Seamas. 30. Performer & artist. 

That’s something somebody said to me once – in Cornwall, it’s a real trope that people are ‘large portfolio holders’. When I was recently on an island in Scotland, they were saying that because there’s so few people there, everyone does about five jobs. So the postman will also be the bartender, who will also be the lifeboatman… I do think that’s also a very Cornish thing, to have lots of jobs. I am an artist, which includes being a performer, a choir-leader, a podcaster and, when I’m not doing that, I’m a piano-tuner as well. Piano-tuning is my fill-the-gaps job. It’s quite humbling doing a sell-out run at the Bristol Old Vic and then having to go in the next day and tune an old lady’s piano.

My mum was born in Falmouth, so she grew up here. My dad is Scottish and moved down here in the 80s. I came along when my parents both had other children from other marriages – in a way I was an only-child, but had four siblings on the weekends. I grew up in Falmouth Terraces; it was the late-90s-to-early-2000s, New-Labour kind-of positive, middle-class world. I had a very safe childhood. And it was arty. My mum’s a teacher, my dad was a musician and a theatre-maker, so there were always instruments in the house. We knew lots of arty people; I grew up in that world. It was never surprising that I’ve ended up doing what I do. Most of my friends in Falmouth who I grew up with and am still mates with are builders, carpenters, gardeners. I’m the anomaly as the person that makes their money from going on stage and twatting about. 

Obviously there are loads of areas which are not arty and middle-class like that at all. This is the thing – when we say, “it’s really good for the community!” or “the Falmouth community’s amazing!”, it has to be plural: there are so many communities in one area. Our community was like that. I was in Edinburgh in August and I met up with Tamsyn Kelly who is a Cornish stand-up comedian. I went to see her stand-up show – I’ve seen it twice now – “Crying in TK Maxx”. We felt like we should meet up because we had so much in common, both doing comedy shows in Edinburgh at the same time about Cornwall and our experiences growing up there. I wonder if she’d agree with this or not, but we definitely clocked the differences and the fact that she, around the same time, grew up in a housing estate round the back of Penzance; her show is about her distant father being an arsehole and disappearing, how she wanted to get away from Cornwall and her mixed feelings about it. We suddenly clocked that there were big differences, that there were some gaps in our experiences. There are all these things about kids who grow up in Penzance and have never been to the Minack, and I love how people go, “Oh, how shocking!”. But why would they want to go to the Minack? Who’s that space for?

In the winter just gone, I was being a tradesman and tuning pianos for about 3 or 4 months whilst planning and doing lots of admin for the arty stuff, and so once a month I’d go to London on the train just to see work, see theatre. I don’t have many vices – I don’t drink or smoke – but my one thing is spending money on going to see cultural things. So I’d go up and just see as many shows back-to-back every weekend just to fill my eyes full of stuff, because with any remote place it doesn’t come down as often. I went out with someone for a while who lived in Surrey and, you know, it’s 45 minutes on the train to get to London. And I remember one of their family really complaining being like, “Ugh! I just can’t live here! London is so far away,” and I remember thinking, “What the fuck? This is London! You’ve got diversity and culture and things happening all the time around you, and it’s 45 minutes on the train.” And sure, it was probably just a moany day for them, but I remember thinking… In Cornwall, it’s less on-tap. 

I guess I often use Aphex Twin as an analogy because his music is recognised for being out-there and unique and distinct. And what makes something unique and distinct? I think it’s often about being detached from something and making it up, being resourceful with what you’ve got. When you watch that interview John Peel did with Aphex Twin in the 90s, he says, “So what is there to do around here?” and he’s like: “Nothing. There’s nothing to do here, just make beats in our bedrooms.” And that’s it for me. If you’re stuck on the end of the land, you either moan or you get on with it and you make stuff happen. Weirdly I’ve just got back from Scotland and we found so many parallels with the Inner Hebrides. We spent a week on Mull which is where Martyn Bennett’s from, an amazing musician who would remix Gaelic and Scottish trad music onto beats in the 90s and 2000s – he died in 2005 – and he was so ahead of his game. I think this is a perfect parallel example of someone who was out-there a bit and was digging into his community and finding sounds in old records and finding a lady who sang in the pub and getting her to come in to sample her on his new record, but then mashing it with the new. He is that thing, and Aphex Twin is that thing, because of their location and their distance. 

I think Cornish culture could be anything. I think it has to be anything. For Cornish culture to continue to exist, its parameters have to expand evermore. That’s one of my things, it’s the trap of when you start defining what culture is. That’s when it gets dangerous I think, from an artist’s point of view and as a person who lives here. There’s all the obvious tropes of pasties and mermaids and mining and fishing and farming and the food and the music and the dance, but what I noticed as I was making the podcast is that a lot of that is new. The Cornish tartan was made in 1963 – people wear that Cornish kilt tartan to weddings thinking it's like this thing from King Arthur’s time and it’s bullshit. It’s made up, it’s fictionalised. And that’s okay! But I think it’s also good to know that. That proves the point that Aphex Twin, for me, is high Cornish culture, and so is Mark Jenkin. It just gets icky, doesn’t it, when you try and define things? Yet we kind of have to, because I feel that Cornwall is a different place and that it is distinct. Making the work over the past two years, there were a few points where it wasn’t very fun, but ultimately now I can sit here and think that was the point. If any of us want culture in Cornwall, it has to be robust. You have to be able to shake it up and look at it and make jokes and provocative things about it. Otherwise it’s just some old ladies with funny hats dancing, and all the teenagers are like, “Fuck that, I’m going to the skate park to get stoned.” Who’s going to engage with that? I always wanted to make work which younger and older people could engage with. That is the motto: who is it for? 

We made these bumper stickers connected to the show, this Cornish flag bumper sticker, and on the white bit of the cross it said: “Everyone is welcome”, because it’s the opposite of those ones that say ‘Non-Emmet’, meaning: “I’m a local. I’m even using the localised term.” That alienates the outsiders because they probably won’t know what ‘emmet’ means. I find that so scary and dubious, that bumper sticker. And so we made these stickers and people kind of went, “Yeah, but second-home owners aren’t welcome, are they!”. No, I get that, but what I believe in is engagement and discussion, which hopefully the podcast did. Let’s talk to them, welcome them in and say: we don’t really want you to have a second home, but you could be here and invest in the place, then get involved in…blah blah blah. You have to make yourself vulnerable to do that. You have to open up the doors and say, “Come in!”, and then hopefully, if we’re positive enough and appealing enough, then we’ll lead by example. I’m aware that’s quite a brittle theory, and it’s open to scrutiny, but I think that’s better than all being Jethro about it. 

Scotland has been much more of a defined place for a long time; so has Wales. They’ve both got their own parliaments, so they’ve got bureaucratic political things defining that they’re different, whereas Cornwall has much less. We’re smaller as well. I do kind of agree that there has been an element of oppression. It was a long time ago – 1497 and 1549 were the big battles, right? – but that’s 500 years ago. In Scotland you grow up and there is a culture of ceilidhs; it’s not a novelty thing. Ceilidhs are a thing you have because the winter’s really hard, and they’re great and they serve the community. I do think there is less of that in Cornwall. That said, even in the past 5 years, the St Piran’s Day’s Parade, it’s like it’s become this massive thing where all the kids make outfits and flags and there’s stuff happening in nearly every town. It’s like, okay, maybe that generation will grow up in Cornwall thinking yes, this is a different place – we’re part of the UK but we’re also separate. And maybe that will have loads of positive outcomes. I didn’t grow up with that. I think teaching about St Piran’s Day in schools is still a bit 2D, a bit too like, “What’s St Piran’s Day? Flags and saffron buns.” And you go, “And what are we celebrating?” “...Flags and saffron buns”. But there is more to that. There are loads of interesting things that we could celebrate about this place. I do think that probably will have an effect on the next generation and the generation after that. A lot of it comes from letting the young people do what they want with it. 

I’m aware that I’ve changed in the last 10-15 years, so I find it very hard to differentiate what’s me growing up compared to the place actually changing. There’s obvious things like, if we can take it on a visual level, you walk down the street in Falmouth and there are lots of empty shops. Lots of big empty shops. I find Wilko and M&S not being there really… I don’t know, you’d think they’d be the ones we need, right? But actually the ones we need are vape shops and holiday gift shops. There’s a lot of those. And there’s a lot of cafes, hairdressers… A mate of mine summed this up – he said, “Well, the internet is here, and the things you can’t buy on eBay are freshly made bread, coffee, and haircuts.” Everything else, you can get on the internet, probably cheaper. I just really enjoy how we’re all part of it. The contradictions. Like AirBnB – boo! – but my parents own their house and they don’t have much income, so they rent out my old room on AirBnB, and that sometimes is the only money they make in a week, and that is supporting a local family to live in the place where they live. So it’s not AirBnB – boo! – all the time, it’s not as simple as that. 

But at the same time I also see some really cool shit happening, and I see the Cornish Bank opening, which is what I needed in my teenage years – a venue which has bands and knows its audience and also caters for different audiences, from emos to dad bands. And down the road there’s a radical bookshop that’s opened, run by a guy who grew up in Redruth and a Galician woman. They get radical, weird books in and they also have a book scheme where they lend books out to people. At the same time, for me, there’s what feels like this really Tory-centric planned homogenisation of everything looking the same – we’ve got all the same chain shops and cafes, and sometimes it’s for the local people but a lot of the time it’s not – but there are still places that are trusting of people and welcoming, and they give me hope.

For a long time I didn’t know what Cornwall was. I was just living my life. But then I went away. I went away because this is such a common thing: you grow up in Cornwall and there’s this narrative to leave. Call it what you want, ‘brain drain’, whatever, but also I wanted to be a musician. I’d grown up seeing really cool shit in Cornwall that had inspired me, and I knew I wanted to do that, and I got offered some opportunities in Bristol. It was when I went away that I became aware of my Cornish identity, because you’re in a different place and people notice things about you, like “why are you always outside?” or “why do you always want us to sing?”. With travelling it was a weird transient life and I realised I didn’t have any community. I also struggled living in a city and being away from the landscape, having it so readily available. I played with the idea of coming home and I saw two friends of mine who hadn’t gone away, both living their lives doing different things, absolutely smashing it. Some of the happiest people I’d ever seen. Both of them inspired me to come back and make a go of it. I’m very connected to a community, so it makes it easy here sometimes. 

I will just say, with the Cornish accent, I have started to feel more comfortable. When I was 12 or 13 my mates and I got really into Monty Python and started doing impressions of all the characters, and we just picked up these very English voices and kind of got stuck in that. But I’ve noticed it with the show recently… I think because I’m playing a character, I’m playing a heightened version of myself, I’ve started saying fah-ther rather than father, and really liking it. What’s interesting is doing this show about Cornish identity in England, and then going to Scotland – when I go to Scotland, I tell people I’m not from England. Like, I’m not. I’m from Cornwall, and that is different. And that’s a new thing in the last 2 years. 

I’ve felt really good the past few months – I came back from Edinburgh and it had all been really successful, and I had my 30th birthday party, and my friends got married, and I had a month off, and I just got to really enjoy Cornwall and know I had exciting opportunities coming up which were taking me elsewhere. I came back and I squeezed the best bits out of it, like going swimming and doing nice things in nice places, and friends. I slightly felt like I was reaping the benefits of some seeds I had sown a few years ago, like starting a choir. I feel like I’ve got forty men who would have my back at any time because I’ve put something in and given them my time. 

They’ve done some extraordinarily nice things for me in the past year or two, like the gifts they’ve given me. It sounds silly, but for my birthday… I love silly games.I said to my housemate that my dream on my birthday would be that if – you know when you get a blanket and you get a little kid and you all pull the blanket and they get thrown in the air? – I really want to experience that, but I’m aware that I’m quite a big guy. So she spoke to my mate down in Penryn who lives on a boat and he brought a sail along to my 30th birthday in the village hall last month. I basically put on a village hall fete – everybody brought food and my dad’s band played. I felt uber loved. And then I got pushed onto this sail and there were 25 of my mates – some were my sisters or my oldest mates and some were in my choir – and they threw me in the air 30 times. I got some real air, and it was fucking thrilling. I have honestly felt pumped since that day. It was obviously a physical but also a metaphorical expression of how much love I felt from my friends. I do feel like I’ve put a lot of effort into Cornwall as a conscious project, that I have enjoyed thoroughly, but I’ve had a weird year or two – family illness where I lost my corners a bit, and then the whole thing that happened with the press and I got really anxious and… I feel fine now, but getting phone calls from the Daily Mail and Radio 4… It was all really full-on. But it kind of felt like it came full-circle at that party last month. I really felt a sense of my community, and I felt so loved. I feel I can say with self-worth that I earnt that. It’s much deeper than an art project. 

Cornwall is much richer than it gets made out to be. It’s really nuanced and interesting and rewarding, and frustrating and irritating and disappointing sometimes. And this is it, the whole thing I’ve tried to get across in all the work I’ve made about Cornwall, right from the first song I wrote for Men Are Singing in the Cornish language: there are good bits and bad bits, and it’s just trying to get the nuance across. Generalised sweeping statements always irritate me. They’re fun for comedic effect, as long as we all know they’re for comedic effect. But when it’s for real and people make lazy assumptions, that’s what irritates me. It’s like me saying, “London’s a shithole.” How will I ever know what London is like? It’s a huge place with thousands and thousands of people. That’s just my tiny, ill-observed judgement on that. I love it when people go, “I’ve been to Cornwall and I love it! I used to go there every year. We know it well!” and it’s like, no you don’t – I don’t even know it well! I just know my small little patch. When I was making the podcast, I went up the road 20 minutes to meet the Muslim community and was amazed that there is one. I didn’t even know those guys existed. I think when you judge any place, whether it’s Cornwall or not, it’s good to be humble about it and ready to go and learn and be surprised. As Big Phil in the choir always says: “be fascinated, not fascinating.” This place is shit and brilliant at the same time, and I totally respect people who have had both experiences. 

I would love to bring up children here. I think it’s a great place to grow up, and I think probably any small rural community can be. But there’s a lot of stuff here – it’s surprisingly more rich than you’d think. It would be good if there was a bit more diversity… But I think it would be a really fun place to have a family. I’m very excited about making work here. I’d like to maybe press reset and go do something else for a while, but making work here is really fun. I think I’ve also just got to the point where I’ve got a little bit of a name for myself around here, so I can do a work-in-progress tour for two weeks and we can book eight village halls or art centres, fairly small capacity, and it can sell out. The next project is about masculinity, and I love the idea that the show could go to Manchester International Festival and play at The Barbican or wherever, but it gets made in Cornwall. The Nationalist show, we did it in tiny venues and now it’s just done a run at the Fringe and we’re thinking about taking it to Australia, but it started in Bodmin Old Library. It’s that thing of being remote and having to be resourceful with what you’ve got. There is a tendency to wait for Cornwall to change. Or we could just book the village hall, put on a whacky show, and make it change.