Why Tom Waits is Keith Bayley's Creative Hero

Keith Bayley is a senior producer and composer at The Futz Butler, professional noisemakers in Central London.

His work is all about telling stories with sound: whether via bespoke composition for some of the world’s biggest advertisers, soundtrack production for factual programming and documentaries, contributing guitars to feature film scores or the creation of an audio branding strategy.

Keith joined The Futz Butler in 2015 and has worked with the team to grow the company into an award-winning music and sound production studio with clients as diverse as Nike, BMW, SKY, Meta, Tesco, Adidas, Uber and Coca-Cola. He remains as passionate as ever about the power of ideas and sound waves combining to move an audience: “people will forget what you said or did, but they’ll never forget how you made them feel.” (Maya Angelou).

LBB> How long has this person been important to you and what are your first memories of meeting them or coming across their work?

Keith> Many years ago at the start of my career I was at a party in South London. It was the small hours, the red wine was cheap and the conversation was becoming increasingly fragmented. Someone put on the album ‘Blue Valentine’ and a line from ‘Kentucky
Avenue’ — ‘take a rusty nail and scratch your initials in my arm’ — jumped out at me as if amplified a thousand times. It was sung in that unmistakable voice — the sound of a larynx left out in the rain and run over by a dump truck. I was immediately and forever a Raindog.

LBB> Why is the person such an inspiration to you?

Keith>

1. He said this. (Or if he didn’t say it originally, he made the quote famous.) “Cheap. Fast. Good. Pick two.” That’s creative working life right there.

2. He could have been a mainstream megastar, coming out of the 1970’s LA Troubadour scene. But he chose a more jagged path, with a sound full of rough edges, leftfield lyricism and wheezing junkyard instruments. He probably sold less, but achieved so much more creatively.

3. Like Hemingway, he’s created the most from the least — working with what he’s got and a razored creative vision. He says of his voice: “I’ll never sing opera, it's true. But it’s the right horn for the engine.”

4. He’s a polymath, like Brian Eno or Donald Glover. Famous first as a visionary songwriter and performer, he has acted in numerous movies and writes poetic prose. Florence Welch, Kazuro Ishiguro and Robert Carlyle all quote him as an influence. There’s no obvious delineation between disciplines — everything is simply about harnessing ideas to tell a story.

LBB> How does this person influence you in your approach to your creative work?

Keith> His work answers these questions. So you ask them of yourself while creating:

1. What truth am I trying to express here? (Even if that truth is entirely invented.)

2. How can I express it in a way that will stop people in their tracks and move them? (“It's the burglar that can break a rose's neck..”)

3. How can I make it unmistakably mine? It might not be shiny and perfect — but it’s mine.

LBB> What piece or pieces of this person’s work do you keep coming back to and why?

Keith>

1. The albums ‘Blue Valentine’ and ‘Mule Variations’.

2. The book: ‘Tom Waits on Tom Waits: Interviews and Encounters’ 3. This quote: ‘Music has generally involved a lot of awkward contraptions, a certain amount of heavy lifting.’