Daniel Pickard

BIOGRAPHY

“I like to pose questions that people don't want to think about or answer,” says Daniel Pickard. “Not forcing an answer. Just playing around with it.” That inclination towards discomfiture, pushing and prodding at polite society, runs all the way through his debut album, Behaviour. Sarcasm and self-deprecation hold sway on songs set in nineteenth-century gay brothels, swish hotel room afterparties, New York basement bars, Sao Paolo’s Guarulhos airport, and offices decked out in naff IKEA furniture — articulated via French pop, Italo disco, Serge Gainsbourg lyricism, and contributions from composer and violinist Owen Pallett (Arcade Fire, Charlotte Gainsbourg, Pet Shop Boys) and composer Michael Stein (Stranger Things).

The Coventry-raised, London-based singer, songwriter, and musician — formerly of art-pop band Half Loon — has always been fascinated by social behaviours: the way people of all walks of life interact, the oddities of their movements, and “social media trends where the best is kitsch and the worst is vomit”. On opening track "First Past the Pose" he visits a Victorian gay brothel in a dream, while on "Room Service", he lingers at a hotel room afterparty because it beats feeling empty and alone. "MD is a Pervert", meanwhile, excoriates creepy managerial types: “the saddening predictability of it.”

Pickard started working on Behaviour during the first Covid lockdown in 2020 while isolating with his family in Coventry. “The benefit of that time for artists was that we were able to contact musicians like Owen Pallett and Michael Stein who were perhaps not otherwise engaged, because of what was going on,” he says.

He engaged the services of co-producer Max Prior, and recorded vocals with Grammy-winning mixer Eduardo De La Paz at Toast, the Kensal Rise studio of producer Craig Silvey (Baxter Dury, Jarvis Cocker), and recorded the drums in West Hampstead’s Hoxa HQ studio with Silvey’s assistant Dani Spragg, who also engineered the record. Synths flew in from composer Alex Ball in Bristol, Carlos Trilha Müller in Brazil, and Stein in Texas. Lead single Heartbeats the Flaw, meanwhile, features vocals from French artist Mahault.

Antoine Chabert (Charlotte Gainsbourg, Christine and the Queens, Daft Punk) mastered the album in Paris — another perfect fit, given Behaviour wears its French influences on its sleeve, from the nonchalant dandy leanings of Sébastien Tellier, to Daft Punk, L’Impératrice, Ellie et Jacno, and producer SebastiAn. Elements of Italo disco worked their way into the songs too, as well as a film score sensibility.

Pickard picked up the guitar at 16, but it wasn’t until he moved to London for university — living above the Big Red pub on Holloway Road in a halls of residence that used to be a Young Offenders Institute, oddly attracted to the narrow corridors and tiny cold damp box room, but with no money to do anything and on a course he didn’t want to do — that he started writing: pen to paper, chords to songs. And then he started playing, first at an open mic night, then in venues across London and abroad.

In 2013 he formed Half Loon alongside Stranger Things star Charlie Heaton. They released an EP, played shows and festivals, and toured, before eventually disbanding in 2017. “We were really good but we weren’t productive enough,” says Pickard.

A “take it or leave it” confrontation runs through the album, “but I’m discomfited by the fact you might leave,” he says, “because I really want you to take it.” And in contrast to some of the behaviours displayed by the characters in the songs — insecurity, immaturity, debauchery — runs a refined, focused sensibility that binds the tracks together and speaks volumes about the kind of musical future Pickard sees for himself. “The album is very purposeful,” he says. “I’m not chancing it musically.”