As any musician will tell you, the rehearsal room is no place for princessing. “I’d no idea if she was any good,” says the singer-songwriter Tom Walker of his unlikely session musician, known to her fans as the Duchess of Cambridge.
“I’d never seen her play. And she’d never played alongside me, so maybe she didn’t know if I was any good either. But she blew my mind.”
When Kate’s people contacted Walker to ask about them collaborating on For Those Who Can’t Be Here, they had just five days to get it together for Royal Carols: Together at Christmas, a concert at Westminster Abbey with a global television audience.
“I made her a backing track to practise with,” says the 30-year-old winner of the Best Breakthrough Act at the 2019 Brit awards. He nonchalantly recalls how he set the duchess homework: practising on her palace piano.
“The first few run-throughs didn’t go perfectly. But we just did it and did it until we got it right.”
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The result was the singer’s own Christmas miracle: performing a deeply personal song he had written about losing his grandad during the pandemic, with the wife of a future king.
“The duchess was unbelievable,” Walker says. “To pick up a song she’d only heard for the first time five days before, join a band she’d never played with, in front of loads of cameras, a director, a whole team of people on set, and just absolutely nail it — really impressive.”
Kate sought out Walker after seeing him perform his hit Leave a Light On at an event for the Forward Trust, a drug and alcohol dependence charity.
“I didn’t think it was a fit, with its drug references and all that,” he says of the song written for a pal struggling with addiction. “I told them I’d just written a Christmas song about my grandad passing away at the start of the pandemic. I sent them it, they loved it, and a week later they came back asking if she could accompany on piano. I was thinking, what’s going on here?”
Walker watched the recorded performance at home with his family at Christmas, still disbelieving. It was their first Christmas without Hughie, his mother’s father. He wrote the poignant tune after Hughie died in a care home, with the Covid-19 restrictions meaning that he was unable to say goodbye to his family.
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“That was really tough on my mum: when you know your dad is going to pass and you can’t say goodbye,” he says. “So I wrote that song for her.”
What would Hughie have made of it all? “He’d probably have said it was a lot of noise,” he says. “He came to one of my gigs and said it wasn’t for him. But he’d have enjoyed bragging about it to his mates.”
Having broken through with top ten hit Leave a Light On in 2018, which led to him picking up the Brit, the singer is introducing the songs from his unscheduled second LP with a series of low-key gigs around the UK.
He was back on stage for the first time in two years in Liverpool last week, and was due in Aberdeen tonight had a throat infection not forced him to cancel.
“It’s so good to be back on stage, I’ve really missed that buzz,” he says. “You can feel that energy in the room again.”
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Like many in his field, Walker did what he could to access the alchemy of collaboration during lockdown.
“It’s hard to recreate that feeling over Zoom,” he says. “Working together on songs, messing about, going for a pint halfway through the day. Trying to write a song that you want to change the world over a computer screen is really difficult.”
The songs for the new album flowed once he got back into the recording studio with his band between lock- downs. The relief was not only creative, but financial. Walker and his fiancée had taken on their first mortgage in 2020, seven days before his tour was cancelled.
“There was a moment when I thought, oh my god,” he says. “Luckily, I had backdated PRS [Performing Right Society] cheques coming in from my first album, so we were OK, but I was worried about the crew, the backline tech, the lighting guy, the guitar tech — all these folk whose income just completely went. I know people did get money and venues were rescued, but they could have done more. The arts were the last people to get a helping hand and that’s frustrating, considering the amount of tax music brings in.
“So much great music comes out of the UK and the government takes that for granted. Ed Sheeran, Adele — two of the biggest in the world and they’re from the UK. They take a lot of money out of the arts and not enough [is put] in.”
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Walker is not going to change that himself although, having played with session musician pals from the pinnacle of the establishment, who knows? Perhaps it’s one of the reasons he is averse to discussing the independence question.
His family left Scotland for Cheshire when he was a tot, and his accent toggles either side of the border depending on to whom he’s speaking.
“When you have Scottish family and all your mates are English, you see any division as total rubbish,” he says. “We’re all human beings. It doesn’t make sense to create division.
“That’s why I hated Brexit, and I’m not even going to get into Scottish independence. Creating division on such a small island is mental.
“If I ever have to show my passport to get into Scotland I’ll be mightily pissed off.”
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Tom Walker’s new single, Serotonin, is out next month.