Flashion Forward: Ed Harcourt

Let’s all take a moment to channel our bitchiest inner diva. Got her? Good. It’s time for Flashion Forward! Each week we pluck a recently added interview from our warehouse of current clips and try to read between the artist’s sartorial lines. Today, we’re giving Ed Harcourt the squinty-eyed treatment.

But blithely skimming the sartorial surface with singer-song writer Harcourt is kind of like paging through the New Yorker for fashion tips. It just can’t be done. He’s played with R.E.M., Patti Smith, Marianne Faithful, Erik Truffaz and Feist. His music’s orchestral, electro-poptastic, dramatic and according to many critics, “genius.”

But his impressive, dark, soul-searching oeuvre is handily matched with his impressive, dark, soul-searching gaze, Byron-esque otherworldly aspect and penchant for wearing funereal suits.

Harcourt discusses the creative process that went into one of his lighter ditties, “Beneath the Heart of Darkness.” “Beneath the heart of darkness/Lies an old machine that’s reeling/Forgotten dust and sunlight/Silent and removed from feeling/The peace in my mind is drowning, fading down/There’s nothing left burning, it’s all out.” It makes my brain hurt and my heart heavy. Apparently, watching Francis Ford Coppola’s epic war tour de force Apocalypse Now inspired him to read Joseph Conrad’s The Heart of Darkness, which in turn prompted him to pen “Beneath the Heart of Darkness.”

Heavy, man. Heavy.