On the Rise
Pollyfromthedirt

We’re at the Nursery Inn, a 1930s inter-war “reformed” public house, off the beaten track in Heaton Mersey. Before the name, before the trademark mask, Pollyfromthedirt finishes his shift, crosses the bar, and joins the debauchery. He spends a year here knee-deep in the “full Mancunian experience”. What starts as a drift ends up shaping him more than he expects: “that job ruined me and made me at the same time.”

Music arrived similarly – meandering, without sudden clarity, until it became the world he now inhabits. He dials into our call from Nottingham, shuffling between his girlfriend’s and his own parent’s home in Darlington for the holidays. This year, she’ll make the trip up with him; his family’s “first guest in about ten years,” he laughs. Our conversation flits across topics; he backpedals and qualifies his answers. “I never really had any aspirations to do anything,” PFTD tells me, “I think that’s a bit of a superpower really.” Even studying in Manchester felt like a delay, prolonging the inevitable of getting a normal job. A former “professional teenager" if you will. Still lacking in aspiration now, he says. 

Within the same hour, he describes the balance of lofi and hifi production he strives for. The desire to offer a less visible perspective, capture the anthemic energy of bands like Stone Roses and Oasis, and write “big, on-your-mate’s-shoulders’ songs”.

Pollyfromthedirt, the alternative project under which he now releases music, emerged gradually from this period. He’s just released his first collection of songs, a DIY endeavour threaded together by this ethos, drawing on Northern roots and navigating selfhood, anonymity, and the complexity of regional pride.

“I’d like to say that I don’t care what people think of me and I’m doing music solely for therapeutic reasons, but there is a part of me that can get overexcited about projects, collaborations, and gigs that I could do in the future,” he meditates. “And then I’ll shut that off and be like, do it for the love of it. Which is probably a load of bollocks really.”

At 18 he began to write his own songs. His dad, a former sound engineer, sits alongside a family split between extremes: deeply Christian and musical on one side, staunchly atheist and nihilistic on the other. He lands somewhere in between, “slightly leaning into both arguments”. Under his dad’s protest of raising kids in London (”they’d probably end up twats”), they moved back to his hometown in Darlington, a market and industrial town in North East England. Defined by what he refers to as “optimistic pessimism”, there’s an excitement for life that surges through its veins, a clamour for the weekend, to let loose when opportunity provides – “The town is small but it's big enough for mad shit to occur.”

“It’s just one of those things you can’t really talk about,” he adds. “There wasn’t really much else to do, other than hanging about and doing things you shouldn’t.”

He laughs when I pry about a line from his press bio, a little sheepish. “I was a twat growing up – in a really pathetic way. I wasn’t doing any hard crimes, just stealing off my dad’s credit card to buy FIFA points.” When his dad found out, he sold the PlayStation and bought a guitar instead. Nothing clicked straight away, but he found himself coming back to it.

“When I first got into music, certain songs would make me feel a certain way. I think I’m always trying to replicate that feeling,” he says. Whilst the kind of music scenes rippling through London always felt “so out of reach and alien”, he’d be mesmerised by the characters, stories, and worlds around “classic Northern lad” bands, going down YouTube rabbit holes as a teenager. A few pints deep at a house party, he picked up the guitar he’d been learning in secret, “playing a few chords in front of a mate, trying to impress a few girls.” The first gig followed a year on: half a song at a local open mic. 

His time at BIMM wasn’t exactly recalled fondly but did grant him some freedoms. “It’s quite rare that someone from Darlington can even be in touch with their emotions, never mind write about them,” PFTD reflects. “Music gave me so many life skills, and the chance to tour, go to gigs, and experience completely different things.”

Under his birth name (which I’ll leave you to figure out), he spent several years releasing music and gigging around the country. But authenticity took time to find. “I didn’t believe in the music. I didn’t really believe in anything really then,” he admits. “I didn’t stand for anything.” Now, he’s certain of “what I like about music, how I want it to sound, the world it wants to live in.”

Part of this difficulty, he suggests, was not yet having found a way to process what was happening internally. There’s a natural rejection of the ill-fitting tortured artist narrative, but he realised he did have to find a way of making peace with his own thoughts. “It wouldn’t be a Pollyfromthedirt project if it wasn’t for the weird identity issues I was having. It made me stop pretending to be someone I wasn’t.”

That process wasn’t easy. “Honestly, it was hell for three years,” he says, describing a kind of OCD-driven identity crisis. “I was believing so heavily in some kind of higher power. Suddenly every action isn’t just the action; it’s, what does this mean for my mortality?” At its peak, he says, it became all-consuming: “I’d be thinking about the origin of the universe for 24 hours straight.”

A couple years on, he assures me he’s on the home stretch. “I learnt to not take my thoughts seriously. And that’s where Buddhism came in – not identifying with your thoughts”. As that eased, something else opened up. “As I recovered, I couldn’t stop writing. It just felt natural.” He’d written songs before, but this felt different: “I wasn’t worrying about the outcome, not even entertaining it, just going in with complete freedom.”

Now based in London, he approaches it cautiously. The move came reluctantly; less a pursuit of the industry and more a practical step in taking music seriously. “A lot of people move to London for the creative side of things,” he says, “but I’m not really that kind of person.” If anything, he keeps a deliberate distance from it. “I don’t really hang out with anyone that’s in the music industry (...) I think I’d probably try and actively avoid a lot of those situations, just for fear of losing touch with reality.” His version of the city is more personal: pubs, a handful of close friends, his girlfriend. Working, ultimately, toward structure: “If I had the privilege of being able to go to the studio five days a week, having the weekends off and treating it a bit more like a job. I think that’d be my dream life.”

These early songs weren’t written with any real intention of release, more a way of making sense of things. But, after encouragement from his girlfriend and friends, they paved the way for PFTD’s first EP, The dirt pt. 1. The collection of songs weaves between themes of self-expression, English culture, and identity. Whilst much of his writing draws from personal experience, he’s wary of placing himself at its centre: “It’s actually quite interesting how the viewpoint of doing songs for yourself is seen as the noble thing to do,” he adds. “It shouldn't be about you. Your song should be a celebration of how amazing music is.”

It’s part of a broader question he seems to be working through – how to position himself and where his own identity lies. Pollyfromthedirt takes his name from his mum, Polly, alongside his hometown’s affectionate nickname, The Dirt. When I ask what spurred on the anonymity and if he intends to stay this way, he mulls it over for a few moments: “I was pretty hurt by the expectations of the industry and the failure of previous projects. It’s very easy to get miserable about the music industry. I just didn’t want to be involved in making the music about me. I almost couldn't take any more. I think it came from pretending to be someone as well. I didn’t want to sour it by saying it’s about me, my story, or about anything gimmicky.”

The mask is a bit of a gimmick in itself, PFTD admits, but it gives him a degree of separation – a way of pushing the spotlight onto the songs themselves. He theorises it lets him move between worlds; avoiding the “turned up noses” that sometimes come with the current association of indie bands and scenes. “I think the mask is allowing me to sit in both worlds. I prefer songs which’re a bit more get-to-the-point, get-to-the-chorus, and let’s-have-fun. And the mask allows me to do that without being chucked into the same label brackets as some of the indie music which is coming up now.”

He stresses he’s not unique, yet notes, “you don’t hear stories from people like me in music that often anymore”. He has a point: the industry both fetishises and shuts out regional identities. “All I ever wanted was for people in Darlington to like me and love me. (...) At the same time, I don’t want Pollyfromthedirt to be associated with any tagline or easy summary. The second you use it as a USP, it cheapens the whole thing. It becomes a form of gentrification almost. It's like using your upbringing to sell music or make money.”

On his debut “No Such Thing As England” that tension between being seen and reduced emerges clearly. “It’s questioning people who are proud of being from or who base their identity on something which is made up.” He’s careful not to flatten it. His writing and reflections move deliberately, careful not to dismiss outrightly. They draw on British culture, sometimes satirical, sometimes earnest, but resist easy conclusions. “You can see how that perspective can develop – through the media they consume to the neglect they’ve felt throughout their entire lives. Whether that be from their own families or people from the North and the social system,” he comments. “This is the different perspective that I feel like I can offer when I write songs and put things out. The slight empathy for the lonely, neglected individual is not something that I am interested in, but something that I’ve grown up with. It’s a part of who I am, I suppose.”

PFTD’s writing process is largely insular. The only real collaborator is Bob Mackenzie, a longtime friend from college and now an engineer for James Blake. “We used to work together when we were 18, and it was always a bit shit. It took us ten years before we started trusting each other.” Reference-wise, he cites Mica Levi, who produced Tirzah’s Devotion: “Everything’s small and imperfect. It’s kind of falling apart, but the songwriting’s strong enough that it could still be a pop hit. That’s the antithesis of what I do, which is big pop elements done in this clunky, janky way. That’s me trying to give a cool answer, too.”

While the first EP came together by accident. The second, Pt. 2, is on its tenth draft at the time of our call. “Even though no one cares, I’m worrying about what people will think again,” he says, only half-laughing. It sounds like a familiar tension: the more pressure he applies, the further he drifts from the thing he’s trying to protect. “You almost have to go in with the intention of not wanting to write a song,” PFTD adds.

“Darlos Cowboys”, a slacker anthem from Pt. 1, came together in weeks after a trip home; a “pathetic gangster song,” as he puts it. That looseness is something he wants to take with him moving forwards:  “I think a good attitude towards music is to not be too precious about what plans you’ve got for the song.”

By the time we speak, the second EP is about to be released. It’s something he’s adjusting to, learning to let unfold: “When you step back, it’s a pretty cool thing to be doing,” PFTD pauses. “I’m chilling, to be honest.” He says, and leaves it there, a sense of freedom learned through years of gradual self-discovery.