![]() He remembers most particularly the day he chanced upon a copy of Pink Floyd’s 1971 album Meddle. I had to discover everything on my own.” He would badger his “cooler, older” sister to take him to thrift stores where he would rifle through the records. “They like music the same way they like paying bills or paying their mortgage, as in: this is just something people do. His parents were not particularly musical. Petty crime and skateboarding were the only things I had to do.” You realise you go to school, and you watch TV, and maybe you get to throw a brick through a window sometimes.” Did he do that? A smile snakes around Walker’s lips. “And then you’re like, ‘This place sucks!’ As soon as you discover skateboarding, or as soon as you hear a Black Flag record and then you realise you’re not in a counter-cultural place. His mother worked in a grocery store, his father in a car factory, and life was fairly sweet, he says, until he turned 13. Walker was raised in Rockford, a city of 150,000 people some 90 miles west of Chicago that was “economically depressed, once a big factory city, the victim of Reaganomics”. ![]() ![]() Watch Ryley Walker performing The Halfwit in Me – video ![]() It’s only a short break – he’s back in Europe this month, with five UK shows next week. At close quarters he is somewhat dishevelled – his skin ashen, his hair unruly, his eyes scrunched with weariness he has the look of a man who has spent many days half-nourished, over-soaked and crumpled up on a tour that has carried him from Illinois to the Brecon Beacons via Leipzig, Luxembourg and Hebden Bridge. It is early in the evening at Green Man festival in August 2016, and standing behind the counter in the Rough Trade tent, he has just delivered the final performance of his European tour – a short acoustic set of songs taken from his last album, Primrose Green, and his third, Golden Sings That Have Been Sung, which culminates in a cover of Van Morrison’s Fair Play followed by the prompt downing of a pint and the announcement of his heartfelt intention to get exceedingly drunk before catching a flight home to Chicago.įans met, records signed, hands shaken, we ride a golf cart across the festival site – Walker calling out exuberantly to the pedestrians as we trundle by. ![]()
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