Elbow’s frontman on his mother-in-law’s death, the upside of therapy – and finally learning to love sushi
Up until pretty recently, Guy Garvey says, he couldn’t have sat very comfortably in a place like this. We are in Roka in Charlotte Street in London’s West End, flagship of the discreetly expensive chain of Japanese restaurants, where attentive staff bring artful platters of exquisitely sliced fish and explain precisely in which order you might best consume them. “Before I met my wife I had a difficult relationship with restaurants,” Garvey says. “I never was that happy being waited on – I’d always be apologising and all ‘if it’s not too much trouble’. When we were first going out, Rachel said, ‘Do you like sushi?’ I said, ‘No not really.’ And she said, ‘Have you ever had sushi?’ I said, ‘No not really.’ She took me to this fabulous sushi place and she is great at just being natural in these places and I was immediately a convert.”
This newfound ease does not extend quite to ordering; we both, diehard provincials, are a bit flummoxed by the menu, so ask for recommendations and a procession of delicate sharing plates starts to arrive, fabulous morsels of yellow-tail tartare and crab gyoza and tiger prawn tempura, which, big-shouldered blokes, we carefully manipulate with chopsticks. Garvey and his band Elbow are in some eyes a byword for northern integrity and soul. He met his bandmates at school in Bury, Greater Manchester and they have, with one exception, stayed together for 30 years and nine albums. Their first gig was at the Corner Pin pub in Ramsbottom in 1990; they now fill arenas, but Garvey has long been wary of stardom.
