:Wonderful (forthcoming Decca single)
