With the release of a new album and a documentary soon to screen, Marlon Williams is ‘sort of a famous guy’ with the face of a choir boy and the shoes of an Italian star, writes Michele Hewitson. Photos: Ian Laidlaw
On the poster for the tour supporting his new album, Te Whare Tīwekaweka, Marlon Williams is standing in tussock grasses. He is wearing a rumpled shirt from Hallensteins, primly buttoned at the collar, a pounamu earring and a pake made by a friend. A pake is a traditional cloak made from leaf strips. It is a protective cape, designed to shield the wearer from the rain.
Not too many people could carry off wearing a pake with panache. The singer, songwriter and occasional actor does so effortlessly. He looks pretty cool. He usually does.
Is he cool? “Ha, ha. I don’t know about that. I heard yesterday that the word cool is out of fashion. But I’m with you. I think I’d make a play for coolness.” He doesn’t have to try to be cool. He just is. Again, effortlessly.
What does that portrait say about him? “It’s a juxtaposition of the worlds, really, isn’t it? It sort of sums up or reflects the journey I’m on, I guess.”
The pake is a protective cloak in another way. It protects its wearer from the world. It is also, I think, a metaphor for his relationship – a complicated one, as it is with many creative people – with the public gaze.
“Well, I think that’s because I’ve lived my life, not always as a famous person, but as a performer.” He doesn’t see the distinction between “being just a person in the world and being a performer in the world. But it’s a dialling up of intensity at certain times.”
His album, his first in te reo (he’s not yet fluent but is working on it), is beautiful, whether or not you’re fluent in te reo. He must be happy with it.
Let’s not get carried away. “It’s a loaded question. I’m happy within my means. I guess I’d say I’m used to not being fully happy with putting out music. But, yeah, it’s been no more painful than the other ones.”
The title translates to “the messy house”. It could also be a translation of what’s going on inside the artist’s head: it’s kind of messy in there, but also inviting. Rummaging through his head, you might trip over stuff on the floor. But because it’s his stuff it’s interesting stuff, so you won’t mind. There are a few things going on. Some of them quite messy.
For an examination of that messy stuff there is now a feature-length documentary, Marlon Williams: Ngā Ao E Rua – Two Worlds, to be released on May 1. He wanted a feature film about him because he is ceaselessly curious. He wanted “just to see what I look like”.
What does he look like? From the outside looking in, he says, “I think I’m even more of the person that I think I am.” That’s quite complicated – he is quite complicated. What does he mean?
“I’m more me than I thought I was. It confirmed a lot of things about my personality to me, such as just in terms of how I communicate with people. My friend, who knows me very well, saw it … and said that I’m just out in the world trying to connect with people. And it’s a very simple thing to say, but yeah, I think I have a desperate, desperate need to connect. And I think it’s reflected quite well in the doco.”
Being on the inside looking at himself must be a strange place to be inhabiting, inside his happily messy house.
It includes a clip of him performing a duet with good mate Lorde, at the Roundhouse in London’s Camden. She introduced him as “the great heartthrob of New Zealand”. Does he want to be that guy? “No. No. As a songwriter I want to make a heart throb, for sure.” In other words, he makes music because of his desire to connect with people. He wanted to make the te reo album to make a connection to a language he is only now learning.
At 34, he is sort of a famous guy. He is certainly not a celebrity. He gets to meet celebrities. He has met Lady Gaga. He worked with her in the film A Star is Born. “She’s just another celebrity. She was lovely, just larger than life.” And Sarah Snook, from Succession.
He laughed at me for asking what they were like. I’d asked if he ever gets starstruck. There was only one starstruck person in this interview, and it wasn’t him. I said I thought I’d fallen in love with him. “Ha. Ha. Oh, that’s nice.”
What I meant to say was I’d fallen in love with his voice but it somehow came out wrong. And isn’t it the same thing? So, what the hell.
You can easily imagine that anyone who has any sort of encounter with him falls in love with him. This is likely to make him blush. He is a blusher. He blushed when he met Steven Adams, the basketball star. “I’ve got my bedroom wall moments. I definitely blushed.” Which is very sweet.
I said I’d rustle up a compliment and have a go at making him blush. How about this, from NZ Musician: “Marlon Williams has the face of a choir boy and the shoes of an Italian star.”
“Wow,” he says. Does he like that? “I do like that. It’s made me go slightly red.”
He likes shoes. He likes basketball shoes. When he was 15, he bought a pair of python-skin boots. “They were $900 down to $150. They were a bit intense for a 15-year-old.”
You get to see more than you might care to see of his feet in the documentary. He has terrible feet. They are like the feet of a 100-year-old hobbit with a skin disease. When the documentary was being made, he said he hadn’t been in a stable relationship for a long time. He is now. But back then, was it because of his feet? “Ha. Chicken and egg.”
In the documentary, in reference to his feet, he says, “I just lost a bunch of fans.” We had quite a lengthy chat about his feet, which are, “much better. I’m happy to tell you. They are nearly back to normal.” I’m happy to hear it.
Still, it is a very odd thing to be asking somebody questions about their feet. But even more oddly, it feels perfectly normal to be asking him about his feet. An interview with Marlon Williams walks you to some peculiar places. Also, it’s funny. He is capable of being very funny in one sentence and anxiously earnest in the next.
He once said that the idea of “putting myself in my music is still something I find nauseating and enthralling at the same time”. What did he mean? “It’s the thought of … I don’t really think of it as confessional, but it creeps in. And, of course, because it’s only me writing, so it’s just the realisation that that’s happening, you know, that someone might see part of your deeper psychology without you noticing you’re putting it there.” But he can’t do anything about that, can he? “I could stop making music!”
He stumbles over himself sometimes, he says. “I think I’m a very nervous person. I’ve got a quick-moving nervous system and a fast metabolism and a short attention span. You know, I’ve joined the modern wave of receiving an ADHD diagnosis.”
When he says he sometimes stumbles over himself, he means, “Well, I guess I sort of cycle through thoughts and ideas so quickly that I don’t always consolidate them before moving on. So, I end up with just a whole bunch of mess that I haven’t quite locked in; haven’t quite pegged into the ground. And so, there’s always a few free-flowing, windswept structures.”
He does say perfection is not a precursor for inhabitation. That, coming from almost anyone else, would constitute a gnomic utterance. But you do know what he means. Which is that “the metaphorical house is pretty messy”. His diagnosis might help him tidy it up a bit. He’ll see. He will give therapy and medication a go but, “gently, gently”.
He has examined the difference between doubt and anxiety. “I think doubt is looking for an excuse out of something. Whereas anxiety is sitting in it and allowing that mess to sort for a bit. And with heightened anxiety comes heightened listening and heightened attention.”
Does he mean then that his anxiety is useful, and something he wouldn’t want to lose? “It’s an aspect of me that I’d like to temper.”
He once said he doesn’t like people. He was joking. Sort of. He was stumbling over himself. He does like people. He is interested in observing people. “I like going into people’s worlds and letting them show me their ways.” Still, “I get fatigued. I get peopled out.”
He has been touring for 20 years. On the tour bus, he sometimes pretends to be asleep so nobody can talk to him. “That’s a defence mechanism. You’ve got to have a shell that you bring on the road if you can’t retreat to your own home.”
Touring is also endless lunches of filled rolls and sausage rolls. He is a connoisseur of the sausage roll. “Oh yeah. I’d say in terms of pastry goods I’m pretty au fait.” He has said there will be an “expiry date” to his touring life. Touring is for young blokes. “You know, I think people either grow up or they grow out of a sort of early-20s-style touring. Or they die.”
What would he do instead? He’d think, most likely. And read. And maybe meditate, which he does from time to time. He has been reading Losing Ourselves: Learning to Live Without a Self by the expert on Tibetan Buddhism, Jay Garfield, “which is sort of making the case for the benefits of stripping out the idea of a self.”
Goodness, he’s a complicated fellow. Does he find himself to be complicated? “Yeah. I’m just constantly trying to work my way through the corridors.” It might be quite hard being him. “I find it hard for sure. But I think I would, whatever I was doing.”
He grew up in Lyttelton where he now lives in the house he grew up in. If you have been to Lyttelton, it feels as if it is somehow separate from the rest of the country, a port town on the edge of the world. It nurtures creative people. People who are somehow on the edge of the world. His parents are the artist Jenny Rendall and the one-time punk musician David Williams.
He is Ngāi Tahu on his mother’s side, Ngāi Tai on his father’s. His parents separated when he was very young. He has, he says, “a very intense and close relationship with both of them”.
He is an only child. He would have liked a sibling. There would have been a caveat: that he continued to be the centre of attention. That is another of his jokes, but it rather neatly sums up that complicated relationship he has with his public image.
It’s not uncommon. “Look at me! Stop looking at my sibling! Stop looking at me!”
There is a clip on his Instagram page of him playing his guitar and singing to some sheep. They are entranced. I am entranced. I have sheep. Could he come and sing to my sheep? “Absolutely. I’ll bring a sausage roll.”
How could you fail to fall hopelessly, head over heels in love with a chap with the voice of an angel who loves sausages rolls and serenades sheep?
Marlon Williams’ nationwide NZ tour runs from May 9 to June 28. The documentary Marlon Williams: Ngā Ao E Rua – Two Worlds is released May 1. Te Whare Tīwekaweka is out now.