Behind the scenes of our Dave cover interview

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It was around 5pm in a lush West London recording studio. The room was so big and full of brand new-looking instruments, that I didn’t even see Dave at first. I didn’t initially realise that the poignant music I heard was being played by Dave himself, who was sat at the piano with his hoodie up. We shook hands and went into the room next door, just the two of us, while his team stayed back. (Thankfully – it’s so awkward to have a third party sat there listening in on interviews.)

Dave has an unusual aura. You feel a mood around him, like a shift in the environment. Although he projects strong emotions, his face doesn’t change very much –sometimes an expression flickers before going back to a straight face – so it’s felt purely as an energetic field. You get the vibe that he has had to live with his guard up for a long time. But once he relaxes, he has a lot of quirky mannerisms and quite a dry sense of humour.

In interviews, I normally like to let people speak until they’re naturally done with an answer so I can hear all of their thoughts. With Dave, this was hard because he’d have so much to say. I’d have a million tabs open in my head trying to keep track of all my follow-up questions. Even though we spoke for over three hours, I felt like I really only asked a handful of things. Because The Boy Who Played the Harp represented such an important shift for Dave, I didn’t need to do too much work – there was so much to unpack in the evolution he’d gone through in the four years since his last album, and the change he wanted to be in the world.

We discussed the discomfort he feels hearing his own past bars about women and that it’s never really felt like him, more what you’re expected to say as a rapper. There is a bit of a formula to a club smash and the songs that do best, he implied, like machismo flexes about girls, drugs, cars, money. That can be hard to justify on albums preaching about social issues. So, over the years, while he’s recorded a ton of songs he knows will be guaranteed ​“bangers”, he didn’t include them because he doesn’t rate the low vibrations of the club and wants to move away from that world. He wanted to set an example for ways to do rap hits that kept his principles intact. It meant The Boy Who Played the Harp was a risk, and while he was unwavering in this purer direction he wanted to take, he still had some residual anxieties about the ways it could be received. A few times, he asked for my opinion, and he seemed really keen to hear what might potentially be made of it.

Because there was so much to talk about, there were some memorable moments in the interview that didn’t make the final version of the cover story. Dave got quite emotional talking about how much his fans had helped him. ​“I feel a bit more comfortable in my own skin these days,” he said. ​“These fans are the best group of fans ever. Over the last few years, they have given me so much confidence. They help me feel the way that I need to feel. For them, I’d do anything. The biggest kindness that I could do for them is to be the character that I know that they want me to be, in a way that is still different each and every time – a true fan is going to want me to evolve.”

I thought it was fascinating that he saw Dave as a character he was co-creating with the fans. When I asked if that was the case, he said: ​“Life is so real but it’s not – it’s like the matrix. But the most important thing is the fans. They’ve had a long few years.” I also regularly think about him discussing the hysteria of politics right now. ​“We’re years away from an election and people are talking like it’s next week.” I hadn’t even realised the next election was all the way in 2029 until he said it. And I liked his track-ready, almost lyrical summary of how survivalist tug-of-war politics feels like right now: ​“This race wants more for their race and less for other races. This gender wants less for other genders and more for its own agenda.”

When I first heard the album the week before release, in the studio it was partially recorded in, I thought it was really beautiful and innovative, but it left me with a lot of blue feelings to process. Fairchild was a particularly hard listen the first time (a lot of women probably find it triggering, which is why it needed to be made) and there wasn’t the turn up song I’d come to expect from a Dave album. Which wasn’t a problem, but it just meant the album’s sad parts really lingered with me.

Since then though, it’s warmed up in my ear. Maybe it’s because in our interview Dave described it as his brightest yet and now I can see the brightness in it too. Right now, my hyperfixation is No Weapons, especially when Jim Legxacy and Dave go back and forth and the flow is super bouncy. I keep rewinding the bit when Dave sings ​“Never showed me the decency.” The way he draws out ​“decency” is so pretty to me. Before that, I kept replaying History because of all the switch ups in flow. There’s something addictive about the blend of James Blake’s haunting falsetto with Dave’s playful braggadocio and the overall holy sense of purpose. It’s such a singular, strange and potent mix of moods – a bit like Dave himself.