Insecure Men

SAUL Adamczewski spent the summer of 2024 living in a cupboard in the South London suburb of Tulse Hill. No band, no girlfriend. Certainly no money. When you’ve lost your job as the tea boy for a Rastafarian meth dealer, where exactly is there left to go? Life, for the songwriter in his mid-thirties, had darkened. “I thought that the chewing gum on the floor in Brixton was artworks with my face on it,” remembers Adamczewski of his frayed psychological state. “Quite severe psychosis. Mental health services were called.” Adamczewski has lived with mental health challenges all of his life, but the hallucinations brought on by psychosis were worse than anything he had previously experienced. Going weeks without a proper meal, Adamczewski became very, very unwell.

He was socialising only with the local methadone services, or those who could procure him a cheap bag of fentanyl (the street opioid of choice in English cities in the 2020s), and it was a period he remembers as arguably the lowest of his life. “I looked like I was going to die,” says Adamczewski, “and I suppose I was.” But something changed.  “I called my Mum,” he remembers today, sipping Super Bock in a summertime Paris recording studio looking healthy and even handsome. “I said: I’m done, I’m fucked. Can I come home?”.  

Adamczewski began the painful process of opioid withdrawal in his mother’s house. “Since then, everything has been much better,” he says, and has spent the last year cheerfully cohabiting with his mum in South East London suburbia. “Everything started to come back to me. I really thought I was a goner.” 

Instead, out of a period spent  fixing fractured relationships with the mother of his infant daughter, his family, friends, and Fat White Family (the band he co founded in 2011), came a new album. A Man For All Seasons is the long-awaited return of Insecure Men, the avant-pop band led by Saul Adamczewski and with a rotating cast of collaborators including Ben Romans-Hopcraft, the Childhood multi-instrumentalist who went to primary school with Adamczewski. It was recorded at Konk Studios in North London as trees blossomed in Spring this year.

Insecure Men began in 2015, a repository for Adamczewski’s more reflective and melodic material that was naturally completely unsuitable for Fat White Family, and to make use of an in-joke that FWF should really be called “Insecure Men Who Look At Their Phones Too Much.” Their self-titled debut album was released in 2018. Adamczewski was out of Fat White Family, out of rehab, and turned in a melodically rich and sonically inventive album that surprised critics with its confident and focused songwriting (even if that songwriting was about Operation Yewtree, Cliff Richard and the death of Whitney Houston.) Praised by The Guardian as a redemptive breakthrough, it was a top 5 Album of the Year for The Quietus. But where that album used a woozy stew of lounge, exotica and off-kilter pop music as a base from which to examine the true-life horrors of fame, substance abuse and imperialism, A Man For All Seasons fixes its gaze on something no less shocking or ugly: the end of a relationship. 

Somehow amidst the chaos of the last two years, Adamczewski found time for a passionate and chaotic love affair. “I met a beautiful person and we were in love,” he explains. “But the struggles that have plagued me for most of my life rendered the romance doomed before it began.” The relationship survived as a friendship, and informed the more mournful cuts on A Man For All Seasons, where heartbreak tended to manifest in the form of wintry and fragile country songs. 

As far back as Adamczewski can remember, there has always been country music. “My mum” he explains, “is a huge country fan, and we always had Lucinda Williams or Gillian Welch records playing when I was a kid. Dwight Yoakam and Patsy Cline. It’s a bedrock in my life and has always been there.” Country was a nuclear influence on early Fat White Family, and will shape his next move, an album he plans to record in Memphis, no less. But the country songs on A Man For All Season were finessed closer to the Thames than the Mississippi. 

“I was feeling absolutely sorry as shit for myself and wanting to die,” remembers Adamczewski of his time in Tulse Hill, “and I’d sit out the back with these two elderly alcoholic friends of mine playing them blues and country songs on the guitar. They would nod if it was a good one.” This unorthodox process minted the stark, haunting Tulse Hill Station - for its songwriter, the best thing he has ever written - and Time Is A Healer, whose luxuriant mid-60s soulfulness makes Adamczewski’s original aim of writing a song for labelmate Al Green not as implausible as it might sound. 

Recording work on A Man For All Seasons began in spring 2025, working with producer Raf Rundell at Ray Davies’ Konk Studios in Hornsey, surrounded by post-war analogue gear and Kinks ephemera. Adamczewski surprised himself and his Insecure Men band members - which, this time around, include Ben Romans Hopcraft, Marley Mackay, Victor Jakeman, Fat White Family’s Alex White and Steely Dan Monte - by loosening his once vice-like grip on proceedings. “My role in the band has changed,” he explains squarely. “On this record, we really came together as a band for the first time in the studio. I’ve learnt to relinquish control, and it worked. Everyone felt much more free to offer and create in the studio, and it paid off really well.” 

Some of this is audible in the album’s more junkshop pop instincts. “I’ve definitely been guilty of taking myself a little too seriously,” concedes Adamczewski, “and it was nice to be more: this is just a fun pop song.” Take the whipsmart new wave of Cleaning Bricks, whose nursery rhyme chorus began life as a workplace joke that those around him began taking seriously, or lead single Alien, where a descending, Sweet Jane influenced riff is augmented by weeping lap steel in one of Adamczewski’s most straightforwardly lovely recordings. All of this is bound together by the distinctly opiated mid-frequency textures that link A Man For All Seasons with the first Insecure Men album: influences from the hypnotic, fabricated soundscapes of US mid-century exotica and lounge, all vibraphone, organ, sax and flute. “It’s an aquatic thing I suppose,” wonders Adamczewski. “Something ghostly and submerged and distant. It recreates the narcotic feeling of calm in me, and I can go back to a place where I feel stoned.” A pause. “And I like feeling stoned, as we know.” 

Looking ahead to A Man For All Seasons, its songwriter is enthused about what comes next. “As I’m getting older,” he reflects, “I’m not so interested in hopping around the stage with a guitar with my mates. I want to do something a little more dignified.” This searching has manifested itself in extreme drone music (in 2022, he recorded a drone record as malevolent and extreme as his life at that point, which was rejected by the record label and resides only in the vaults)), autumnal folk songwriting (Adventures in Limbo, eventually released on streaming and limited vinyl in 2023), an underrated volume of end-of-the-pier style covers of Peter Andre and Van Morrison (Karaoke for One Vol 1 from 2019), and as well as that planned Memphis project, Adamczewski is plotting a dub record.

“It sounds very fucking corny,” he says, “but it’s about finding truth, some inner truth or meaning. That’s what I’m trying to do now. Life is hard, and I haven’t made my life that easy, or certainly not for those around me. But music can be a healing force or a way of getting through it.” What all of this shares is an effervescent ability to transport him somewhere else, even if just fleetingly. “When I play those songs, I leave my head,” says Adamczewski, “I guess that is all I’m ever really trying to do.” Brilliant songwriter, unlikely auteur, serious maverick: a man for all seasons.