Maverick Sabre's Lonely Are The Brave
A new book by photographer Nahwand Jaff documents the 10 year anniversary tour of Maverick Sabre's debut album, Lonely Are The Brave. I met with them to talk about the journey of creating it
In November 2022, singer Maverick Sabre re-released his critically acclaimed debut album Lonely Are The Brave, a decade after it first came out. By funding it himself and re-recording every note, he could take back control from the record label who still own the original masters. It gave him a chance to revisit the carefree sounds of his youth, penned when he was just a teenager with a dream and a guitar.
Once complete, to promote Mav’s Version and provide space for listeners to hear him perform it live, he toured the UK and Ireland, finishing with a show at KOKO, north London, in December 2022. Then 12 months later, at the end of 2023, he organised a series of intimate shows in smaller settings.
Which is how, on the evening of Monday 18th December 2023, one week before Christmas, I found myself watching him take to the stage in the centre of Bush Hall, west London, surrounded on all sides by a tight legion of loyal fans hanging on his every word.
As his emotive, piercing voice ran through the album’s track list — including my favourite song Memories, which reuses the soothing beat of What They Do by The Roots — I found my mind drifting back in nostalgia to when I first heard it in 2012. I was approaching my 21st birthday and the end of my undergraduate degree in Bristol, consumed by the early stages of a relationship with my wife, Yasmin, and had just started a music blog with the vague aspiration of becoming a writer.
I’d been aware of Maverick Sabre since he’d released his first single Sometimes and an acoustic A64 performance of They Found Him A Gun on SBTV in 2009. Both songs then appeared on his debut mixtape, The Travelling Man. Its final track, I Need, later became his breakout single. When he performed it at Bush Hall, he paused to ask everyone to put their phones away, stressing the benefits of being fully present to listen and feel.
Michael Stafford was born in Hackney in 1990 before his parents moved him to the small town of New Ross in County Wexford, Ireland, when he was a child. He absorbed the musical passions of his father, who loved the blues, his mother’s love for writing, and the Irish trad of his locale. After discovering hip-hop he started rapping whilst playing the guitar. He burnt CDs and sold them at school, hassled DJs to listen to his work on MySpace and started gigging
In the summer of 2006, he landed a break supporting the east London singer-songwriter Plan B in Dublin for the rising star’s Who Needs Actions When You Got Words tour. It inspired him to embrace singing and move to the English capital, where Plan B offered him mentorship and free studio time. He slept on sofas, toured open mic nights and steadily embedded himself in the city’s grime and hiphop scenes. By 2010, at the age of 20, he was signed by Universal.
He called his album Lonely Are The Brave after an American black and white Western film, whose title he’d scribbled down in a notebook years before. Its four words speak to the album’s determined self-realisation, search for inner-peace and honest highs and lows of human relationships. On its release, the project soared to number two in the UK Official Album Charts.
Since then, Maverick Sabre has had a celebrated career. He has released multiple independent albums, collaborated with the likes of Professor Green, Jorja Smith, Shy FX, Digga D and many more, and achieved countless production and writing credits across a wide range of genres.
Throughout the anniversary tours, photographer Nahwand Jaff tagged along to document the sold-out crowds, dressing room drinking and euphoric stage-show climaxes with his camera. A book of his black-and-white images is out now, on a limited print run, available to order by clicking here.
I met up with Mav and Nahwand at The Auld Shillelagh, a raucous Irish pub in Stoke Newington, north east London. We huddled round a small table in the smoking area to drink Guinness and talk about the album’s legacy, staying in touch with tour younger selves and their collaborative journey.
Ciaran Thapar: Mav, talk me through what returning to Lonely Are The Brave was like, a decade on. You’re older and wiser now.
Maverick Sabre: The whole process of re-recording the album was to take the knowledge of a 10 year music career and be like: right, there are things I’ve figured out, and things I’ve become disconnected with. For my younger self, when I was making that record, certain things were deeply connected and certain things I hadn’t figured out. The therapeutic element of doing the re-record was going back and listening to the original vocal tapes. It was a beautiful thing, I was able to take a lot from it. I needed to connect with a younger version of myself, to learn something. There are parts of ourselves that we shed, that we don’t need any more, and there are things that are attached to the child inside of us, and we should reconnect with that child, because kids are pure. We become adults and turn serious and stop giggling. We don’t jump over the couch, we walk around it. But I want to skip sometimes, I want to jump up in the air and have a laugh. As you get older, you learn patterns of dealing with things, and you end up having armour, but you also learn patterns of being too logical, and I need to be a dreamer, be ultimately connected in what I’m doing, and serve that purpose first. Back at 17, 18, 19, 20, when I made the record, I didn’t give a fuck! To the core. When I loved what I’d created, there wasn’t a fraction of self-doubt. It was like: this is hard, I love it, this is what I’m moving forward with. As time goes on, you hone in on your craft and double check things. Things take longer to put out. But this album was the purest record I’ve made. There was no filler. Every song I made went on the record. The messages on there after 10 years still hit the same.
Ciaran Thapar: Why did you re-release it?
Maverick Sabre: I’ve been independent since 2016. Since then, step by step, I’ve been taking back control. There is an interesting clip of me when I first signed to Universal, an interview with Amaru Don. He asked me what I thought about recouping [the financial advance], and I didn’t have a fucking clue what he meant. I was pretending I had a clue, but I didn’t. I was like, ‘recouping, numbers, finances, that’s for everyone else. I just make the music, I’m pure.’ And there was a beauty to that fearlessness, but there was also a naïveté. Now I’ve got two independent albums that I’ve owned outright. So I was like, I have to do this re-release, I’m gonna put my own money into it, make it a moment, and create the best world around it that I can.
Ciaran Thapar: What impact has re-releasing it had on your current artistry?
Maverick Sabre: In the process of holding my craft I’ve started to produce a lot more. I make music differently, I write for other people, I’m more open. Re-releasing and performing that album again on tour reminded me that the feeling I get from it is forever relevant to me and the people who listen to what I make. I need to make sure I serve that for the rest of my life. There are times when you can get inward and forget. But the reason I got into music in the first place is because certain artists, certain songs, made me feel like they were there in the room with me when I needed them. And that’s an underlying level of what I need to remind myself, always.
Ciaran Thapar: When I saw you perform at Bush Hall, you asked people to put their phones away for I Need. Why?
Maverick Sabre: I started doing that on the tour because I felt like a lot of people connect with I Need in a different way. Over the years I’ve had the wildest messages about that song, in particular. It’s got a breadth to it. I’ve had people message me saying it got them through their prison sentence, funerals, weddings, positives and negatives, different extremes. And it made me think about the tour and the reasons I was coming back to doing it. That song and the album in general have meant different things to me as I’ve travelled with them. So, you’ve come into this room to listen to this album, one of your favourite tunes comes on, and you’re gonna spend three quarters of it looking at it through your phone? That don’t make no sense to me! The point of feeling the room is to feel me singing and you singing. That’s that euphoric shit, that’s that high we can get to without drugs. The minute people put their phones away, you feel the energy shift immediately. I don’t know how much you feel it in the crowd, but on stage the emotion’s immediately more present, louder. It’s full attention.
Ciaran Thapar: At Bush Hall, how was performing in the middle of the room and in such a small, intimate setting?
Maverick Sabre: It almost felt like being in a space with 350 people who you shared a secret with and they understand it, and they shared their secret and you understand it. And now we’re talking about those secrets and how we feel about them. There was something about being in-the-round in a venue like that. One, it kept me from being distracted. Sometimes, when you’re on stage and the audience is in front of you, you get very used to those interactions, and sometimes — not all the time — you can get lost. Transactional might not be the right word for it, but it can feel like you and them. But by being in the middle, all I’m doing is conducting what the fuck they’re doing. All I want to do is make sure the feeling is as strong in the room as possible. And for me to be able to walk around the stage constantly interacting with different members of the audience, looking at people, feeling what they’re on, pulling them out of a shy space or engaging with someone who's extroverted, ready to go…it’s constant interaction.
Ciaran Thapar: Nahwand, how was touring with Mav and working on the photography book?
Nahwand Jaff: Mav did a good job of cultivating a space where it feels like family. And feeling part of it meant I had a unique vision within it, in those small moments where I was interacting with people. People aren’t just on job, they’re living between the cracks of what is happening on tour. The book was a chance for fans in the crowd to immortalise themselves within this album that means so much to them. One of the defining moments was in this last string of shows, each time Mav had some die hard fans come, some of them travelling from Birmingham, Manchester, even Dublin. One of them bought the book, and he came back later and pointed at one of the photos and said, “that’s me!”. And I was like, that’s the whole point, that’s why we did this. It was full circle. That’s the difference with a comeback tour. Everyone in the audience already knows the songs and has an emotional connection to them. So the purpose of the book was to immortalise that.
Ciaran Thapar: It’s special to produce physical art that people can hold in their hands when social media is saturated with content.
Maverick Sabre: There’s this ‘film everything’ culture for musicians in studio sessions now. You get young artists who come through and they’re either pressured by their friends or their management or labels, who say they need to be on TikTok filming everything. And I get it, because I’ve been in amazing scenarios over the years and there’s not one bit of documentation of them. But in one sense, I couldn’t give a fuck! Because I’ve had the experience, and that’s enough, and I would have pulled myself out of the space, of enjoying the moment and the people I’m with, by being like: hold on, we need to film this. If it happens, it happens.
Nahwand Jaff: I truly believe the journey is our own. It doesn’t need to be seen by everyone. And at some point, if you’ve constantly got a camera on you, at what point are you authentic? Because if there is a camera on you, it’s for the viewing of other people, regardless. So at what point are you allowing yourself to be your natural self and not performing all the time? You police yourself when you feel like you’ve got eyes on you. When it comes to the journey and the moments, it’s cool to document it, but separating it into specific projects rather than documenting everything is the way to do it.
Maverick Sabre: Before social media, it felt different. See the policing you’re talking about, I feel like before social media, the documentation of artists felt more free. I watched Supersonic the other day — you know the Oasis documentary? I’m a big Oasis fan. At every moment, every live show, someone had a camera. And because it was less to do with recording it for social media, so that your fans can see it tomorrow, there was this freeness to it that made it still capturing the moment, even though there was a camera in the room, because there was less thought going into how it would look, whether it’s Instagram-worthy. Did I say something stupid? Did I sing a bad note? Are people going to harass me?
Ciaran Thapar: So what’s next?
Maverick Sabre: Being able to have people at the shows being the subject of the book, it was like everyone was part of this big art piece. That’s what I took from the Bush Hall show as well. So now I’m thinking a lot about how immersive I can make these experiences. We’re just touching the surface. How do I capture that feeling on a consistent, bigger scale? Do I perform in-the-round more? I would love to be able to do that in a bigger venue like Camden Roundhouse. Go beyond that size and you would lose something, but you could stretch it and it would feel interesting. I’ve got some new ideas for my next album, of doing one-off shows before the record’s even out. So people don’t have a clue what they’re coming to hear.
Nahwand Jaff: We’re also interested in how we can immerse people even when they’re at home, creating something visual like the book, set up so it’s like a narrative to go along with the songs that you can look at whilst listening and gain a different perspective.
Maverick Sabre: Yeah, it’s like with a music video. You want a video to immerse someone in the world as close to where your head is at. I can play you songs where I don’t feel like I need to have a visual representation of them…but if you can do that in a physical thing that is colouring peoples’ perspectives of the music, then you’re in peoples’ homes. They don’t even need to come to the show.