Considine band Riding the Low is set to release their third album. Even after about 16 years and many pub shows, Considine is still wary of being perceived as the vanity of an actor known for great indie like Dead Man’s Shoes, some Hollywood movies, starring in the TV drama The Suspicions of Mr. Which, and the show that should surpass them all, in terms of mainstream attention, the upcoming prequel of Game of Thrones, House of the Dragon. “I knew there would be some kind of cynicism around it.” But he does not care, and he does not need anyone’s permission, he says. “I do it because I like it.” Subscribe to our Inside Saturday newsletter for an exclusive behind-the-scenes look at the magazine’s biggest features, as well as a comprehensive list of our weekly highlights. He has become, he says, more vital to his happiness than his acting career, something to which, as he says, “I almost fell. I am never completely comfortable with acting, I have never fully embraced the fact that I am an actor. “I still feel like a scammer.” One of his challenges, he says, is interpreting someone else’s work. “I always guess to myself: is it okay? Am I doing a good job? ” But his songs – he writes the lyrics and some melodies – are his. “They are unfiltered, they pass me by.” Considine did not intend to become a songwriter and did not even know he could do it until his wife bought him a guitar one Christmas at 20. He wrote a song that morning. “And I did not stop,” he says. “I do not know where this came from, but I could do it, so I kept doing it.” Later, when he connected with some childhood friends – now musicians – with the idea of recording some of these songs, “People caught me. It was so exciting to hear something you have written come to life like this. ” Paddy Considine with Riding the Low shows in the ruins of Coventry Cathedral in 2021. Photo: Katja Ogrin / Alamy We meet at a guitar show in central London and Considine – black jeans, stalks, tattooed eyes, sunglasses – looks like the place, but his way is far from catching rock stars. He is the most stellar actor I have ever met: unguarded, quick to laugh at and kind to him. But then he would not necessarily call himself an actor. He knows he did not always meet like that – in old interviews he could be stingy and did not try to distance himself from the intense and often violent roles he played. In one of his songs from the new album, Carapace of Glass, he sings: “I’m such a different person, but I do not recognize him at all.” He was inspired by his own experience, he says, by creating a persona, “that I’m some kind of tough guy, and it’s not true, really. “The root of all this is just fear.” At the age of 30, he was diagnosed with what was then called Asperger’s Syndrome (now part of the autism spectrum disorder), which helped him understand some of the difficulties he had as a child: misinterpreting things and feeling alienated from other people. “This appearance was my way of keeping people away from me. And it worked. “He woke up one day with the song in his head and wrote it down quickly. It’s a very personal album, dealing with Considine’s childhood in the Winshall area of Burton. He still lives in the city with his wife, with whom he has been together since he was 18 (they have three children, whom he has encouraged everything, creatively, and especially in music). “There are a lot of ghosts on the record,” he says, smiling. Not just the old family, and the local legends that seemed great in childhood – the people you realize, as adults, “were confused, but we looked at them as if they were heroes” – but also the places. He is the second youngest of six children, a “working class child,” he says, “but my parents did not even work.” His father was fickle and could be violent, not at home, but he had a reputation on the fortune as someone with a short fuse – he once threw a bucket of wheels out of a utility window and got into a fight in a pub. Olivia Colman and Peter Mullan in the 2011 film Paddy Considine by Tyrannosaur. Photo: Optimum / Sportsphoto / Allstar Considine directed the Bafta-winning short film Dog Altogether, which he developed into the 2011 feature film Tyrannosaur, which he wrote and directed as a way of exploring his father’s anger. The album’s title track, The Death of Gobshite Rambo, was written for the day his father died (the name Gobshite Rambo is the name Considine gave to the darkest part of his soul, though he could easily describe the father who died in 2006). “He was lying in bed and he was becoming more translucent. Everyone drinks a cup of tea and a fucking chat. I looked at my family too [realised] We all just try to deal with it, everyone goes through their own personal feelings. “It was a complicated relationship we all had with our father, so everyone treated it very differently.” Considine’s way, with all the self-defense of the post, was to wonder how he would turn the stage if he made a movie. As teenagers, Considine and his friend Richard Eaton – now guitarist at Riding the Low – formed a band with another friend, Nick Hemming, who is now on the band Leisure Society. Considine put forward another friend’s drum kit and, exactly, became a drummer. In college, where he took a drama class, he met Shane Meadows – who would become a director and screenwriter and cast Considine in his first roles – and they had a band for a while. When he went to university to study photography, he joined a Britpop-era band, which had little success supporting well-known indie groups. Paddy Considine on stage with Riding the Low in Coventry in 2021. Photo: David M Benett / Dave Benett / Getty Images for Coventry UK City of Culture Considine left when the band became more serious and did not believe his drum was up. In any case, he did not really think of music as a career, and at that point he wanted to explore photography (newspapers like this and the Independent had started writing his photo exhibitions). He was happy to pursue this when Meadows offered him a role in his film, A Room for Romeo Brass. “Then I had to learn how to act. Acting was fine until it was my bread and butter, and I’m going to say, “I do not really know what to do, I do not really have the tools to do that.” In some movies, he says, “the lightning would do it. strike, but again I did not really understand it as art. “It’s always something I learn more about, the more I do it.” He smiles and says: “I think there is still time to become a good actor”. Just relatively recently, he says – when he was on The Ferryman in 2017 – he started taking it. (I saw it, he was electrified, with no sign of the inner turmoil he felt for much of the run.) “All this pressure I put on myself to perform. I went: ‘All you have to do is tell the story.’ And a huge weight was lifted. “ Considine loves directing, but was bored by the experience of the 2017 film, Journeyman, about a boxer suffering a head injury. Despite Tyrannosaur’s success, starring Olivia Colman and Peter Mullan and winning many awards at Sundance, despite the positive reviews, he found it difficult to find a festival to show Journeyman. “I’m not sure if the things I want to do will find a place anymore,” he says. “I did not expect a free pass, but I thought there would be some interest and there was none. I just went: “You know what? I do not have time to make this mess in my life “. Music was somewhere that could express itself, give meaning to his life and thoughts, with immediacy. “I found that in other parts of my life I was scared, especially of things like acting.” It was not the same as writing music or playing a concert. “And I had a little company with me, I felt like I belonged to something. This was something I think I was looking for as well, that I could say, “These are my people.” Considine has no expectations or worries about where he’s going – “I wouldn’t call it a career,” he says, although the next album has already been written and closed for a 2am slot in Glastonbury – in the same way that he did not have a specific plan for photography or acting or directing. But he likes to look back. Sometimes a year, he will drive his old estate. “I will go out of my house and think; everything that happened under this roof – all the sorrow and all the laughter, all that made it what it was.” The memory of the boy in the upstairs window, who sometimes struggled to connect but found joy and escape in the music. Riding the Low The Death of Gobshite Rambo’s album is out now.
