‘I had no plan. Just total scorched earth’: how Kiran Leonard survived teen success to make songs of full-body joy

Kiran Leonard presses the tips of his fingers together and looks at me solemnly across the table. “I don’t know if I’m doing a very good job,” he says, “But I’m trying really, really hard not to swear.”

A decade ago, he explains, he was interviewed by the Guardian, got too drunk, and “swore all the way through the interview”. When the piece came out, his grandfather was thrilled. “But he couldn’t show any of his friends because I just sounded really aggressive,” he tells me sheepishly.

It’s true that, the last time Leonard had a profile in this paper, he sounded a lot like a twentysomething trying hard to shed the preciousness of his former status as a teenage wunderkind. Hailed as a prodigy at age 16, upon the release of baroque, bonkers 2012 debut Bowler Hat Soup, a lot of Leonard’s early press plays up his age in a way that now reads as embarrassingly trite. “I think, unconsciously, I was probably quite defensive about how I was written about,” he says. “It’s not nice for journalists to fetishise the density or the ambitiousness of the music – it [was] obviously meant in a slightly patronising way.”

The Leonard sitting across from me at a pub near his home in south-east London speaks calmly and carefully, like someone with nothing to prove – because, perhaps, he has so thoroughly proved himself over the interceding decade. In the past five or so years, Leonard has emerged as one of Britain’s most consistently fascinating experimental musicians. His recent slate includes 2024’s Real Home, a rangy pop record that touches on ramshackle country, menacing prog and Jonathan Richman-esque romanticism; last year’s Small Brown Bed/With You Waltz, a surrealist album of live takes recorded at notable DIY venues such as the Golden Lion in Todmorden and Delicious Clam in Sheffield with a group of musicians he calls No Tailgate; and credits on acclaimed records by Eli Winter, Caroline and My New Band Believe.

His music is certainly far less wordy these days, far less likely to garner comparisons to Captain Beefheart or Joanna Newsom. But that’s because at this point, he says, he’s searching more for a sense of pure feeling: “I’m strongly driven by a very physical thing – which might seem quite broad, but it’s what distinguishes what I’m interested in and what I’m not.”

Leonard was born and raised in Saddleworth, near Manchester, the son of a community midwife and John Leonard, a folk musician who worked for BBC Radio 1 and 2 in Manchester in the 80s and 90s. Although it’s clear he was making music from a young age, it’s less clear how he ended up signed, with a manager and booking agent, before he could legally drink. “The short answer is: I don’t know,” he says. “I was very ignorant and sheltered from a lot of it. I made Bowler Hat Soup and put it on Bandcamp. I think I sent it to a load of blogs, and a blog wrote about it, which was then read by [the people who ran the label] Hand of Glory. I didn’t really come up through like, gigging.”

From there, Leonard was set up with that dreaded industry mechanism: a team. He got a publicist and a radio plugger and, through his management, a band, thankfully comprised of Manchester musicians who were at least making music that felt aligned with Leonard’s own. “I was fortunate to work with really good people and great musicians and have all this support, but the context was wrong,” he says.

During that period, he made and released four albums, but increasingly felt as if he wasn’t in the right zone. Enamoured by fuck-the-industry icons such as Steve Albini, he began tanking his commitments because the music was the one thing he had control over. He moved to London and then, one day, ditched his entire team. “It was a disaster – just total scorched earth,” he says with a sheepish smile. “I had no plan, had no idea what I was doing.”

Leonard found London “really alienating and difficult”, a feeling that was compounded by the fact that, he soon realised, he didn’t really know how much his team had sheltered him. “I couldn’t really find another manager – never have since, actually. And couldn’t get gigs,” he says.

Leonard “gradually found a groove in London, found a way to find it really stimulating and engaging”. That came through booking more shows and from befriending the post-rock band Caroline, who are the nexus of some of the country’s most vital experimental music. “I’m sure many people in this community would say the same thing,” he says. The band have become “a centre of activity in a lot of the work that I do because there’s so many of them, the quality of what they do is such a high standard and they’re operating at a level that everyone is very proud of and impressed by.”

Leonard quickly realised that his work could comprise “different investigations” – that he didn’t have to feel pinned down by one style, and that he didn’t have to be haunted by the music he made as a teenager. “I wanted to articulate myself more clearly and with less pomposity, less adolescent over-the-top-ness,” he says. “With the teenagery records, a lot of them were coming out much later than they’d been made. The difference between 15 and 18 is really massive, so playing those songs, I’d feel a bit of a dissonance, which made me more conscious of wanting to move past [them].”

Leonard says that most of his work now is extremely solitary, although he occasionally plays in Caroline, and enjoys playing in a project where he doesn’t have to add his own compositional voice to the mix. An exception to that solitary work is Or Sobre Blau, Leonard’s duo with Catalan guitarist Andreu G Serra. Their remarkable second album, Making Friends, released earlier this year, is a heady mix of ambient guitar primitivism, oddball samples and scratched-up found sound. “Or Sobre Blau is really thrilling because it’s in a totally different voice,” he says. “It’s the voice of that friendship, which is really thrilling because for my stuff, I’m just in my head, which is sometimes horrible.”

If there’s a common link between all Leonard’s work now, it’s that it often comes from a desire to make sounds that conjure full-body sensations. He often gets there. “I remember having a conversation with someone about the Caroline song Total Euphoria,” says Leonard. “They were like, I don’t know how often I feel total euphoria. I’m like: ‘I feel it quite a lot.’”