October 29th sees the first date of a UK tour where THE LITTLE UNSAID will be showcasing tracks from their latest long player Lick The Future’s Lips as well as from their buoyant back catalogue. The tour consists of 11 dates and sees them visiting some delightful venues all over England. It starts off in Saltaire before heading to Kirby, Sheffield, London, Winchester, Bridport, Dartington (Totnes), Nottingham, Birmingham, Corsham before playing their final gig on 12th November in Bath.

To find out how the band are planning on resting up between shows, John’s musical influences and three things that he just CANNOT live without when on the road, read on….

Tell me a bit more about The Little Unsaid, where and when you formed, the band members and maybe a fascinating fact about you that not many people know….

I started recording and releasing solo records under the name The Little Unsaid around 2010. I was multi-tracking myself playing everything and wanted people to think it was a band, rather than one solitary Yorkshireman in his bedroom. Then when I started touring I crossed paths with all these wonderful musicians who started to help me bring the music to life on stage, and that’s how the band formed.

Not-so-interesting fact: my first homemade records as a teenager were self-released under the terrible name ‘THE JOHN’ and had an arty black and white picture of a toilet on the front. The toilet humour thankfully wore off quickly.

Your music is as eclectic as it is immersive, I’m keen to learn about bands or artists that have helped you to shape your sound?

Songwriters from the 60s folk revival initially got me into writing as a kid, finding records in my dad’s collection by Neil Young, Joni Mitchell, Bob Dylan, Leonard Cohen, as well as good dose of blues and some more psychedelic stuff. Then later Nick Cave, Thom Yorke, Nina Simone, Kate Bush. The Beatles got me interested in recording and building worlds with sound, and later that expanded into a fascination with electronic music - everything from Detroit techno to house to Aphex Twin to weird ambient music. It felt like a new world opening up that could colour in my songwriting even more so I inevitably started to play with electronics, learning on the fly and embracing all the happy accidents that came along.

Have you ever met any of your heroes? If so, how and when did this happen and if not, who would you most love to meet and chat to?

I bumped into Thom Yorke once at Glastonbury Festival. It was the middle of the night in an area called the Shangri-La which is full of trippy installations. I was pretty merry and suspected he was too. I think I shook his hand and then danced off giddily in the mud.

I’d love to have met Nina Simone. She would be fiery and imposing and brilliant and would probably mock me and I’d love her even more.

I watched your video for ‘Half Alive’ and I love the idea of you painting the faces of the fans that sent in photos of themselves so you could ‘perform’ for them, where did this idea come from and how long did it take you to paint all of their lovely faces?

I was watching Grayson Perry’s Art Club during lockdown and got the idea to paint our audience as an act of trying to connect with them from afar. It took a whole day to paint the photos we were sent in by fans. I'm a terrible painter but the rest of the band did a good job! Mariya (our bass player) is a brilliant artist, her quick sketches of people were amazing. The video captures a bittersweet moment in-between lockdowns I think.

You’re on tour from the end of October until early November, will it take a while to get back into ‘life on the road’?

We’re all so ready for it. It’s been nearly two years since we performed in front of people. The band rehearsals have been so euphoric, the live shows I expect will be the same. I think the joy of the gigs will eclipse the strangeness of being in a different hotel every night and the challenge of finding food that isn’t something beige from a service station.

Tell me about your touring plans, will it be hotels, beds and hot showers every night or are you going to be approaching it from a more DIY point of view (borrowed couches and launderettes en-route?)

It’s always DIY, but where the venues haven’t managed to provide us with a place to stay we’ve either got a cheap hotel or can crash comfortably with friends. We used to tour all over and just sleep on floors, in the club on a couch, or turn up without anywhere to stay and ask the audience during the gig if anyone had a place we could crash. But we’re all a bit older now and you learn that to do the songs justice and deliver the kind of energised, emotionally connected show we want to deliver, you need to be resting and feeling good when you step out on stage, not skulking on hungover and sleep-deprived!

Would you say that you manage to eat well whilst on the road or is it Pot Noodles and Monster Munch every day?

I can’t operate on shrink wrapped sarnies and crisps so I do a quick google search whenever we arrive in a town and find the nearest freshest thing and we munch it down. That's especially useful at breakfast time, because the fried English brekkie, wondrous though it is, is like tour Kryptonite.

What three things can you not live without when you’re on the road?

• Companionship of the band - We’re all very close and feel like a family on the road. That keeps us sane and looking after each other when things go pear shaped or one of us needs an ear or a hug.

• Playlists - New music when travelling. Keeps you inspired and not just chewing over your own music every day.

• Sad to say it, but the Internet - Finding fresh food, navigating around traffic jams to get to the show on time, finding the nearest A&E - all essential lifesavers I’ve had to use plenty of times!

You’re playing 11 shows on the UK tour and will be performing at loads of cool looking venues across the country, are there any ‘first times’ on the list? If so, which are you most excited about performing?

We’re returning to lots of places we know and love and I’m so relieved they’ve survived the last 18 months. So many great venues have had to close and it’s heartbreaking. These places are the lifeblood of the independent music scene and where our music culture in this country flourishes.

I think the only place that’s brand new to us is Bridport Arts which looks lovely. There’s a great record shop in town too, which is always a bonus.

Do you tend to find that you get a different reaction to your music depending on where you play around the country? What about abroad?

We had incredible gigs in Germany a few years ago. We’ve only done a few tours in Europe but German audiences in particular are so warm and open to new music.

Because our music straddles a few genres, we get to play different kinds of venues, and I’ve learnt to arrive everywhere with zero expectations. Sometimes you turn up at a cool underground club in a hip part of town and expect crowd surfing, and it’s a pin-drop quiet listening audience. Other times you arrive at a village folk club and think ‘oh no, we’re gonna be too full on for this crowd’ and the audience goes nuts dancing and shouting and getting involved. So we take every gig as it comes and just focus on making a connection with the people there, whatever the vibe is.

Did I read that you are starring/have starred in a West End production called ‘Cruise’? If so, please tell me more about it….

I wrote the music for Cruise and performed it live on stage in the show. My actor friend Jack Holden and I started developing it during the pandemic. It was the first new play to open on the West End after all the lockdowns. It’s set in the 80s in Soho and most of the music was electronic club music. It was so much fun, after making quiet music in my little flat for so long, to be thrown in at the deep end - suddenly in a gorgeous theatre pumping huge beats and bass through massive speakers. The play was a success and is hopefully making a return next year.

You’re no stranger to releasing music but tell me how you approached your latest album ‘Lick The Future’s Lips’ as I understand it was created during the pandemic?

It was written mostly during the pandemic, and I’d send songs round the band for them to work on remotely. We recorded the bulk of the album in one week in November 2020 with an amazing engineer called Grace Banks. We were so close to the whole thing being cancelled several times due to the pandemic, but managed to get everyone into a studio safely and it was so euphoric all making music together again after so long apart.

We've also got another new record available now, December Songs, which is a kind of wintertime album that I made at home on my own in 2020 when Christmas was cancelled. It was an antidote to all the stress of our band studio sessions being threatened with cancellations, and the sheer difficulty of making an album in a pandemic. I thought I'd just set up a couple mics at home and record some wintery songs acoustically, and it came together as this intimate record all about memory, closeness and finding solace amidst all the change that is forever going on around us.

Did you find it difficult not being able to get the band together in order to run through the tracks ahead of getting together in the studio to record it?

We’ve all played together so much over the years, I think the band understand my songs so well they can hear what I’m trying to get across instinctively and they just tune in to that, so it’s not too tricky to work when we’re apart. But obviously nothing can substitute that feeling when we’re all together in a room getting lost in a piece of music.

With things slowly being returned to something that resembles ‘pre-pandemic’, what plans do you have for touring and playing in 2022? Any festivals planned in yet or is it too early to say?

We have lots we’d like to do, including releasing more new music, but no concrete plans yet!

There are LOADS of quality bands and artists out there, please tell me about a few that you and the band are currently listening to?

Cassandra Jenkins’ recent album is a beauty. Wonderful songwriting. Nick Cave and Warren Ellis’ record Carnage is also a killer. Also I’ve been adventuring through Alice Coltrane’s work, which is vast and always incredible. The field recordings of Chris Watson have also provided some real lovely listening when my head is too full of music. He records sound for nature programmes by David Attenborough, but also has a few albums of ambient recordings you can listen to in their own right, things like dawn choruses or glaciers crackling and creaking or underwater recordings of seals chatting to each other. It's very calming and fascinating too.

Lastly, where is the best place to keep up to date with you on the socials?

I’m not great at those things but try to keep up. Instagram seems to be where it’s at now, but we’re on them all under ‘The Little Unsaid’ - come say hello! We also have a mailing list which is a good way to stay in touch, you can sign up at www.thelittleunsaid.com. But better still...come to a gig and chat to us! Meeting people is the best thing about touring, to chat about music and life over a chilled beverage after the show. We love it and we can't wait to get back out there.

Catch The Little Unsaid on tour across England from October 29th to November 12th, click HERE for tickets. We’ll be at the Dartington show on November 6th, we hope to see as many local folk there as possible.