Interviews
Interview on Radio Norwich, December 2006
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Interview with Last Hours magazine in 2005.
If you think punk is all about piercings, a scene t-shirt and spiky hair then you're probably better off reading some other article, but if you think punk's about a DIY ethic, trying to maintain some autonomy and having looked the system in the eye walking away, then maybe there's something in here for you.
Matt Shepherd is a guy I've known a few years and he's gone from being a sales rep for a Japanese multi-national to a singer-songwriter living hand-to-mouth and working with the Amplifier project that is attempting to introduce a whole cross-section of kids to the nuts and bolts of making music.
LH: Matt, a couple of years ago you handed your notice in and walked away from a secure job, something a lot of anarchists and anti-capitalists dream of doing, why and what gave you the bottle?
MS: Like a lot of people I think, I never really chose the job I was in and hadn't really ever paid it a great deal of thought until I was almost in too deep. I was gradually becoming more and more unhappy with the soulless grind of making money for the sake of it. I was surrounded by guys ten to twenty years older than me, clearly unhappy and usually fiercely egotistic, caught up in the machinery of capitalism. There didn't really seem to be any motive behind what anybody was doing except make as much money as possible at almost any cost.
It was an empty existence really and like a lot of people in that situation I started looking for distractions and meaning in hedonism, which was hurting me and those around me. It got to a point where I either had to leave and find meaning in my life or I was likely to self-destruct.
I had always written songs and been half a musician on a local level, and like so many others had only ever daydreamed of making a career in music or at least earning some sort of living from my music, I guess my disillusionment with mainstream work pushed me into a situation where taking my music as far as it would go was a big risk but nowhere near as dangerous as carrying on where I was.
LH: what sort of reaction did you get from people around you?
MS: Initially most of them thought I'd lost it, some still do, but at the same time there seemed to be a small part of everybody that I told that secretly envied or even admired being able to cut free from it all. For some people it was just voyeuristic.
LH: OK so you walked. You got a bunch of songs, a guitar and the rest of your life. How did you initially finance getting set up as a full-time musician, and have you been happy with how your career is progressing?
MS: I don't really see it as a career at all to be honest with you, in fact quite the contrary. Career has connotations of competitiveness, being driven by ambition and money, being prepared to do whatever to get on, all the opposites of where I want to be and how I intend to get there. I see what I'm doing as expressing who I really am and so far I've been constantly surprised by peoples support and encouragement for my music. When I quit work I sold my house and used the money to do a little bit of inspirational traveling, followed shortly by investing in a home studio where I am currently recording my debut album The Village Idiot.
LH: I guess that used up all your money pretty much, how did you live after that?
MS: Well I was aware that it would be really easy to get another shit job to fund what I was doing and that terrified me so I wanted to, where possible, provide some sort of service or use my music to generate a living, preferably both.
The Amplifier project has come out of The Junction in Cambridge, it's a community music project based in twenty-one venues all over Suffolk for kids that want to rock. If you've seen School of Rock it's not dissimilar kids participate from all backgrounds; some of them on the edge of exclusion from school and with no music theory and we try and encourage them to express themselves creatively. A couple of weeks ago we had a showcase for some of the kids to perform publicly, there was a good crowd and it went really well. Fortunately this fulfills my hopes of earning a living while trying to serve.
LH: What are your hopes for the rest of the year?
MS: I hope to launch the album by the end of this year and I'm looking forward to taking that as far as I can, it seems to be a good time for my kind of singer-songwriter stuff with the popularity of Jack Johnson, and the like so fingers crossed.
LH: Punk for me has to be militant, compassionate, anti-capitalist, DIY activism, as I see it Matt fulfills all these criteria. He may not look the part but his lifestyle is a lot nearer punk than a lot of people including myself get. Big thanks to Matt for the interview and I hope the album does well. Are you really calling it The Village Idiot?!