Artist bio: Ben Narcis and his self-titled EP
Ben Narcis’ mind is constantly overflowing onto the page. The songwriter has hordes of notebooks filled with “poems, crap stories, weird insane jottings and fictional diary accounts” dating back to his teenage years. He rarely revisits those old writings, but they remain precious, and – like a true savant – he always knows where to find what he’s looking for, should he decide he does want to return to a particular line of thought. “You can always sift through your own mess,” he explains.
It’s in these scribblings that Ben Narcis’ songs are born. Conversations with friends down the boozer, the latest breaking news headlines, a pointed line from his “homeboy” Nietszche, a dark reflection from deep in a Dostoevsky tome – all can be the jumping off point for one of his wayward and witty missives, which could run on for several pages at a time. “As Hemingway said, ‘write drunk, edit sober’,” he reflects. Through this haphazard, spur-of-the-moment process, his cutting, irreverent and cathartic words are transformed from private scribbles to rousing screeds on the state of the world – and his soul.
Born in Romania but adopted into a British family as a baby, Narcis’ songs often reflect a sense of being out of step with the world around him. Having spent most of his adult life in London, these feelings of alienation have only been amplified by the city’s unrelenting demands and unignorable inequality. As heard in his former bands, Narcis sings with a glinting grin and razor-sharp vividness, channeling his experiences of living in one of the world’s most revered and reviled places through doomed characters and disastrous situations.
He’s previously exerted this gripping writing acumen in previous acts, and has had songs played on 6 Music, toured internationally, recorded at Abbey Road and at one point was bandmates with Harriet Harman’s secretary. But that was all preamble to stepping out under his own name.
While previous bands have fallen by the wayside, Narcis has never stopped writing songs and playing music. He’s always had a natural affinity towards music, having taught himself guitar in his childhood and spent his university days learning piano instead of revising. However, it’s coming up with the words themselves, which he compares to “solving little puzzles”, that excites him the most. “It’s fun to write outrageous sentiments and build a funny little world where something can be true,” he says.
Ben Narcis EP
That outrageousness abounds on his debut EP under his own name. Culled from hundreds of half-written songs in various states, these four tracks introduce us to the prolific songwriter’s latest mode of expression. While the echoes of his heroes like Leonard Cohen, Nick Cave, Bob Dylan and Tom Waits are all still audible, it’s amalgamated and reconstituted into his new persona, which he pithily describes as a “weird ass croaky preacher fella”. It’s provocative, in-your-face and entirely essential. “At some level music has to be confrontational, otherwise it’s just decorative,” Narcis says. “It’s just not what gives me thrills and chills.”
This preacher persona strides confidently and crisply into focus on the EP’s opening track “App-Ocalypse”, where he heedlessly proclaims “nothing has value or really matters” in the midst of a dizzying soliloquy about the state of the modern world. Bright, Beck-like melodies underpin his magnetic word vomit, which inspires and overwhelms in equal measure as he continues to slice through the facade of society, calling out its hollow values, until he finally relinquishes his grasp; “you’re just too tired at the end of the day / log in and drift away”.
Like any powerfully disruptive preacher, Narcis has built a coterie of collaborators around him to bring his visions to vivid life. He’s struck up a fruitful chemistry with producer MAX RAD, with whom he worked on three of these songs; he’s garnered honeyed backing vocals from Swedish songwriter Mags on Earth; and he even has London Sinfonietta double bassist Enno Senft in the mix.
The classical musician’s skills are employed on second track “The World is Changing”, where Narcis requested he play a “creepy legato” to complement his Tom Waits-like diatribe about the world heading quickly down the plughole. Dating back to when he was 18, “The World Is Changing” was inspired by a point in Narcis’ life when he was exposed to a subset of West London privilege that left him feeling suffocated and spitting bile, channeling the scathing tone of T.S. Eliot’s The Wasteland. And yet, through his sardonic observations about princes and princesses, Narcis comes out the other end of the song stronger and bolder in his identity; “I have no secrets left to hide / In fact, I welcome the intrusion,” he concludes.
But, as the second half of the EP unfolds, we come to learn that his belligerent preacher’s all-knowing arrogance is just the surface. “First Time” and “Do You Ever Really Know Someone?” were recorded with MAX RAD in his makeshift studio down in Cornwall, where Narcis shipped up in summer 2021 replete with “a whole fucking orchestra” that included a battered three-string violin, a beloved old guitar with only four strings, a lap steel, a bike horn, a mouth harp and a banjo, to name just a handful. “I wanted to take anything we could find funny or interesting that could spark something,” Narcis explains. The results speak for themselves, as these two tracks let more light in, opening up new apertures into the songwriter’s mind.
Cracks in the preacher persona start to appear on “First Time”, a song scribbled down during the dog days of the pandemic, where Narcis – like everyone else – was pining for connection. It finds the singer wallowing in deflated fantasy over a woman, played magnificently by Mags on Earth’s Lana Del Rey-esque hook. The production is balmy, with echoing guitars and light claps subtly turning up the temperature while Narcis explores that first rush of attraction to the unattainable. Over psychedelic synth organ, he trips through sputtering and flustered observations like “You’re like a sculpture by a sculptor that was sculpted by a master, by a visionary poet who can sculpt,” revealing his heart is just as big – if not bigger – than his ego.
Once we reach the EP’s denouement, “Do You Ever Really Know Someone?”, his heart is completely cracked open, beating and bleeding unpretentious sentiment all over the place. Sitting somewhere between Lou Reed’s cynicism and David Bowie’s allusive tact, it finds Narcis coming to the bitter realisation that he can never possess, control or even truly know someone whom he desires. It’s a stomach-churning come down from the heady heights of the EP’s beginning, and this dramatic sweep is perfectly captured in the song’s bittersweet arrangement; a swaying singalong that asks you to indulge in the moment, to try to make it last as long as possible. It’s a nostalgically tinged strummer that brings the EP to a poetic close, Narcis staring at his own reflection in the mirror, asking himself the unanswerable question of the song’s title.
However, this EP is just the first step on Ben Narcis’ journey to pop infamy – and future incarnations could see him shift in tone and appearance like all those greats he admires. He’s already recorded some songs that he describes as more “primitive” and physical than the pristine sounds found on this EP, and he has no desire to streamline his sound; he will let it naturally come to life through his own wide-ranging tastes and impulses.
You can expect to get a taste of that wild and unpredictable approach when he takes the Ben Narcis project out on the road for the first time later this year. “It’s gonna be loose and sloppy and angry and broken guitars and bleeding and stuff,” he says. “Then afterwards I’ll return to being a groveling little Englishman.”
