Creature Comforts: Inside The World Of Baby Dave

When I arrive at Oslo, the grassroots venue that sits adjacent to the platform exit at Hackney Central station, I have no agreement in place to interview Baby Dave (a.k.a Soft Play’s Isaac Holman) at the sold-out opening night of his tour. His approach to promoting the project has been extremely laidback since its post-pandemic inception, when Soft Play, then still called Slaves, were on hiatus and unsure if they would ever share the stage again.

Isaac has always been open about his struggles with mental health and has often battled with the intensities and anxieties that come with being part of a major touring act and living in the public eye. He rarely does any press or promo for Baby Dave and hasn’t toured extensively with the project, which is why it came as a surprise when he dropped a string of mid-October tour dates on his Instagram a couple of weeks ago.

For Isaac, this is very much his hobby and therapy project, and he’s unapologetic about putting privacy before promo. His reserved approach to social media, paired with the distinctly DIY sound of the records, meant I had little idea what his live setup was even going to look like. I didn’t know if he had a band behind him or if it was going to be Isaac alone, surrounded by synths, guitars and drum machines, in another instrumentally unconventional variation on what he does alongside Laurie Vincent in Soft Play.

Many artists would do things differently. They’d announce the tour dates months in advance and plaster them relentlessly over an abundance of reels, posts and stories. And yet, having done very little of that, he now stands, grinning triumphantly, before a room of 400 people in London on a Sunday night while they scream his humorously confessional lyrics back to him bar for bar.

“It was better than I thought it was gonna be,” he tells me after the show. “The first gig’s normally a bit rusty, but it felt really good. London being the first night was a lot of pressure, and I kind of had high hopes that it would be one of the last dates because it’s always the busiest.”

Isaac hails from Tunbridge Wells and now lives in Brighton, meaning both of those cohorts are out in force tonight. Though he’s under no illusions that every stop on the tour will offer quite the same home-away-from-home advantage.

“We haven’t sold as many tickets tomorrow in Birmingham,” he laughs, “so I’m worried I might get humbled.”

Tonight’s buoyancy is a considerable distance from the circumstances that shaped much of Baby Dave’s world, though. His latest record, 'Billy', takes its name from an unlikely companion Isaac found during one of the most trivial and daunting periods of his life.

“Last year, maybe a little bit longer than a year ago, I was still out in Tunbridge Wells and I was having a terrible time of it, to be honest,” he explains. “My life was falling apart horrendously. It was just terrible thing after terrible thing.”

It was during that period that Isaac started taking long walks by himself in the evenings to clear his head. On one of them, he encountered the animal that would eventually give 'Billy' its name.

“To cut a long story short, I was on my own again after not being on my own for a very long time. I’d been through a lot of trauma and I’d find myself just going out and walking every evening.

And one night I saw a badger there in the middle of the path. I was like, no fucking way, I’d never seen a badger alive before. I decided to call him Billy.”

He continues, grinning as he recounts the tale: “It was hardly spooked by me. I walked past it and it just kept eating stuff off the floor. I went back the next day because I wanted to see if he was still there, and he was. And so the day after that I decided to take some food with me. I didn’t know what badgers liked, so I gave it a peanut butter sandwich and chopped it up into little squares. I got too fucking excited and ran over to it, and it ran off and I thought I’d fucked it. Anyway, I walked around the block and left the sandwich there, and when I came back I watched Billy taking it bit by bit off to the bushes and eating it. From then, I just knew this badger would be special to me.”

The music of Baby Dave plays on something that characterises much of Isaac’s approach to dealing with his mental health struggles. Many of the songs are about the importance of friendship during these dark times, and are either sung or spoken in a much warmer tone than the wrath and fury he’s known to bring to the mic with Soft Play. And while the subject matter is often painful, it’s almost always served with a comforting dose of humour.

'alaska' is about a suicide pact he made with his friend Kelly, written during a point in his life when he was contemplating taking his own life. Kelly jokingly told him that, if he was going to do it, the only way she’d let him was if she came with him – and that they’d go out in style, heading to Alaska to overdose under the Northern Lights before their bodies became dinner for polar bears.

‘twat in the attic’ sees him explore regretful drunken behaviour and the anxieties that inevitably follow it. The subject matter of ‘San Pellegrino’ is instinctively less heavy, telling the story of a mission that involved going to multiple corner shops and eventually a big Sainsbury’s in search of the Alpine sparkling water at the request of his girl, who won’t settle for any other brand.

Despite his discombobulation at the specificity of the request, he accepts the mission with grit and determination, hilariously chronicling his quest over the sound of a gritty drum machine.

There’s a musical freedom to the project, too. Baby Dave gives Isaac room to explore a more conversational style of songwriting, with multiple generations of the Dury clan among his greatest influences.

“I love listening to both Ian and Baxter Dury. I love that sort of style. I don’t always wanna be screaming and shouting all the time. I love all that, but not all the time.”

During his set, he brings out his closest friend and long-time collaborator Jack Leon Mackay, a.k.a CUB, to perform the guest vocals he recorded on 'mycellium'.

Jack, of course, is also the reason this interview is happening in the first place. I first met him earlier this summer at The Forum in Tunbridge Wells, where he was opening for Laurie Vincent’s new band Big Truck. A highly confessional artist in his own right, heavily inspired by Mac DeMarco, he builds his songs around guitar and loop pedals, gradually layering them up around himself onstage.

It was Jack who, after bumping into us downstairs at Oslo earlier tonight, offered to put in a word with Isaac and see if he’d be up for talking after the show. Their friendship, though, stretches back considerably further than either Baby Dave or Soft Play.

“Me and Jack go way back,” Isaac says. “He was a local musician that I was a fan of. I was a rapper back then and he was doing more of an indie thing. He didn’t know of me but I was like in awe of him. There was a thing called Bebo before Facebook was a thing, and you used to get three ‘loves’ a day on there, and I used to go on there and just use up all my loves on Jack.”

Their friendship properly began in suitably chaotic fashion when Isaac spotted Jack out in Tunbridge Wells one day, jumped on his back, gave him a cuddle and invited him home. Before long, Jack was at the Holman household playing Maccabees songs on guitar, where Isaac’s family quickly grew close to him.

“Me and him have been best mates ever since, and we’ve been through so much together,” Isaac says. “Jack’s been through a hell of a lot and so have I, and our friendship has endured through a lot of really difficult stuff. I feel very blessed to have such a vulnerable and loving relationship like that. We tell each other we love each other a lot, and I think that should be more normalised with blokes.”

That kind of emotional openness is fundamental to Baby Dave. Isaac talks about the project less like a conventional musical endeavour and more as something he needs in order to keep himself level. Its beginnings came during a period when Soft Play’s future looked uncertain and his own mental health had reached a particularly difficult point.

“I started this during the band’s hiatus, and we’d essentially agreed that we were never gonna do the band again, and then I’d had a fucking serious mental breakdown and was living with my parents and working as a gardener. I started making songs because I need to make songs if I want to feel alright, and then I just started to add up tunes, and I realised I had enough to do something with, which is how the album 'Monkey Brain' came about.”

There’s little ambiguity, then, when I ask what Baby Dave has become for him. “I’d say that Baby Dave for me is like therapy.”

It perhaps explains why the usual machinery that surrounds releasing and touring music seems largely absent here. There’s no elaborate strategy to propel Baby Dave towards bigger rooms or turn it into something beyond what Isaac needs it to be. The fact that other people have found something in these songs is clearly meaningful to him, but it isn’t the reason he makes them.

“I don’t treat it the same way because it’s a totally different thing to me. I love both projects with all my heart, but this is a world away from what I do with Soft Play. I don’t really know how to explain it, but I’d still be doing this even if nobody gave a shit. It’s really lovely that people are interested and wanting to come along to the shows, but I don’t have any drive to promote it as a thing beyond what it already is for me.”

It also goes some way to explaining why arranging this conversation required a chance encounter with one of his best mates downstairs rather than an email exchange with a publicist.

“That’s maybe why I’m quite hard to pin down for interviews and stuff,” he admits. “I like sitting here and having a chat, and I’ll do it with some people, but I’m not hunting it down and thinking, ‘I’ve got to do promo!’ or anything like that, which with Soft Play is always a big part of the cycle. It’s just not about that for me. It’s about giving myself a bit of therapy and expressing myself.”

But the distance between his two musical worlds doesn’t mean Baby Dave exists in opposition to Soft Play. If anything, Isaac feels the freedom he and Laurie give each other to pursue their own creative ventures ultimately strengthens what they come back to together.

“I just feel really lucky to do this in between that stuff. Whenever we go off and do our other projects, we exercise the creative muscles and stay active in doing what we do together, even if it’s through different outlets. We come together even better as a result of it, and me and Laurie will always come back bigger and better and with more love for each other. I fucking love that bloke.”

Since moving to Brighton, Isaac has found some new companions, although leaving Billy behind in Tunbridge Wells wasn’t easy.

“I’ve got a new badger gang in Brighton, who my friend who lives there introduced me to after I told him how gutted I was to have had to say goodbye to Billy. I’m not gonna say where because I don’t want other people going there, but it was in a cemetery. It’s at the point now where I’m there chilling with like five badgers and a fox all at once. It’s like a little hub for wildlife activity.”

His daytime allegiances are avian. “I fucking love crows. I love pigeons as well. I feed multiple squads of them every day in Brighton. But crows are my special interest at the moment. I’ve been trying to befriend this one murder of crows in Brighton city centre for a while now, over the last month or two, and now I turn up and do the same little whistle and wear the same hat every time. Now when I get there and whistle, they just flock down from the trees or wherever they are and I just get surrounded by them. I walk and they’ll just fly along next to me. It feels fucking epic.”

There are, of course dietary requirements to consider when seeking these connections. “I’m spending a killing on cashew nuts at the minute, cos that’s what they like. Walnuts for the pigeons, cashews for the crows, pecans and dried apricots for the badger.” He says, “In the day I see the birds, in the night I hang out with the badgers and the foxes.”

It might sound eccentric, but for Isaac there’s a profound sense of calm to be found in these encounters.

“I’ve got ADHD and mad OCD and I do struggle with my head quite a lot. Throughout the day, I often find everything quite difficult, and when I’m with these wild animals and connecting to them, I feel so present and so calm.”

He concludes, “It’s like medicine, man. There’s something about connecting with a wild animal, and having those moments where you see each other. There’s something so special about that. It’s a mad feeling.”

'Billy' is out now.

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