Ben Ottewell has one helluva voice. It’s something of a contradiction – sometimes smooth, sometimes bracing in its jagged edges and raw expression. The kind of voice that would be equally at home in some dim-lit underground bar as it would in a forest.

Since winning the Mercury Prize back in 1998, his band Gomez have established themselves as one of the most unique (and unexpected) groups around, thanks in no small part to Ottewell’s roaring vocals. With the release of his second solo album, Rattlebag, that voice continues to grow – not that he has ever been particularly driven to develop it.

“Perhaps when I was younger,” he considers, sipping at his drink as the witching hour ticks away. “I may have been a little more conscious of how I was trying to sound back then. Listening to bands like The Doors or Led Zeppelin. But I sing the way I sing, I open my mouth and it’s there. A lot of times, you know, it comes down to what you’ve been doing the night before, how long you’ve gone without sleep.” He laughs, and on cue I can hear the sound of chinking ice as he pours himself another drink.

“I think quite naturally this is just how I sing,” he continues. “It strikes a lot of people as odd because I certainly don’t look the way I sound. I guess it’s left me trying to grow into my voice. It’s really not a self-conscious thing. I think people assume I’m kind of trying to sound a certain way, but honestly, knowing how singing works, the amount of gigs I’ve done, if this wasn’t the way I naturally sound I wouldn’t have been able to keep doing it anywhere near this long. I’d be straining something up there.”

Ottewell’s speaking voice gives little indication of the force behind these songs: he is an amiable guy, and seems pleasantly surprised that people are interested in talking to him. His first solo album, Shapes And Shadows, dropped in 2011, and allowed him the opportunity to showcase material that would never have quite fit with the style or sound of Gomez. Three years later, with the help of crowdfunding platform Indiegogo, Ottewell has been able to continue building his own catalogue without the worry of label pressure influencing his direction.

“It was nice having that transparent process, that direct relationship with people. Plus just getting the money together to do it, which is still a problem these days, believe it or not. And no-one’s asked for a refund yet, so that’s good. The downside is the bloody mailing you have to do. I’ve been sending CDs to Japan, Finland, Israel, Australia. All that bloody distribution and the time it takes. Otherwise it’s fantastic. It’s so difficult for musicians these days. The money is hard. You’ve got to be good, and you’ve got to be lucky.”

It also doesn’t hurt if your upbringing is surrounded by music. Some of Ottewell’s earliest memories are of being taken to folk festivals by his parents (“Both hippies – I may have caught a little of what they were smoking”), and although he had no burning desire to ‘make it’ as a rock star, his high school days were filled with performance.

“I’d always sung, and I’d played guitar, but only in snatches. Whenever someone started a band in high school I was always the singer. But there were never really any bands playing what I wanted to sing, which is why I started learning to play the guitar. There was never any real reason behind it, you know, I didn’t see any end point. I was never one of those people who stood in front of the mirror saying, ‘You’re going to be a star.’ It was just purely something that I enjoyed, you know?”

Mirror or not, Ottewell has since penned some outstanding material. He is that rare variety of writer whose songs don’t seem to diminish through repeated listening. Part of it is the strength of his voice, of course. But the songs themselves – his often dark and remorseful lyrics, his sombre yet catchy riffs – can stick in your head for days. It’s not a bad achievement given some of them have taken years to fashion into shape.

“There are always snatches of material that will sometimes hang around for years, and you’ll never quite know what to do with them. You’ll be sitting there playing, and suddenly find some different perspective. Maybe you were drinking tequila the night before instead of beer, and that opens up some kind of synapse in your brain. Something clicks, a connection is made and a song suddenly starts coming together. Then all that’s left is to write the bloody lyrics.

“A lot of my writing is based around riffs. ‘Rattlebag’ is a riff, ‘Patience & Rosaries’, ‘Shoreline’. The riff is a great thing. Some cyclical thing that gets in your brain and keeps nagging at you, that’s what I want. That’s the problem: it doesn’t just do that to your audience, it does it to you, too. When you’re writing a song, you know it’s good if that riff just doesn’t let go of you. I always have my songs in my head. I think that’s quite an achievement – if you can happily live with something you’ve created yourself.”

Though had Ottewell never found success either solo or with Gomez, he has no doubts about the direction his life would have taken. “Oh, I would have been some kind of occult, magus kind of figure,” he says matter-of-factly, finishing his drink. “Someone deeply in the dark arts. Lucky that the band happened instead, I suppose.”

Rattlebag out Friday October 24 through Cooking Vinyl. See him live at Newtown Social Club on Wednesday October 29 (tickets here),The Brass Monkey Thursday October 30 (tickets here) andThe Bunker, Coogee Diggers Saturday November 1 (tickets here).

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