Sam Tompkins To The World

The Sam Tompkins story… I grew up in a small town in Eastbourne and not a lot went on. As much as it’s a great to grow up in and you’re kind of free and it’s a nice neighbourhood and people are genuinely quite nice and everyone gets on, well not everyone. It was a bit hard for me to express myself, so it took me until I was about 16 years old, and I got a little bit of money from my mum for my birthday, and I went to Brighton, which is much more multicultural so you can be who you want to be in Brighton.

I went there with how much money I had, it wasn’t loads, but I spent it all really quickly. I went into a skate shop called ‘Route One’ in The Lanes and I really liked this hat in there, and all my friends said they have heard me sing in bits and bobs so why don’t I go sing on the street to earn the money? I was like ‘Ah, I’m not sure about that’. Eventually, they coerced me into putting my current hat that I already had down on the floor right outside the ‘Route One’ shop and just sing, no amp or mic just me and my voice. In maybe 20 minutes or half an hour, I was able to afford the cap, so I went and bought the cap and wore that every day haha.

I suppose that I was always creative as I never wanted to do anything academic, I wanted to do something different. I liked football and I always wanted to be a footballer from like 4 years old to like 13 and from 13 to 16 I wanted to be a skater. Then, from 16 onwards I wanted to be a musician and that’s what I ended up doing. I suppose I always had to be creative as I was always quite intelligent but I saw through education, I never really quite got on with authority, I like structure in my life but I like structure when I’m creating it, not someone else creating my structure for me.

I always used to listen to whatever my sister and my brother were playing. I love pop music, I’ve always loved pop music, because that what was on the radio, and my mum always liked pop music, so that was that. My sister was proper into R&B, so I would listen to Usher and Chris Brown, like all the early 00’s stuff  – I was fully into that. I think I learnt to sing via imitating those people, then I suppose I got to a certain age where I started busking and I was like ‘ah, I’m actually good!’ Everyone seemed to come from London and the big cities, no one has ever really come from Eastbourne and been a major music artist apart from Toploader who did ‘Dancing in the Moonlight’.

They are so polar opposite it’s insane. It’s funny because you got Hastings, you got Eastbourne and you got Brighton. Those are the big towns, and Brighton is Brighton. Slowly becoming gentrified, the things that once made it amazing are slowly kind of vanishing because you are seeing gentrification to the point where I suppose the creatives that made Brighton amazing can’t afford the prices anymore. It gets like that, that’s how it goes. But, Eastbourne and Bexhill in the middle, they are very small towns, mostly elderly people that keep the traditional values, and that breeds young people to think it’s ok to be narrow-minded which I hated because no one liked what I was doing. Then, I vacated that because I realised that was too much negative energy. There was a point where it could have been really easy for me to give up, because of what people were saying which was the hardest part really. I’ve always known I wanted to live in Brighton because it’s just so much better than anywhere else to me. I’d maybe live in Hastings, later on in life but now I’m in Brighton, on the seafront of Brighton.

My sound is typically pretty eclectic, I don’t really try and do the same thing all the time. When I’m in the studio I’m writing and co-producing, I come in with an idea and we flesh it out. Most of the time, it sounds different from the track before, and that’s in my opinion of music should be made. You shouldn’t stick to one thing, we are now in 2020 – you can bend genres to however you want them to be, it’s all been done to death so, you gotta’ start mixing it up.

At the moment it is. I’m starting to expand it and talk about other people troubles and how they impact us all. It’s narcissistic of me to be talking about myself all the time just because it’s my music. Music for me is therapy and sometimes I get a kick out of writing songs for someone else, to make them feel better about something, or maybe to help myself understand something. Eventually, I just want my music to be about everyone. For me, one thing is that I don’t make music for the purpose of anyone else’s pleasure but my own. If it helps others and gives them happiness and enjoyment then brilliant, but mostly it’s for me to express myself and not go crazy.

Weirdly it started off perfectly natural. As I’ve gotten into it and I’ve been writing songs about other people, I felt like I was emotionally exhausting myself because even though I didn’t feel like I had to talk about things I was talking about them anyway. That’s what I wanted. As I’ve got on, I realised I can write songs about my dad or my sister or my friends. My friend who has lost his life. It makes me feel better talking about other people because that makes it that much broader. One thing I want people to think of me as is someone who writes and sings from the heart.

I think the visual side of what I do comes from insecurity. I didn’t necessarily feel that strongly about the way that I looked growing up and fashion was the perfect outlet for me because I always thought the more unique you looked the less will people pay attention to what you actually look like. I think it was a coping mechanism.

In terms of music, I’ve really gotten into writing my own narratives and stories from videos – the stories are written by me and we flesh it out with the director. I know how fleeting the feelings of passion are and it’s so worth having it. With music, I might wake up in two months and want to be out of music for a while. Life is about trying as many different things as you can. The visual side is really important to me but I think it comes from having to overcompensate a little bit.

I think I’ve done things that I think are correct for someone like me. I take social media seriously but not too seriously. At first, I was insecure about what others may think or define me as but I think over time I’ve realised people don’t really talk about the way I look so much unless I do something drastic to make a point. I think that I’ve become more secure and comfortable with the fact that people are going to have an opinion and that you have to just live with it. I know my shit’s good.

When you grow up and everyone says that you’re different to other people, I’ve learned how true that is but that we’re actually all so similar. I think most people go through life and just wanna have a normal time. Another thing I’ve learned is that humour is my thing – that’s what gets me out of any hole. Humour is my coping mechanism. I like to make jokes about absolute everything – otherwise, I can’t get over the bad stuff. If I could speak to my younger self I’d just tell him to write songs.

I find that I have stints of wanting to learn and wanting to grow and develop and it depends on who I surround myself with. I started guitar when I was sixteen or seventeen and dropped it until I was about 21. I have gotten so much better since I picked it up again and I find being self-taught is a great way to learn. I like making my own structure and not having it set out for me – I didn’t want to go to a teacher and having them teach me a song when I wanted to write my own. I find it way more satisfying just working out where I should put my hands on the guitar – it makes me think that the talent that I’ve got is so beautiful because I gave it to myself.