When you have the blues, when you feel it's all crumbling around you, there's really only one way to go. When you think the odds are stacked against you, you still got to believe. Otherwise, what is there?

Having traded the cacophony, restlessness and expense of London for the relative calms of Hastings, Duke Garwood continues to chip diligently away at the coalface, fully immersed in music making, as he has been for 25 odd years. An accomplished multi-instrumentalist, he played guitar on The Orb's 'Perpetual Dawn' single way back in 1991. He also played clarinet and rhaita (a Moroccan reed instrument) on the first two albums by the Archie Bronson Outfit, played clarinet on Savages' Silence Yourself album and hooked up with Mark Lanegan to release the Black Pudding album in 2013. Alongside Lanegan and Savages' Jehnny Beth, he has also collaborated with Tinariwen, Josh T. Pearson, Josh Homme and Kurt Vile.

This CV and list point the way in describing what Garwood does so well; a deceptively laid back neo-blues sound that is noirish in tone, but both full of loving and foreboding. It's also a soulful, and hypnotically slow burning concoction that recalls the diverse likes of Portishead, Tom Waits, JJ Cale, and Nick Cave. In Garwood's battle against anguish, there needs to be positivity to see you through.

On his sixth album, Garden of Ashes, that is precisely what he sets out to achieve. Achieve it he does. Able to conjure up alluring imagery, Garwood pulls upon his experiences from his travels around the globe including Hackney squats, Moroccan hash bars, Cuba, Thailand and good ol' LA (where he made Black Pudding with Mark Lanegan). Garden of Asheswaspart recorded in Duke’s Valley Heights studio and at Giant Wafer in Wales with producer Strat Barrett at the helm. It features friends Paul May on drums, Pete Marsh on double bass and, adding a Morricone-style ambience to some tracks, the Smoke Fairies on backing vocals.

Are you an angry man?
I am an angry man; so angry I burn myself. So angry I heat up the air around me. This is the nuclear fuel I use to make music.

In a world so full of pain and madness we need to be better than ever; to evolve not devolve. To become masters of our fate and stop listening to the snake talkers who would steal our last breath. It’s time to go Elvis and shoot the cursed TV.

Making angry music is for young men, or for old men who really can. I don’t think we need angry music. We're all feeling furious, and there's a terrible frustration in the air. Hopeless anger. Which is really useless, because it's the equivalent of standing, crying, and punching yourself in the face. It doesn't solve anything or go anywhere. And we can't punch each other in the face. That gets even worse. So, yeah, I am trying to make some beautiful music.

I make beautiful music, because we don't need angry music right now. Everyone can turn on the TV and see the horror show, they don't need to hear it coming out the stereo.I’m trying to distill this frustrating feeling we all have right now into something more focused.

What is this album about?
This album is about midnightin the garden of love. The garden of good and evil. The garden of paradise that we know is being destroyed to satisfy the greedy money people. It's all burned down. We burned it to ashes.

(It's) beautiful apocalypse love music, it doesn't hide from reality, but it could hide the listener from it all for a while.

How is it different from your previous album Heavy Love?
I was inspired to follow Heavy Love with a warm bath of honey for the soul. It's a stare down to the beast of hate trying to take over our garden. Time for man to be the beautiful warrior and stand up for his loves.

I tried to compact the sound. And compact the recording sessions. Some of it was done at my place – guitars, drums, piano – to give it that nice feeling in a nice small place. Then I went to Wales to do the other tracks. Did the same thing. That hasn’t been done previously. With Heavy Love the drums were done in a separate room.

There's more of a live feeling. It's more something that a band would deliver live. It's a little more lush, too.

Events like Brexit and Trump inform your feelings about the world around you, but you remain calm…
I think I am trying to distill being calm. Even if you force yourself to be calm, that is good sometimes. Just try and be calm and be a bit Orson Welles like; speak more calmly, more succinctly. Keep the other stuff back. Because I think, especially politically right now, we see these clowns, and their hearts are on their sleeves in the most ugly way and they're encouraging everyone else to do it in the most ugly way. There's this rather hideous over-expression, people saying, 'Yeah, express, say whatever you want, whatever you're feeling'.

I don't think that is how society functions, going around saying whatever we are feeling. It's a disaster. It's a nightmare. Of course, we can't control our feelings all the time, but we can control how we express them. We can feel all sorts of things, depending upon our mood. Depending upon our circumstances. Whether our toast was burnt in the morning, or we were snubbed at night by our lovers, whatever. The current climate of ranting expression is pretty hideous. I suppose I'm trying to streamline that in my music.

Do you feel a difference in the atmosphere around you, post-Brexit and post-Trump is election?
When I recorded this album they were calmer times, a different world. It is so noticeable. I live in the sticks a bit. I can feel it. Of course, the negatives are obvious and they don't need saying, but controversially there are positives. Having talked to a lot of artists at this festival (Le Guess Who? festival in Holland), pretty much the day after he got in, we felt bizarrely excited. If this could happen, then anything could happen, and it means an opportunity for people with good intentions, to rise up to this new challenge. Get out of our comfort zones. Anything can happen. I have to look on the positive side. I have children. I can't sit here and say the world is over and we can all go to the gas chambers or something.

This period in time feels a bit like the height of the cold war, when nuclear armaggedon felt like a possible reality…
I remember that time, it was awful. I remember they put pamphlets through your door saying if it came down to it you should put mattresses against the windows. Ridiculous bullshit… I think it was a deliberate ploy to instill fear in the population in order to control them better. They knew they were never going to nuke them. They probably had an agreement to build them. 'Sure, you can build them and we can build them'. Keep everyone in check. They were never going to launch them. It would take a true maniac. Trump's a businessman. He doesn't want to die or lose his precious hotels. I tell myself that.

You say the album is about this idea of 'midnight', what do you mean by that?
When you say midnight, it sounds like a decisive moment. I was going to call the album a different title but then I found 'midnight' was too direct. The idea that midnight is a decisive time, between day and dawn in a way. But I think we are at that point. It feels like that.

I think what's more scary now is people themselves. I don’t give a hoot about politicians anymore. They are clowns of their own making, most of them. I'm just worried about people on the ground losing their way and getting negative, losing their will to keep it together. But I think it's probably going to go the other way; get stronger and more cohesive.

We are humans, it's kinda not our fault. We could have been born snails, or something nice like that. Maybe they have their own problems. Trying to get from one place to another, that's their main problem. A long hard road!

Can you tell me about the songs that bookend the album, 'Coldblooded' and 'Coldblooded the Return'?
I had a feeling I wanted to remake it ('Coldblooded'), and when we got to Wales the first thing that struck me and my engineer was, 'Ooo, I don’t like this room. It's a bit roomy sounding'. So I went into a kind of funk. I got angsty. But we were playing nonetheless and this riff came, and it took hours and hours, so I could contain and hold it for any length of time. I finally got it, and during this time he managed to 'control' the room. And then we laid it down, and it had that magical thing you get with film music sometimes; very fragile. You 're holding back as much as possible in order to keep the riff aloft. If you put any more in it'll be smashed, and if you take anything away it becomes too fragile. And that riff is one of those. I then re-adjusted the lyrics. It was nice because it conceptualised the album slightly without it being too pretentious. And of course the Smoke Fairies added to it, gave it more of a Morricone tone. As well as there being some kind of philosophical treatment they are both really great numbers. I love them both. They both had to be on the record in one way or another.

You had both Smoke Fairies on this one (Katherine Blamire and Jessica Davies), as well as other tracks?
The Smoke Fairies only operate as a twosome. You can't separate them. They are like batteries, if you separate them… I've never tried actually. Their electricity requires that they are both there. They aren't actually sisters, but they are soul sisters.

Tell me about Hastings?
In Hastings I'm keeping it low. But I like it here. There was a lot of drinking, it was a boozy town. People got carried away, and it being a small place there are the same people going out, getting into fights. But they've cracked down on that.

You don’t do that, do you?
Only on the full moon, go out for a bit of a fight.

And you decided to leave London for Hastings…
I was in London for a long time, the Old Street area. We had to get out, we couldn't keep up. It's just impossible to be happy in life when you've got to bring that much money in. It's fine if you've got a great salary and a great job, but in my line of business money can be here and there. Impossible. It just make you anxious, and you end up thinking there's no need.

And, what will you be doing before the UK tour starts?
I'm going to be rehearsing my band quite hard, and I'm going to be making more videos, which I'm really into at the moment. I want to make films for most of the tracks on the record . They are going to end up on YouTube anyway, so they might as well have a film to go with them as well. And I'm making another record with my old friend (and his drummer) Paul May.

Jeff Hemmings

Website: dukegarwood.co.uk
Facebook: facebook.com/dukejgarwood
Twitter: twitter.com/dukegarwood