Johnny Flynn’s long way round

It is difficult to overstate how jarring, how disruptive of the frozen emotional landscape of my forgotten youth, it is to see Johnny Flynn ambling towards me eating a cheese pastry. Flynn is now perhaps most widely known as an actor, starring as Dylan in the Netflix dramedy Lovesick, Mr Knightley in a 2020 adaptation of Emma and Richard Burton in The Motive and the Cue, a role he is about to reprise in London’s West End. But he is also a prodigious musician and it was because of his 2008 debut album, A Larum, that I knew him as a teenager.

He was, for me, the sort of niche but life-altering artistic crush that was only really possible before the internet became omnipresent. I discovered him in the good old-fashioned manner of hearing a song of his, “Tickle Me Pink”, on a CD that came free with the NME magazine. It was an exhilarating confluence of the raucous and melancholy, making folk music and the violin — which I had associated with gentleness — into something raw and new. I lived in a small town in Ireland, waiting to get old enough to move to a big one where things happened, and I read the write-ups of a folk resurgence scene in London with reverence — about these beautiful poised young adults like Flynn and his friend Laura Marling, who was 18 then, and her sometime bandmates Noah and the Whale.

At some point during the afternoon we spend together, walking through the Hackney Marshes in east London, I try to remember what the embarrassing little moniker concocted for their coterie by the music press was.

“Nu-folk — that made me want to throw up in my mouth,” Flynn says cheerfully. It seems obvious listening back that Flynn’s anachronistic, experimental musical style was undermined by its inclusion in a scene whose most famous product would be the folk rock band Mumford & Sons. “I’m not trying to be dismissive of them or anything,” Flynn says, “but they were doing something quite populist and people quite literally went ‘They’ve got a banjo, and you’ve got a banjo.’ There were people who didn’t understand the subtle — and also not-so-subtle — differences between us.”

While Mumford & Sons started out as a support act for Marling and Flynn, their rapid rise to fame reversed that dynamic, with Flynn joining their US tour and appearing before audiences he might otherwise never have reached. He is grateful for the opportunity, he says, but the stakes seem not to have particularly appealed to him.

He wanted to connect with people in sweaty rooms rather than play stadiums. He was much more attracted by the anarchic New York anti-folk scene of DIY legends like Jeffrey Lewis and Kimya Dawson.

Flynn’s career since the 2010s has borne out this preference for experimentation and collaboration and a lateral approach to expression. We have met for a walk along the River Lea, which bisects the east of the city passing through Tottenham and Stratford to join the Thames at Canning Town, because its trajectory underpins his new album, The Moon Also Rises. It will be his sixth, and was created in partnership with the writer and filmmaker Robert Macfarlane, a professor of literature at Cambridge university. The two were introduced by a former student of Macfarlane’s who knew that each was a fan of the other. Macfarlane had been listening to Flynn’s records as he worked on his books, and Flynn had been reading Macfarlane’s books as he wrote songs.

In 2016, Flynn was preparing to buy the house he now lives in with his wife Bea, a costume designer, and their three children. He always knew he wanted kids — and to be a young father — partly because of losing his own dad in his teenage years. He described to Macfarlane his pent-up feelings about the enormity of the commitment he was about to make and the urge to do something momentous to mark it: “To stamp it. And somehow we decided to walk the length of the River Lea, which starts up in the Chiltern Hills.”

He describes the walk as a kind of pilgrimage to feel the soul of the river. It enabled an ongoing creative conversation, which produced first a 2021 album, Lost in the Cedar Wood, and now The Moon Also Rises, exploring the rights of nature, the transposition of grief on to landscape and the literal and metaphorical power of what it is to walk alongside a friend. The new album is divided loosely in two, the first half about burial and cessation and the second about renewal and rebirth. It’s difficult to say this without implying an unappealing, woolly sort of hippie-ishness, but the part of Flynn’s output I have found consistently moving over the years is an atavistic concern with ancient ritual and cycles. In his work, the transience of existence is consoled and explained by these permanent rhythms. It’s the kind of paganistic-adjacent perspective that could easily come off as a little corny or contrived in lesser hands. But it is wholly convincing and affirming when served by his profligate intelligence and wit.

As we walk, an incredibly fit topless and shoeless man runs past us, his feet and calves splattered with mud. We both marvel for a moment. “Wow, primal,” Flynn says. We discuss our fathers — mine, a playwright, and his, an actor, Eric Flynn. The rehearsal room, with its semi-mythical allure (another sort of small, sweaty space in which Flynn thrives) has been an important presence in each of our lives, which we agree makes Flynn’s next play the platonic ideal for both of us: not just a production set in a rehearsal room, but one about the dwindling of an older era of theatre and its clash with a brash, modern successor. The Motive and the Cue by Jack Thorne is the story of the legendary 1964 production of Hamlet, directed by Sir John Gielgud (Mark Gatiss) and starring the hot young thing of the day, Richard Burton, played by Flynn. It ran from April to July this year at the National Theatre and will reopen in December.

Flynn says the initial rehearsal period, which took place when Covid-19 restrictions were only beginning to be relaxed, lent this rehearsal room an extra potency: “It was exquisite, really — a place of yearning — and that was the genesis of our performances.” He seems to often play roles based on real people (as well as Burton, he’s been Einstein and David Bowie) and I ask how the preparation works.

“I think the front end is that I’m not Richard Burton, I’m just not. I’m quite loose and I allow myself the gift of imagining this person instead of just studying their mannerisms.”

Pigeon-holed years ago as a traditional English-folk posh boy, when his art was always something wilder, freer and more frenzied, Flynn is now often described as a polymath or a multihyphenate because of his success as both an actor and a musician. Why, I wonder, are people so obsessed with the fact of him doing more than one thing? “I’m not really interested in that. Everyone does more than one thing, whether that’s mother, friend, worker, artist, musician, poet — and, actually, it’s more true to say that I do one thing in many ways, which is that I communicate with other people.”

We end our walk at a pub by the water, on a canal. Flynn points out the boat that travels along the line of moorings selling coal, waves at a friend of his daughter’s, then a neighbour who tells him she’ll be along to see the play when it opens, and it does feel like he has done what he set out to do almost a decade ago, learning the spirit of the river, letting it lead him where it will.

Johnny Flynn and Robert Macfarlane’s album, The Moon Also Rises, is out now via Transgressive Records. The Motive and the Cue opens at the Noel Coward Theatre on December 9.

Follow @FTMag to find out about our latest stories first