Mercury Prize Award nominee Chris Duncan on being the major surprise of the shortlist

Scottish musician and artist C Duncan is a trained composer whose work has been performed on BBC Radio 3

Mercury Prize Award nominee, Chris Duncan performing (Press image)

It's difficult to tell whether Glasgow-based musician Chris Duncan is the least likely entrant on this year’s Mercury Prize shortlist, or the most representative of the award’s customary spirit of cross-genre inclusivity.

When his debut album, Architect, a disciplined arrangement of dreamy electronic soundscapes that he made on a budget of £50, was shortlisted for the prestigious prize, he was as surprised as anyone. FatCat, the Brighton-based indie label to which he’s signed, have become used to their artists not quite making the Mercury cut. They had to be persuaded by his publisher to enter the record, says Duncan, .

“I was in my flat when I found out,” he says of receiving the news. “We’d been on tour and my PR called. He said, ‘are you sitting down?’ I was in complete shock. It’s something I’ve followed for years, there’s a sound they often go for which really applies to me. I can’t believe I’m part of it.”

The son of two classical musicians, Duncan is a trained composer whose work has been performed on BBC Radio 3; a self-taught painter who illustrates his own record sleeves and sells in commercial galleries around Glasgow; and a wondrously baroque psych-pop musician who grew up listening to Björk and Radiohead, and whose dream is to play in a trio alongside ferociously fashionable producer Flying Lotus and bassist Thundercat.

Born in Glasgow and raised in Drymen (pronounced “Drimmen”) on the east shore of Loch Lomond, Duncan is the son of Mark and Janina (his mother is half-Polish), a violinist and a viola player with the Royal Scottish National Orchestra and the Scottish Symphony Orchestra, and the brother of an IT consultant. “He’s quite musical, he always enjoyed it and still does,” says Duncan with a smile, “but he made quite a sensible choice.” Their mother used to run a small music shop from their house, so Duncan grew up around musicians, but it was the neighbour’s piano that first got him playing at the age of six.

The sense of contradiction in his musical life transfers to his demeanour. Tall, dark-haired and somewhere along the lines of handsome, he wears a smart V-neck sweater and keeps his long black coat on throughout.

At once, there’s an air of the assuredness and confidence of a young man who won a music scholarship to the Glenalmond College boarding school in Perth, and who used their apparently excellent music department to earn a place at the Royal Conservatoire of Scotland straight from school (a highly unusual path); and a sense of the geeky, easy-going music obsessive who worked at the post office back in his parents’ village, and coffee shops around Glasgow, to pay his way while he holed up in his flat recording.

The son of two classical musicians, Duncan is a trained composer whose work has been performed on BBC Radio 3 (Press image)

“A job in a coffee shop is a good one when you’re a musician,” he laughs, “you get really caffeinated all day, then you can work all evening.”

He says he works on music for at least six or seven hours at a time, every day for six month stretches, then he “hits a wall” and slips into painting mode for three months, during which he listens to a lot of new music. “I find it very relaxing,” he says of his visual art. “It’s a totally different thing, you’re using your brain, but not quite in the same way. You’re not asking, ‘how do I get this bit to work?’ You just do it and it happens over a space of time, whereas music is more head-down, more intense.”

He started painting when he was at school, sitting at the kitchen table and painting alongside his mother. He enjoys contemporary art and he’d love to do a degree in art history, although that may have to wait until after the Master’s in composition he also has his eye on. His paintings sell, he says; he shrugs and smiles when I suggest business might pick up even more after this month.

Architect, the debut album for which he earned his Mercury nomination, sounds meticulously produced, a gorgeous wash of Duncan’s gentle, echoing vocal and a mass of deliberately lo-fi acoustic instrumentation. The soaring “Garden”, a mainstay of BBC 6 Music, is probably the best example so far of what he does.

“It’s just my laptop, a sound card and a microphone,” he says of his method, which is lo-fi less out of choice than necessity. “I actually use my grandpa’s old classical guitar from the forties. It’s a bit out of tune – it’s actually a terrible old guitar – but it’s amazing what you can do with computers to make the sound clean. Production is like practising a musical instrument, and I had so many limitations with the equipment, I kind of had to learn to make the production as clean as possible. Otherwise it would just be a bad guitar recorded through a bad microphone.”

He takes inspiration from artists like Björk and Róisín Murphy, whom he’s thrilled to be on a shortlist alongside. “Also things like French classical music, late Romantic impressionist music,” he says. “Very lush, big sounds. That’s always been at the back of my mind, and it’s why I keep adding more and more layers of vocals, just this big wash of music. Cocteau Twins are another big influence. I always wanted to make a record that had that kind of dreaminess to it, those really precise melodies.”

Adding to the sense that he came out of nowhere, Duncan was signed to Brighton-based indie FatCat Records before he had played his music live – or rather, before he had played it anywhere other than Burns Night in Drymen Village Hall three years ago, when he and his family were playing in the ceilidh band and he was talked into doing a set. Targeting One Little Indian for the Björk connection and FatCat because of their history with artists like Sigur Rós and Animal Collective, it was the latter who came to him and offered to sign him while he went off to make a full album.

Duncan says he’s been overwhelmed by their support, and by their focus on the art rather than the business; they signed him for three albums, and are currently discussing a fourth. “He genuinely is such a creative soul,” says Dave Cawley, the label’s co-founder.

“He just wants to create and the avenues he can explores are endless, for me that’s so exciting. These are the artists I want to work with. It’s not about money or some short term plan, I want to build a creative working relationship with Chris that lasts. To do that takes time, but it’s so much more rewarding.”

Duncan says he doesn’t want to limit himself. At the conservatoire his work was performed by ensembles including Icebreaker and Red Note, and he wants to move into classical composing and film-scoring at some point in the future.

But he does have three more albums to think about first. “Chris Duncan is two average names put together,” he reflects on his chosen persona. “C Duncan is short, it’s easy. My painting is Christopher Duncan, my music is C Duncan, I don’t know what the composition [name] might be. I could translate my name into Polish or something?”

C Duncan plays dates in London, Aberdeen, Edinburgh and Glasgow between 1 and 5 December. His album ‘Architect’ is out now and his single ‘For (Autumn Rebuild)’ is released on limited-edition vinyl on Friday 27 November.

The winner of the Mercury Prize 2015 is announced on BBC Four and BBC Radio 6 Music on Friday 20 November