Andrew Pankhurst was born and raised in Keighley, West Yorkshire, and now is a longtime resident of Stirling, Scotland. He is Constant Follower‘s guitarist and, on May 9^th, he unveiled his debut solo album under the name Thoughtfox. The Tides is an atmospheric folk album born of alternate tunings, layered textural guitars and a preoccupation with the sea. Hot on the heels of the release of second Constant Follower album The Smile You Send Out Returns To You, The Tides charts a more singular path than the collaborative approach of the Constant Follower records, with Andrew writing, arranging, performing, producing and mixing the record entirely alone in a home studio over an 18 month period. The album’s 8 songs are built on a framework of fingerpicked guitar figures, layered with lush textural electric guitars, synth, bass, percussion and vocals.

What Andrew Says: “This was one of the earliest tunes written for the album. It’s about feeling like there’s forces beyond your control, pulling you away from where you want to be. There’s a lot of ocean imagery in there. I found a synth sound that has an undercurrent of what sounds like crashing waves, so that’s bubbling away underneath the whole tune.“

“This one is about that odd feeling songwriters get, when they realise they’re playing a kind of passive role in writing songs, in that the good ones seem to come beamed out of nowhere, and you’re merely a receiver for them. You don’t really feel like you wrote it, it just popped out of the ether.“

His mixtape:

Nick Drake – Road

This seems like a very obvious pick – quelle surprise, the indie folk guy likes Nick Drake?  But it has to go in, and right at the top too. As soon as I started mucking about in those altered tunings, I could hear little shades of what Nick Drake was doing on guitar, and though it’s a million miles from his genius, those little echoes of his style I kept accidentally landing near kept me going deeper and deeper in, until songs start to coalesce. The whole Pink Moon album is amazing. I like it so much more than the first two that are very arranged. The naked just-voice-and-guitar approach allows you to hear what’s brilliant about him with nothing masking it or distracting from it – just an otherworldly guitar talent, and an unassuming, understated but beautiful vocal style. He’s a massive inspiration.

Radiohead – Separator

I think I might be the world’s biggest Radiohead fan. I’d certainly be happy to take on challengers on that front. This particular song is a bit slept-on I think. It’s from The King of Limbs, which seems to be nobodies favourite Radiohead album, but I think it’s one of the most interesting. I picked this song because it starts really minimal and then builds really steadily until it kind of blooms in the last section. Most of the songs on my album map that same trajectory. It’s a really satisfying dynamic I think. The lyrics on Separator are very interesting too, very naturalistic and mysterious.

Neil Young – Alberquerque

Getting into Neil Young is like a hobby all in itself – the catalogue is so massive you can swim about in it for years. I picked this track because of the lapsteel part that Neil’s longtime sideman Ben Keith plays on it. It makes your heart soar – it dives from low notes to high like a rollercoaster. I tried to recreate that a bit on the song Drifting Free From It All, which has a wee lapsteel break in it.

PJ Harvey – Down By The Water

PJ Harevy is just amazing – another artist with a catalogue to get lost in. I picked this because my wife said she could hear echoes of this song in the track The Lighthouse in the Sound. It wasn’t intentional, but I can hear what she means. Since we’re using YouTube links, I couldn’t resist using the version of this from Glastonbury 1995. That was the first year I watched Glastonbury on the TV, and there was PJ playing this track in a pink catsuit and the guitarist with crocodile clips on all his guitar strings, playing guitar with a kitchen knife. It made quite an impression on 14-year-old me.

The Byrds – Turn! Turn! Turn!

I’m going through a big Byrds phase at the moment. It’s been going on for a few years. On a sunny day it’s all I want to listen to. The music is like a time machine back to mid-60s California, a place I feel like I know but can never go to. There’s so much good stuff, but the jangly stuff with the 12-string electric guitar at the forefront is my favourite. I bought a 12-string electric as a natural conclusion of this obsession, and stuck it literally everywhere it would fit on the album.

The Verve – Northern Soul Reprise

Nick McCabe is my favourite guitar player of all time, hands down. In that school of guitar players who use technique, effects and feedback to make the guitar do something more than the standard riffs and bluesy solos, and instead evoke crashing waves, echoing caves, striking lightening, choirs of voices etc, he’s the absolute master.  He’s like the Picasso of textural guitar playing, and this track is his masterpiece for me. It’s 6 minutes of beautifully manipulated feedback – the guitar is fighting to just scream, but he’s constantly coaxing it into singing, soaring and cooing, turning it to morse code with the selector switch, letting it get almost out of control and then pulling it back. I’ve listened to it a thousand times, and I want to hear it a thousand more.

His Album: The Tides

“This has been a very long-gestating project, but the success of the last few Constant Follower albums gave me the confidence boost I needed to let go of these tunes and let them live in the wild. I think anyone that enjoyed the stuff we’ve put out as a group will find something to enjoy in this.
I’ve been playing with Constant Follower since the band started in 2016, playing the sort of atmospheric accompanying electric guitar to the acoustic songs my bandmate McAll writes. That’s very much my comfort zone. I’ve stepped pretty far outside that for this record as Thoughtfox, as it’s 100% solo, so I’ve written, sung, played, recorded and mixed the entire thing. I sort of set myself that challenge. I think I pulled it off? Close enough in any case. It’s eight songs that are born of a eureka moment I had with altered tunings. I retuned my guitar to an open tuning one day to see if I could pull off playing slide blues. Turns out not, but just messing about fingerpicking in the tuning immediately started yielding songs.
I’ve always found putting interesting chord patterns together a bit elusive, but when the guitar is in a different tuning all the rules go out of the window – you don’t know where any of the chords would be anyway, so you just put your fingers in different places and keep what sounds nice.
I must have written about twenty or so – a really big burst of stuff. The Tides is the eight best ones, all layered up with the usual type of electric guitar stuff I do – bowed guitar, slide, lapsteel, FX stuff, swells, wee solos etc.
I was quite nervous to release it. It feels so much more like showing the world your diary when it’s your own voice and your own words. But it actually feels quite cathartic to have it out in the world. It seems to have connected with some folk, so there’s not much more you can ask for than that.“

The Tides is out now. Look Here for more information on Thoughtfox.