Iconic festival performer and folk music force Beans on Toast moves to Whitstable and promptly gets stuck in, writes Joe Bill

Beans on Toast at The Street, Whitstable

Wait.. what?… I know those stones and that shoreline!

As Beans of Toast (@beans.on.toast) boogies his way through the video of his song A Beautiful Place, it didn’t take long to realise that the water lapping around his ankles was breaking on Whitstable’s The Street (the shingle bank that stretches out to sea).

The festival folk icon moved to The Bubble in October last year to be closer to family.

“I kind of feel better about being able to say we didn’t just randomly turn up,” he says. “Even though one of the beauties about Whitstable is that it’s a place you go to and fall in love with. I’ve met many people who have done that and it speaks highly of how much of a magical place it is.”

With the pandemic having made its mark, coupled with the rent being up on his London home and a “reshuffling of the deck”, Beans and wife Lizzy Bee made the move.

“I never thought I’d leave London,” he says. “I travel more than most and have visited most towns in this country, but never thought ‘Oh, this is where I’d like to set up shop’.

“But the stars aligned. And since getting here, I’ve found out so much more and fell more and more in love with the place. I feel at home.”

It helped, of course, knowing a bit about the place, including having played at Dukes (the Duke of Cumberland pub), and it certainly got the creative juices flowing, with new album Survival of The Friendliest being created here and then launched in The Playhouse on the High Street.

“I get to live quite an easy-going life, carrying on being a human being. And when I do stumble across people that know me, it’s generally not because they f*cking hate me”

— Beans on Toast

Written with old friends Blaine Harrison and Jack Flanagan of the Mystery Jets, it’s an album that radiates positivity and counteracts the times in which it was written.

“The bad news was everywhere,” remembers Beans. “I switched off social media, looked to nature and zoomed out to write songs about a bigger, longer and stranger story. There are no songs about Brexit, about coronavirus, about climate catastrophe. I’d sung those songs already. I’m not naive to the challenges we face as a species and I’m not ignoring that. But to tackle our current predicament, I feel we need to be in a good place mentally and spiritually. This is an album about finding that peace in preparation for the road ahead.”

Taking its title from Humankind by modern thinker Rutger Bregman, the book’s positive philosophies played a pivotal influence in shaping the course of the record.

“[Bregman] explains why humans are fundamentally good and generally nice, we just get confused and focus on the negatives easily,” says Beans.

It was recorded at Big Jelly Studios in Ramsgate, where a cast of revolving musicians including the multi-talented gospel singer Sarah Telman (backing vocals, strings), Rosie Bristow of Holy Moly & The Crackers (accordion), Adriano Rossetti-Bonell (saxophone) and Margate’s Graham Godfrey (drums) helped it to be laid down in under a week.

“The mindset of the album was all positivity. In this strange world, I couldn’t really think about anything but celebrating the things that are still left to celebrate,” he says.

“There were so many opinions and divisions. I didn’t want to shy away from singing a political song, but I didn’t feel like it was gonna do any good. It was the wrong time for it. So the album was all about the good times. It made the recording process really beautiful because you sing it over and over and it was almost like a mantra with this positive energy.”

CULT CLASSIC & BEST SELLER

With a back catalogue that stretches back more than a decade, Beans is revered for tracks spanning subjects from climate change to drugs to politics - if there was a human who could be the very embodiment of Glastonbury Festival’s values, then here he is. In fact, he hasn’t missed a Glastonbury Festival since he was 16 (performing at most of them) and this year alone he will be clocking up some 25 to 30 different festival performances. So the ‘cult’ figure tag that follows every uttering of his name is pretty well deserved.

“I’ve always thought ‘cult’ is, like, not everybody really knows about you,” he says. “It’s something I’m cool with. If you’ve been doing it for a long time and some people like you, but you’re certainly not a household name, then that’s cool.

“I get to live quite an easy-going life, carrying on being a human being. And when I do stumble across people that know me, it’s generally not because they f*cking hate me, if you know what I mean.

“I don’t find it weird and I don’t think I’d go out of my way to call myself a cult icon, but I quite like it when other people do.”

While his summer is looking juicier than ever, thanks to multiple rollovers of festival line-ups as well as new ones accruing, Beans has still been touring the album in the meantime and released his second book, Foolhardy Folk Tales. Appearing at Faversham Literary Festival, the performer explains that the book is based on 10 true memoirs that “try to throw up some fun stories, lessons learned or bridges burned”.

From top tips on the art of the blag, fantastical tales of robbing Tesco (sort of) to philanthropic deeds for the Strummerville charity, the book is the follow-up to Drunk Folk Stories.

“As much as I enjoyed the first book, I sort of surprised myself with it because I never thought I’d write a book,” he says. “And in my small universe, that book did really, really well. So when touring was off and I had loads of time at home, I was like ‘I guess I’ll write another one’.

“One of my favourite songwriters, a guy called Todd Snider, similar to me, he can talk a lot on stage. In between songs he will often give an intro that’s longer than the song itself. And he wrote a book that was an extension of his tour stories. After reading that, I was like ‘Why the hell not?’.”

Beans admits he found the process quite easy. “I know that sounds annoying,” he says. “But when you’re writing a song, you’re creating something out of nothing. Whereas with the book, one, these stories actually happened and, two, since they happened I’ve been telling them to anyone that will listen, in the pub, on stage or wherever.

“Generally with these stories, the more you tell them, the sharper they get and you can bend a little bit more away from the truth as well, but they become more concise. So when it came down to writing, it was just a case of getting it down on paper.”

Have the books been successful? Well, it’s quite easy for Beans to tell what is and isn’t successful as he turns the Zoom call camera around to reveal a wall of boxes in his studio.

“I can tell how many I’ve sold by how many I’ve got left,” he explains, divulging that he and his wife run the whole Beans on Toast operation from home. “It came out and it was accepted, and I sold more than I would any albums.”

The new releases are set to continue in 2022, with Beans releasing a track and joining a campaign that’s now very close to home.

“I got right into sea swimming and one day my wife says ‘I don’t think you should go swimming today because they’ve emptied loads of sewage into it’,” he says. “I started reading up what was actually happening here and looked back at some of the dates and realised I had effectively been swimming in raw sewage.”

Beans attended and even played at a protest outside the Southern Water plant in Whitstable; he is in contact with campaign group SOS Whitstable.

“It hit me quite hard and at the same time I was reading about SOS Whitstable and what those guys were doing, and they got in touch and asked if I could retweet this petition, and I was like ‘Let me do more than that, I will write a song’.

“So I wrote a song [Swimming In It] about Southern Water and how much the CEO earns and the fact that it’s a problem that can be and should be fixed.”

Plans are afoot for what Beans describes as a gathering of musicians to fight the cause, or a ‘Live Aid about sewage in Kent’.

I think it’s fair to say he has settled in.