About
Tom Hickox: The Orchestra of Stories
Tom Hickox’s long-awaited third album, The Orchestra of Stories, delivers exactly what its title promises: a rich tapestry of human narratives, brought to life with grand ambition and intricate detail. Emerging from a period of personal upheaval, Hickox elevates his celebrated storytelling through a cinematic sweep of songs brimming with drama and poignancy. From The Clairvoyant – a mariachi-flavoured tale of a widower deceived by a fraudulent psychic – to The Failed Assassination of Fidel Castro, which recasts a doomed CIA mission turned love affair, Hickox’s gift for unearthing and reimagining stories from a wide range of sources blossoms here, each song revealing a universal truth that resonates long after the final note has rung out.
You’re perhaps unlikely to pick up an album this year with a more apposite title than The Orchestra of Stories.
It’s been almost eight years since Hickox’s acclaimed second album, Monsters In The Deep, during which time he had to navigate not only the near ruinous effect the pandemic had on his life as a performer, but also a tumultuous upheaval in his personal life during which he lost both his mother and step-mother and became a father himself for the first time.
Yet for a writer such as Hickox, one who can so vividly depict the human condition, the mind is constantly alert to the storytelling potential in the ether. “The antenna for thinking about songs is always up, that process never stops,” says Hickox. “I’m constantly writing things down, sometimes very big ideas and sometimes just tiny little kernels.”
Be it Monsters in the Deep’s inspired romantic tableau The Dubbing Artist, or The Lisbon Maru from his 2014 debut War, Peace and Diplomacy, in which he used the framework of a WW2 naval tragedy to tell the story of an old man people ignored by those around him (Hickox appears in the documentary feature The Sinking Of The Lisbon Maru, due for release spring 2025), where he excels as a songwriter has always been his ability to spot the germ of a story others might overlook – be it in a history book, newspaper clipping or a seemingly everyday observation – and weave it into a narrative that can captivate and speak a universal truth.
“I’m primarily interested in people and interesting stories on a micro level,” he says. “I’m always looking for stories, but there has to be a personal angle. I’m not in the business of doing history lessons. I love looking for truths I can relate to, that’s interesting to me. That’s the most important thing.”
An album of a depth and richness that more than justifies its protracted gestation, The Orchestra of Stories runs over with both human stories and the truths they tell us. From mariachi-flavoured curtain raiser The Clairvoyant, inspired by a news story about a bereaved man conned out of his savings by a bogus psychic, to The Failed Assassination of Fidel Castro, which reimagines the story of Marita Lorenz, who was enlisted by the CIA to seduce and then poison the Cuban revolutionary leader, but who instead became his lover, these songs are ripe with all the tragedy and romance of the human condition.
Often, too, the characters within them are used as a page onto which Hickox writes his own story. Take The Shoemaker: though inspired by the maverick and eccentric cobbler Jason Amesbury, whom Hickox played cricket with, it finds Hickox concocting his own entirely imagined biography of his late associate, one which explores the themes of searching for home and belonging that run through much of the songwriter’s work.
“I always enjoy being able to express quite personal stuff within the framework of someone else’s story,” Hickox says. “I find that much more interesting, and actually more revealing, than just pouring out things out in the first person.”
Although technically someone else’s story, the closest to home here is the tale behind Roy and Eve, a study of obsession in which Hickox inhabits the mindset of abstract painter Roy Turner Durant. Hickox’s maternal grandmother Eve Sheldon-Williams was an artist, illustrator and lecturer. A keen writer of letters, after purchasing a painting by the up-and-coming artist Durrant she wrote to him to thank him, and thus commenced a history of correspondence between the two that lasted decades, with the abstract painter including sketches and then paintings in every one of his letters.
“They started off as small, some the size of a coffee cup, but eventually they became very significant, big pieces,” says Hickox. “It very clear that as time went on he become completely obsessed with her, even though they never, ever met. He created this vision of her in his head.”
Hickox uses a similar leap of imagination on Man on the High Road. During a time of personal difficulties a few years ago, Hickox would walk past a man drinking on the steps of his local church in South London. As he passed this character every day, Hickox’s mind began to extrapolate on the idea of him inhabiting the role of a Greek chorus, looking out in judgement upon the lives of those passing him by.
It’s a powerful track rendered even more affecting by its stormy orchestral backdrop, adding a heightened sense of drama to Hickox’s lyric.
While the arrangements on his previous two albums provided rich, sympathetic settings for his songs, this time around they’re integral to the storytelling.
Aided by his own work as a film composer and drawing inspiration from the sumptuous orchestrations of Scott Walker’s seminal run of self-titled albums, on The Orchestra of Stories, Hickox paints on a far grander scale, using the finer details of the score to fully realise the songs and bring them to life.
Recorded with the Chineke! Orchestra, Europe’s first majority black and ethnically diverse orchestra, as well as Onyx Brass, it allows Chalk Giants’ anglicised road song to blossom into full bucolic English splendour and Lament for the Lamentable Elected to rage with a tempestuous distemper at corrupt politicians “sealing us in dreams only.”
On closing track The Port Quinn Fishing Disaster, meanwhile, which uses the legend of an abandoned Cornish fishing village as an allegory for the callousness of the debate around refugees, Hickox’s ingenious but subtle use of instrumentation means you can practically feel the salt spray and tears on your face as you listen.
Another innovative bit of sonic storytelling comes on The Orchestra of Stories’ lead single Game Show. Inspired by the Cambridge Analytica and Edward Snowden revelations, but sadly as relevant as ever, Hickox ups the Kafkaesque nightmare for the song’s protagonist who finds himself in a surveillance state dystopia with a discombobulating chatter of news reports and the boos and applause of a game show audience, featuring a turn by Olivier-winning actor Rory Kinnear. It’s a remarkable track and once again sees Hickox uncovering the human story and the universal truth within a much broader context.
Not every story on the album comes direct from Hickox’s hymn sheet, however. The Orchestra of Stories also features a reimagining of The Waterboys’ 1985 hit The Whole of the Moon in which Hickox redirects Mike Scott’s widescreen epic down a new musical slipstream flanked by layers of fluttering, tape-delayed guitars.
“It came from a place of enormous love. It’s a great song,” he says of the original version. “It’s so spectacular lyrically. I was messing around with it and just thought, ‘There’s something different I can do with this…’”
It’s just another example of how The Orchestra of Stories paints a broader, more encompassing picture of Hickox as an artist than we’ve heard before.
“I think that it’s just me finding the essence of what I love,” reflects Hickox on what he wanted to get across on The Orchestra of Stories. “It’s the truest representation of the music that I wanted to make. Which is what you want as a listener, right? You want to feel like what you’re listening to is honest and is sincere.”
As each story within the orchestra plays its own unique part, that’s precisely what Hickox has delivered.