John Skilbeck of the Press Association meets Horton Parks:

I avoid Leeds now, if I can help it. Spent five years living in this
city, yet now I'm barely able to muster any affection for the place.
"Everything Is Brilliant In Leeds" is the slogan adopted by Kaiser
Chiefs, the local lads making big news from here to New York, shipping records faster than they used to mix them in Pigs, their electro-punk club night hoodang.
Fuck them. They could hardly be more wrong.
Tonight's local rag decrees the imminent closure of one of the city's
Finest schools, one which thrives out of adversity in a real deprived
district.
I've barely put my drink down and already some kid's looking at me all
quizzical.
No, I've not seen your wallet, I tell him, but he's not buying it. He
asks me to get up so he can search behind the seats. I oblige, but he's
still not happy. It's as much as I can be thankful for that he's not insisting I turn out my pockets.
He'd not find anything, that's for sure, but now both he and the brunette behind the bar are throwing me decidedly aporetic looks.
There's suspicion round every corner in Leeds. Tensions run high. This
is the burglary capital of Britain, where violent crime rates have gone
beyond worrying to the level of terrifying. Multi-racial gang culture still thrives and you could cut the atmosphere on the streets with a knife this afternoon, or any-old-weekend afternoon. Big (London) money investment in the city centre cannot hide the social divides, and the implications. You know the implications now of course.
Thank the heavens, then, that Horton Parks has just walked in and wants
to talk music. It's his escapism, mine too, and we've got a near-empty pub to reminisce, consider and look forward.
There's no-one here because the big screen's showing Manchester
United's latest spit'n'sourness FA Cup tie. In this city, if there's one theme which unites all, it's that those Reds from across the Pennines are the common enemy.
Horton carries his pint over. The exception to the house rule, we're
more ambivalent than most to the football.
"Tell you what," he offers, taking a sip. "I'd have struggled to pick
this glass up a few months back."
Rough luck struck this 29-year-old troubadour last year. Not so really
rough, but a hernia as debilitating as you might care to fear knocked
him from a lofty perch.
Just a couple of nights ago, he was onstage at a fundraising event in
The city, easing himself back into music again with a two-song set as 22 artists showed up to help save a local working men's club-turned-DIY indie nerve centre.
"It's been a while," he says.
"I've been held up by hernia problems and various things going on with
the band, but at the moment it feels like a new start really."
"Things were going well to the point where we were building momentum,
but unfortunately we couldn't use it fully.
"I'm not too disappointed by that at the moment though because it's
just nice to start off again, get new ideas out there and new music.
"You always wonder, when you stop for a while, 'Have I still got it?'.
"I wouldn't ever think about stopping or quitting, but I did worry
whether physically I'd be able to do it any more.
"With being young, you think you're going to be fit forever, but when
something like this hits you it knocks you down for a while, and you
wonder,
'Am I ever gonna get back to the way I was?'.
"Timing is everything, especially with when you release a record or
head out on tour, or play gigs, and aim for the right promotion. It's all about getting the right music to the right people at the right time, so we get noticed.
"I'm glad I've still got the first album out there. It's there, it's
not going to go away, and I'm happy with that. I might be promoting new
tunes, but the record promotes the new stuff by association."
If it sounds as though Horton is cynical of making and breaking acts in
Leeds and beyond, then perhaps that's fairly accurate.
He's been about the scene long enough to have a nibble at the fame
game, only to spit it back out.
"I played with a few bands, one was called Trampoline," he says. "We
played with bands like Space and Catatonia, and we played to big
audiences at places like the (long since closed) Duchess of York.
"We were headlining too at those places, and we got a lot of A & R
interest, and that's what we were chasing. But it didn't seem to lead to anywhere else.
"I was young too, about 18, and really couldn't cope with the
responsibility of writing the music, organising all the gigs, and I
really didn't have the experience to know what to do next, so we just
ran out of steam in the end."
This time, with a wholly different sound, no great urgency, no pressing
desire to chase pluggers or rifle demos off to label bosses, Horton is
taking a refreshing approach. It's an approach which suits him, and his
music, a stripped-down edgy but countrified sound, just perfect.
Right now, with songs in the bag, Horton could book studio time and
Have the record out in no time, but this second album is going to mature organically, through playing fund-raisers, headline shows, support slots and
probably a raft of whimsical local festivals. Take the music to its audience. Don't expect there to be an audience for the music until you've achieved that.
"Hopefully by this time next year the second album will be 75%
completed, and then it'll have to be mixed and put down on CD," says Horton. I say 'Horton', but I know him better as a Dan Austin, who not so much as hides behind his alter-ego as channels his thoughts, his eccentricities and his frustrations through this latest musician's vehicle.
Then he surprises me.
"There's a lot of interest in America at the moment and we're being
asked to arrange a co-headlining tour in this country with a band called Eugene, and the idea is that it'd be followed by a similar trip to play shows in the States," he says.
"They're very good and it's quite flattering that they're interested
and that they've heard of us."
Hardly surprising, when you listen to Horton's voice, a real Deep South
growl lent a Yorkshire twang, that underground America wants its slice,
even though the dark nature of debut LP Sleepers feeds on a lifetime's
experiences in some of the most bleak yet wondrous parts of Yorkshire,
spliced with a decade of inner-city vexation.
"In some ways I think Horton Parks is a combination of everywhere I've
lived," he says.
From tough innercity beginings to rural North Yorkshire as the son of a local preacher, through squalid urban digs as a student, to loathsome suburban normality, Horton has wandered. And now to stability with his partner Yinka, a university lecturer. In the real world and back again, there's a rich seam for him to mine.
"Living in the country gives you time to think a lot, and I had plenty
of time to do that as a teenager," he tells me.
"There's a big deal made of truth in presenting music, but anyone who goes
out there and says, 'This is me, and I'm the same onstage as off', isn't really telling the truth.
"It's about projecting a character to a certain degree. When you write
songs even from your own experiences you're extenuating a certain part of your character. I lived in Little Horton as a kid in Bradford and Great Horton Park was one of the places where I did a lot of growing up.
"When I moved out to the country at the age of nine, one of the first
places I went to was Horton-In-Ribblesdale, so if felt like the name was calling me to a certain degree.
"With a drink in my hand, I'm referring to myself in the third person.
"If I went out to gig and called myself Dan Austin I don’t think I'd
really be telling the truth."
Bleak cities of Leeds's ilk inspire creativity. What beauty is there to
be found in row after row of dilapidated terraced houses if it is not
created by the individuals inhabiting the living space?
Which is why Horton Parks has been a fringe member of the LS6 scene,
The lo-fi indie community in Leeds where the underdog barks to get
attention around the streets of Hyde Park.(a crime-blighted inner-city space covering a couple of square miles 20 minutes walk away from the city centre.)
"I'm interested in how places I've been playing in for the last 10
years now sell only wine and not beer. I realise I sound like an old man but it's interesting, it inspires my music, my lyrics," he says.
"I think Leeds has to be open to the best things from Leeds. Leeds has
been so desperate for success that I think Kaiser Chiefs will get all the attention, but there's plenty other Leeds bands who are equally
deserving of success. If that’s what they crave of course…Personally I think notions of success and fame are being confused these days.
"Although Horton Parks as a project is based in Leeds, I love Leeds and draw on it quite a lot with my writing; I don't like the notion of being a ‘Leeds band’.
"I understand the Leeds band scene, I've drifted in and out of it for a
few years now and when I decided I was going to do a solo project, it was with the aim of getting away from being tagged a 'local band' really. I’d rather be the 200th best selling artist in Canada and still relatively unknown over here than the latest biggest thing out of Leeds!"
So while the NME wet themselves about an invisible scene called New
Yorkshire, as if all these bands peeking above the parapet are somehow part of one scene, Horton Parks wanders out into the dank streets sure of himself, sure of his music after flitting from band to band, and sure there's no rushing this new album.
So we wait....
END