Lonely Joe Parker is a one-man, bike riding, folk machine. He recently released a split EP – What’s Wrong With Broken Glass – with label mate Jackie Paper a.k.a David Miatt and is now set to release the single “Shanty” taken from the aforementioned EP on Monday 8th March.

We grabbed five-minutes with Joe, just long enough for him to chat to us about his love of bombay mix, record label (Sotones) and his hatred of singing in a fake accent!

Lonely Joe Parker

1. Please introduce yourself to Panic Dots…

Uhh… hi! I’m sorry but my trendy clothes are all at the drycleaners. Just gonna’ lock my bike up – is it cool if I crash here tonight? Do you want some bombay mix? I got some wine, too – three for a tenner… Nice top you got on.

2. Aliens land on your back door, they have no concept of music. How would you describe your sound to them?

I don’t actually have a house at the moment, but if they did come knocking I guess they’d be confused; the dictionary says music is “a regular sequence of notes”, but there’s nothing regular about it, unfortunately. Hopefully they’d magically fix my battered guitar, Batteries Not Included-style. I think they’d like the roughness and the funny noises of it all though, it might remind them of their cities at home – the one thing you can guarantee about life everywhere is that it’s pretty messy, right?

3. Why are you “Lonely” Joe Parker?

As if I knew the answer?!

4. What’s your favourite thing about being a musician – recording, playing live / touring etc?

I always hated recording, but I’m coming round to it now. It’s all about touring and playing live though – seeing weird places and meeting odd whackos at funny times of the day…

5. What influenced your decision to pick-up a guitar and start writing music?

I’ve been writing lyrics and songs since I can remember, which is a bit hammy but true. I picked-up guitar when I was 14 to get girls. I quickly discovered you only need a few chords to make a girl-worthy song, so then I didn’t bother trying to write anything more complicated than that for years. I’m a bit more ambitious now…

6.  There’s a distinct lo-fi folk sound to your music. Aside from this genre, what other bands / artists are you listening to?

Believe it or not, I spent most of 2009 listening to nothing but really poppy, precise stuff by women – things like ‘White Chalk’, ‘Actor’, ‘The Reminder’, ‘The Greatest’ etc… It’s taken a long while to filter through, but I think my debut LP (starting it next month) will reflect that. I’ve always had loads of time for Tom Waits but lately got a massive man-crush on Gil Scott-Heron – ‘I’m New Here’ will go down as the best record of this decade, I’m totally convinced about that.

7. And the music / bands / artists you despise the most?

Anyone who sings in an accent that isn’t theirs just because they’re on autopilot and unimaginative. People trying to pretend they’re singing from some deep well of emotion when somehow all they manage is cliché. Any idiot that enjoys advertising hair products. There’s not been much spirit of rebellion since about 1993, I think – it’s all been neatly packed-up and tidied a bit and used to sell soft drinks, or cars, or ad space on MTV.

But I really hate people who moan about music being hard, I mean come ON, this has to be the best job there is!

8. Your label, Sotones, is a collaborative effort between all the artists on there. What’s your take on the “DIY aesthetic” these days?

Well, we don’t really have a DIY aesthetic, at least, we don’t aspire to – apart from me pretty much everyone else sounds more polished – they’d sit as well on XL or Parlophone/EMI as they would with us. Really it’s all about sharing the load and supporting each other; for instance at the moment I’m sending a release for one band to the distributor, at the same time I’m on the phone to a guy from one of the other bands who runs our publishing stuff (he’s hassling me for my gig setlists to get PRS dosh, which I’ve not done on time, as usual…)

9. Genie in a lantern time! What are your three wishes?

Well, I’m gonna assume that someone who got there ahead of me in the queue already covered world peace and happiness, so… a set of un-buckle-able bike wheels, a guitar that doesn’t go out of tune all the goddamn time, and a crazy Good Will Hunting speed-memory-reading ability thing, imagine how much you could cram in just surfing the web. That, or better hearing, ‘cos mine’s fucked.

10. Finally, if you were an animal, a vegetable and a mineral, which would you be?

I’d like to be one of those elements they make in the particle accelerators that are so unstable they only exist for a kajillionth of a second. Or a big, wily, evil ole mountain lion.

“Shanty” is available to download from March 8th 2010. Check the Sotones website for more details…