Tom Scott: ‘I don’t know how this interview turned into a retirement speech’
About two years ago, Tom Scott finished work on a new album. Called “Average Man”, it was to be the first released under his own name. The award-winning and outspoken frontman for Home Brew, @Peace and Avantdale Bowling Club believed he’d captured the kind of raw, unfiltered snapshots of the life he’s become known for. When he played it to his manager, the late Lorraine Barry, she told him he’d made a masterpiece. “She was like, ‘This is the greatest,’” Scott says.
Then Scott played it to someone else. At the time, Scott’s relationship with his wife, the mother of his two sons, was in trouble. His new album addressed what they were going through, making constant references to the mistakes he’d made. “It was these love songs, not just singing, but a bunch of shit about infidelity, trauma, holding the relationship together,” he says. Scott’s wife had a different opinion to Barry’s. “She was like, ‘I [don’t want] to hear that,’ and rightfully so,” Scott says.
Out of deference, Scott put the album on hold. Then he embarked on the hardest two years of his life. His marriage fell apart. He got sober. He started seeing a therapist and began to unravel his past, learning why he was the way he was. Along the way, he realised his ex was right: the album he’d made “wasn’t done well”. It didn’t capture what he’d really been through, and what he’d learned over the past two years. Now, he says, he’ll never release it. “It let heaps of people down [but] at least it didn’t shit all over my ex,” he says.
So Scott recorded a different album. This one, called Anitya, the Sanskrit word for impermanence, comes from a different place, capturing an unseen side of Scott. It’s brutally intimate, full of insights from his new reality – one that captures the hurt that he caused but also includes time to examine new love. “This album, there’s a bit more thought to other people’s feelings,” he says. It’s a jarring listen. Scott sings far more than he raps, sometimes sweetly, often sadly. One song tells his kids why their parents can’t be together. Another apologises to his ex. “When I come to get the kids, I’ll just beep,” he mourns, forlornly, on the first single, ‘Till Then. “Promise you I won’t call you no more.”
Anitya was such a difficult album to make, Scott wondered whether he should just keep it for himself. It felt too personal. “When you start writing these things, it’s really scary. It’s like you’re opening Pandora’s box. This is more ownership of my behaviour than ever,” he says. Finally, he decided it scared him so much he had to put it out. “I was like, ‘Will other people want to listen to this?’ That’s when it felt I’d done something right,” he says.
To promote it, Scott decided he’d play just a handful of shows. At the first, for about 80 people crammed inside Neil Finn’s Roundhead Studios, Scott sat on a stool and warned the crowd, “I’m not going to rap.” He told them his new songs were like “gazing into a house fire … it’s everything I’ve been through”. The following hour was a searingly intense and emotional experience for everyone in that room – including Scott, who admits he felt terrified about singing his new songs for the first time. “Certain things are so strong [they] zap me back to that place,” he says.
After the show, he felt so overwhelmed he disappeared immediately. No one could find him. He’d run out of the studio, jumped in his car and gone straight home, a man alone, feeling all the feelings.
Scott is telling me all this with a baseball cap jammed tightly on his head while slumped in a chair. We’re sitting in the middle of Auckland’s Civic Theatre which is otherwise empty. Scott talks softly, almost in a whisper. “I know how to be loud, I know how to get attention,” he tells me. At some point it feels like a cheat code, it’s so played out.”
In the past, Scott has been the loudest in any room, on any stage. His past is littered with headline-grabbing antics, like the time he took a goat to the Aotearoa Music Awards, released a song called Kill the PM, walked out of an interview with Kim Hill, or leaked his DMs with then-prime minister Jacinda Ardern. Controversy was part of the package. My ears still reverberate from his antics at Womad in 2023 where, at a family-friendly festival, Scott demanded the speakers be turned up to piercing levels, then fired shots at the night’s headliners, Fly My Pretties.
Yet, with all that agitation, there have been accolades for his impressive catalogue. Scott holds the record for the most Taite Music Prize nominations for best album – six – an award he finally won in 2019 for Avantdale Bowling Club’s debut, which also took home Album of the Year at the Aotearoa Music Awards, ahead of records by Marlon Williams, The Beths and others.