It’s the start of a spring heatwave and sitting with Tom Rowley in Fagan’s beer garden – Guinness in hand, sunglasses on – he’s got the sort of laid-back energy you’d expect from someone finally doing things on their own terms. Known to most as the guitarist in Milburn and a touring regular with Arctic Monkeys, Rowley is finally stepping out from the shadows with a debut solo record, due early next year. Exposed settled in for a pint to find out more…
Having known Rowley for the best part of 20 years now, I don’t think he’d mind me saying that, while he’s a fantastic musician, being a solo artist isn’t necessarily a natural fit. “It’s kind of not something I wanted to do,” he says, matter-of-factly. “But I’ve always wrote songs and had an idea of what they should’ve been. Then someone else is singing it or performing it, and it’s never how you want it to be. So, it was like, well, if I don’t do it, it’s never going to be what I want.”
That quiet pull towards creative autonomy became a gentle itch Rowley felt ready to scratch. Following Milburn and a stint fronting Dead Sons, he was in a rut – back working as a sparky, PAT testing in “a shithole in Leeds”.
“It was the worst thing ever,” he grimaces. “Then one Sunday I get this text off Cooky [Arctic Monkeys guitarist Jamie Cook] – ‘Alright mate, do you still play keyboards?’” He laughs, as if he still can’t quite believe the timing. “Monkeys were going on tour, and they asked me to come in. I was hating my job, just fucking miserable. So when that offer landed, it was like, yeah – absolutely.”
Since then, he’s toured the world, played some of the biggest stages going and quietly built up a catalogue of personal material. “I think I’ve probably written about ten albums I’ve done nothing with,” he says. “But then there was this one song – ‘Something Strange’ – and that kind of stuck. That was the turning point.”
Fast-forward a couple of years, and he’s in LA, recording at Valentine Studios with producer Loren Humphrey (The Last Shadow Puppets, Florence and the Machine). “We just did it in like a week and a half – proper fast,” he recalls. “We didn’t really know what songs we were doing until we got there. Just cracked on.”
The record, he says, blends 70s influences with modern grit. “It’s singer-songwriter at heart, but I’ve leaned into the guitar a bit. There was a moment we thought, ‘Should we lose the solos?’ Because they’re not exactly cool anymore. But then I thought, ‘Nah – embrace it.’”
Having had a sneaky listen, musically it’s rich and varied – some moments tender and piano-led, others full of big riffs and wailing leads. “It’s not just twiddling for the sake of it,” he insists. “The songs are strong underneath it all.”
Lyrics often arrive late in his writing process – more intuitive than intentional. “I rarely set out to write about something. Usually it’s the music first, then a line slips out, and that opens the door to what the song might be about. Some of them, I still don’t know what they’re about. But that’s fine.”
He’s keen to preserve some mystery, too. “You don’t need to tell everyone everything. Let people figure it out themselves.”
There’s a semi-fictional band called Moses and the Drones that crops up in one song – at one point, it was nearly the album title. “It was just a way of writing about what I’ve been doing the last few years, but through a lens. Then I scrapped it. Might still use it, though – I like it.”
Next up is a headline gig at Crookes Social Club on 19 June – the first official outing for the new material.
“We felt like we had to do that, make it real,” he says. The lead single Tell Me What You Want will drop a couple of weeks before the show, followed by more new music across the year and the full album in early 2026.
And while the music’s been ready for a while, the mechanics of going solo have taken some getting used to – especially the self-promotion side. “The fucking social media stuff just blows my mind,” he says, half-laughing, half-scowling. “I’m a bit of a technophobe – it’s like finding a way to do it where you’re not pretending to be someone else. Because people can spot that straight away.”
He’s not kidding about being a technophobe, either. After we wrap up the interview, I watch as he struggles to remember how to save my number (I now realise it’s possible he was just trying to avoid saving it). Anyway, I take his phone off him and he half pays attention as I show him the quickest way. “Learn something new every day,” he says, eyebrows raised.
Tom Rowley plays Crookes Social Club on 19 June. Tickets are available from tomrowleymusic.com (£15).
