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A Larum: a Bright Future for this Young Troubadour
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Despite being labelled the 'poster boy of the nu-folk scene' by some, Johnny Flynn exhibits a little discomfort with the term, saying: "I make the music that seems apparent for me, I'm not pursuing a certain sound.
"I don't really mind if people need to fit it into certain categories so that it can fit into a CD rack," he added, following the arrival of his debut album A Larum.
Regardless of genre constraints, the rich and inviting debut - its anachronistic title a "reminder of where things come from" - heralds a bright future for this young troubadour. Unless he decides to return to acting, that is...
The son of musical theatre great Eric Flynn and the step-brother of Jerome Flynn, the 24-year-old tells me he's "taking a break" from acting currently because of the rigours of making and touring an album but admits to missing his thespian days.
"I was probably quite likely to at least try and be an actor when I was quite young," he explains.
"When you're a kid and you're dad's the guy on stage, it's inevitable. I just presumed that 'Oh, everybody goes to the theatre', because I did, but I only went to see my Dad and the other actors in my family.
"I found it kind of magical being backstage and my earliest memories are of being on my Dad's shoulders when he was in dress rehearsals, which is just amazing for a kid," he admits.
And while the gentle, old-fashioned folk of A Larum means Flynn might be set for musical fame in his native land, in Holland he's already a Daniel Radcliffe equivalent, having starred in Crusader in Jeans, "their classic children's story, their Harry Potter".
The babyfaced singer - who bears more than a passing resemblance to Dawson's Creek's and Funny Games star Henry Pitt - describes the year-long production as "really incredible" but equally intense thanks to the pressure of taking a beloved novel to the screen.
"A lot of people have a vested interest in you, whether it's producers needing you to give the performance that they think will make the money or directors who think they have the best idea of the character, and the purely physical attention placed on you is just mechanical at times," he elaborates.
Like Lily Allen and the Kooks' Luke Pritchard, Flynn is a Bedales alumnus and explains the "microcosm of creativity" at the Hampshire school as the reason for so many of its pupils embarking on media careers.
"It's not necessarily encouraged in the school, but allowed to be. At Bedales, in quite a healthy way I think, there's nothing to stop you from forming a film society or a band, or whatever".
And the positive critical reception for A Larum - with four-star reviews from all and sundry - seems to have sat far more comfortably with Flynn than his cinematic success, though he explains that "even if it hadn't done well, we'd have felt right about it".
He and his touring band the Sussex Wit - "a particular sense of humour or irony that was in British folk song", Flynn explains - had always "really believed" in the potential of the album, even without critical acclaim confirming their confidence.
"That's the thing about recordings, films or any artistic medium - they're there forever and you choose which category it fits into, but they're there regardless."
While its original incarnation was slow and melancholic, the sped-up update of recent single Tickle Me Pink - complete with an otherworldly marionette version of Flynn undergoing a crisis of confidence in the accompanying video - pinpoints him as a male counterpart to Laura Marling's romantic and wistful folk.
"I guess because of my experiences I'm interested in storytelling and the idea of heightened life when you set up a stage, the concept of choosing moments of your life that stand out to tell a story," he says of the unexpectedly moving video.
"The brain works through tying in cross-referencing stories and it's kind of amazing to me how that all fits together."
