Jack Sharp - Wolf People/Large Plants - Interview

Raised in Bedfordshire, Sharp was raised in a very musical household with influences on him such as Michael Jackson, Paul Simon and The Incredible String Band before falling in love with bands like Sex Pistols, Oasis and hip-hop later down the line. When it came time for Sharp to play music himself, he wanted to be in AC/DC until his young ears heard Nirvana for the first time and then it was on! Sharp would later on form Wolf People when he moved back to Bedfordshire from London and would go on to release three incredible records on Jagjaguwar before the band went on a hiatus in 2020. But this did not stop Sharp from pursuing his love and passion for music. Recently he started a new project called Large Plants and In this interview we explore Sharp’s youth growing up his brothers, getting into music and going to see shows, starting Wolf People and eventually Large Plants.

Tell me about growing up in Bedford, Bedfordshire, England. When did you first begin to fall in love with music, more specifically the guitar and songwriting?

I moved from London when I was little and although the scenery of Bedfordshire is not very dramatic, I fell in love with the woods and rivers and started spending most of my time outdoors. We always had music in the house. I remember cassette copies of Graceland and Thriller, that were my brothers and my parents Bonzos and Incredible String Band records being played to me from a young age. I wanted to play guitar from the age of about 8 and wanted to be in AC/DC, but it wasn’t until a friend started learning and taught me some basics that I really got going when I was 13. By then it was Nirvana. I think the fact that Nirvana stuff is so well written, but relatively easy to pick up helped me and a lot of other kids get to grips with guitar. I don’t remember not writing songs, but I kept them to myself for good reason I think, they were very derivative. I just always wrote music of some sort.

Who were some of your earliest influences? When and where did you see your first concert and when did it dawn on you that you wanted to be a musician? An artist. When and where did you play your first gig and what was that experience like for you?

Like most kids on the mid 90’s, I started out playing Nirvana and Oasis songs. I went through loads of phases, for example being a punk for 6 months and obsessing over Sex Pistols. I always seemed to do this on my own, not being able to convince any mates to dress weird or listen to the same stuff. By the time I was 14 I was lost to music and it was obvious I wasn’t going to do anything else with my life. I did really badly at school because I was so focussed on making music and being in a band. I played in school concerts and stuff, but it was really hard to get gigs back then, especially as I was 15 and wasn’t allowed into most clubs. I had a band from maybe 14 to 17, then got obsessed with hip hop, bought an MPC sampler and put the guitar away for years.

Prior to Large Plants you participated in groups The Midnight Orchestra and the amazing Wolf People. How did you initially meet your bandmates Tom Watts, Joe Hollick, Daniel Davies and Ross Harris? What were your first impressions of everyone? What led to the decision to first form these outfits roughly around the same in the mid 2000’s?

In the mid 2000’s I’d started playing the guitar again and incorporating it into the instrumental hip hop I was making. Tom (Watt, drummer from Wolf People) was my best friend from home since we were 14 and he had started to play drums again and set up to record in his living room. We started jamming and recording stuff and getting back into playing real instruments again, but this time we were more influenced by sampling and record collecting culture. We were trying to play more psych, jazz, funk etc, and getting into obscure library records. When I moved back to Bedfordshire from London in 2005, I suddenly had more space and time and started making the music that became Wolf People. This was with drum samples at first because I had no access to drums or the right recording equipment. I got obsessed with Beefheart’s Safe as Milk, but I was also listening to a lot of Pentangle and Fairport, so I figured I could try to make the English version of Beefheart. That was the initial idea for Wolf People. I made the recordings without much thought, then people were really getting into it. My friend Ian convinced me to put a band together, so I asked Tom to drum, had my friend Gab on bass, then we met Joe through a friend, which I still think is the luckiest coincidence that has ever happened to me. Joe turned out to be the best guitarist I had ever heard in my life, I’m not joking and he just kept getting better. Gab had to leave after about a year to concentrate on another band, so we found Dan, who had seen us at a festival and really liked the band. Again, it was so lucky to find an amazing musician who understood the music and could not only play it, but add something meaningful to it. It helped that we all got on really well.

When and where did you guys first get together to jam and what was the chemistry like between everyone? When and where did Wolf People make their live performance debut and what was that experience like?

I have to admit for the first few years we had no idea what we were doing really. We just booked a load of gigs and threw ourselves into it. We would jam a lot, but it was often pretty bad. We were either brave or stupid, I’ll say that. Our second gig was in Bristol, we got booked to headline, but only had six songs!! Luckily the promoter was very understanding of how green we were and gave us a chance to redeem ourselves by booking us again later. Our first gig was at the Ivy House in Peckham, where I am originally from. It was a complete disaster. There was a noise limiter and we managed to cut the power about 5 times before giving up completely. It was a blessing in disguise actually, as I was so nervous I could barely fret the guitar. We played at The Montague Arms in New Cross later that week and it went a lot better, but I think I spent the whole gig facing away from the audience. It only got better with lots of time and many, many gigs. I felt like we were only really properly good in the last couple of years we were together.

The group released their debut album “Steeple” in 2010 after a handful of singles on labels such as Sea Records and Battered Ornaments. Tell me about wiring and recording that album and what the overall process was like creating this record. When and where did recording begin and how did the deal and friendship with the folks over at Jagjaguwar come about?

We’d done a bunch of live shows and started writing together, so it was the classic first album thing. When Jagjaguwar got in contact (through Myspace initially), we hadn’t put much thought into making a full length record, but we had started writing and recording as a band, and we were incorporating new songs into the live set. The jams were improving too and we had a growing archive of recorded ideas and jams to draw from. We initially went to a studio in Wales to write and rehearse for a week, but we liked the place so much we went back there to record the album a few months later, after trialling the new stuff. I always remember we played with Dinosaur Jr. on the day we came back from the studio. We’d been playing constantly for a week, so we were really rehearsed, but we had literally not seen another person for 7 days so playing a big venue with one of the loudest bands in the world was quite overwhelming! By the time we made Steeple, the influence of the other band members was starting to come through more in the songs. The folk element is there from myself and Joe, but also early Fleetwood Mac and British blues, psych, funk and hip hop elements started to become more prominent.

The group released their anticipated follow up “Fain” in 2013, now celebrating its 10 year anniversary. How did you guys want to approach this work that differs from the previous work? Would you mind giving some backstory to songs such as “Athol”, “Empty Vessels”, and “Thief”?

Fain was a painful record to make, but we’re still very proud of it. We decided to take a load of recording gear to the house Joe was living in, in the Yorkshire Dales. It seemed like the perfect solution, but we had loads of technical issues, and when we started listening back to the takes after the main sessions, we really weren’t happy with the results. The acoustics were poor, the separation was bad, there was ground hum on all the guitars and the takes themselves could have been better. We had to work really hard to replace parts and build the tracks back up to where we wanted them. With hindsight, I feel that some of the tracks are really successful and capture something of the mood we were going for. We wanted to make a spooky, moody, English psych rock record. Athol was one of the first songs we wrote for Fain. We had been playing with the riff for a while. I don’t think we captured it very well, the same with Empty Vessels. They didn’t really live up to our expectations unfortunately. I wish we had started again with some of them, but we didn’t really have time. My favorites are “When The Fire” and “All Returns”, I think they worked out a lot better. I’m quite proud of Thief still, though I think it needs an edit. I wrote that about the famous 18th century London thief Jack Shepherd. I don’t know why, but we recorded it in three different keys so we could never play it live.

The band released their last album “Ruins” in 2016. When you reflect back on the Wolf People days what are you most fond of during those days and what was your favorite to create and why?

The touring and promotion around Ruins was my favourite as I felt like we’d reached a high point as a live band by then. We were consistently doing good shows and we felt really confident about what we were presenting to people. We always had an element of improvisation in the set, but I felt like by Ruins, we were really nailing that every time live. We did a lot of touring for that album and I only really have good memories of the shows. The album process was a lot easier too. After the struggles with creating Fain, we decided to just record everything, and hopefully capture the songs when they were at the perfect point of development. We recorded all our rehearsals, and some of them ended up on the final album. We spliced the best jams into good takes from other sessions. We started by spending a week in Devon writing, but we recorded all of that. I believe ‘Not Me Sir’ on the album was our first run-through of that as a band. We tried to record it again, but it never felt as exciting. When we were nearly finished, we booked into Humbug Studios on the Isle of Wight (now called Empire Sound). We spent a few days recording anything we hadn’t captured yet. I think that was Night Witch, Crumbling Dais and the main part of Kingfisher.

How did Large Plants initially come about? A huge debut album from the band was released last year entitled, “The Carrier”. I’m dying to know your overall approach and vision for this album and group. How did the deal with Ghost Box come about and would you mind walking me through some of the songs that are featured on the album? What has ultimately inspired this project and all the tones and textures that we find within the music?

Wolf People went on hiatus in 2020, but it had been in the cards for a couple of years already. I think it affected me quite deeply without my being aware of it at the time. So much of my identity was wrapped up in this band that I had been a part of for over 15 years. I got on with making a solo folk record and started to do some solo acoustic shows, but I never really settled into it. In fact I had some really bad shows where I just couldn’t deal with the pressure of doing it on my own and that led me to think; I either need to do this all the time, or not at all. The pandemic decided for me really. I wasn’t able to promote the acoustic record with any shows, so that was that. I was also missing fuzzy rock music a lot. I had a summer to myself in lockdown 2020, so I decided to see if I could write and record a whole rock album in a week. I made 15 full demos in 3 days and recorded the majority of bass and guitar in that week, but didn’t quite manage to finish it. I realized I had some good material and spent the rest of the summer tinkering with it.

I needed a band again and I’d been playing guitar a fair bit with a friend Joe Woolley, so it seemed an obvious choice to put a group together and start booking some shows. The Large Plants records will sound a bit like Wolf People. I decided early on that I shouldn’t try to hide or deny that in the music, just to let it be what it was. Large Plants at the moment is just about allowing my brain to make the type of records I like without thinking too deeply about it. Just good rhythms and tones, messing about with tape, adding folk melodies, making weird psychy sounds with the guitar. Jim from Ghost Box contacted Wolf People on twitter, but I’d lost the log in. When I logged in after a year, I found a message asking if we wanted to put any music out. By this point I’d just finished making the Large Plants record and was looking for a label, so the timing was perfect. I have always loved Ghost Box’s records, especially as they put so much love and care into the design and packaging, so it wasn’t a hard decision. Jim and Julian are fantastic people and do a great job. The record was mixed by Chris Cohen, a musician who I am a huge fan of, so that was a real thrill for me.

What have you been up to more recently? Do you have anything going on for the Spring/Summer? Is there anything else you would like to further share with readers?

Large Plants have a new recorded which I have just finished. That will be out in Autumn 2023. This one is me on my own again. I’m working with the rest of the band on new stuff as well, as the live band are getting really good now. We have some exciting supports coming up. Playing with Johnny Echols from Love, plus there will be some shows to mark the release of the second LP.

Thanks so much for taking the time to interview me!