Episode 263: Liam Ivory - Maribou State

What happens when you achieve everything you want in life, as musician Liam Ivory of Maribou State has, and still find yourself with an itch that remains unscratched?

That's the question at the heart of my conversation with the brilliant Liam, one half of one of the UK's most successful electronic music acts, and somebody who, I learned, has also been grappling with a conundrum every Looking Sideways listener will recognise: how to strike a balance between 'the creative life, and finding moments to get out and ride'.

As a sentence that defines the Looking Sideways ethos, this is pretty much unbeatable. Even better, it's a direct quote from an Insta DM Liam sent me back in February, when he generously got in touch to tell me how much he was enjoying listening to the show and its celebration of the balancing act that has become increasingly important to him.

Naturally, like any good journalist, I immediately asked him to come on the show. So it was that on the eve of Maribou's biggest ever show, at LIDO Festival in Victoria Park, we met in London and sat down to go over the whole thing: that elusive search for balance; how board sports have been the defining anchor of his life; the seven-year gestation of Hallucinating Love; the twenty-year creative partnership that Liam describes as a marriage; and the highs and lows of an extraordinary career in music.

The resulting conversation is certainly a peerless insight into the creative reality of sustaining the type of career that eventually leads to a Glastonbury headline slot.

But it's also yet another reminder, as if we needed it, that notions of success truly lie in the eye of the beholder.

And that even the most outwardly prolific creative people are just like the rest of us. Fuelled by a search for meaning - and a desire to go riding as much as they possibly can, whatever the circumstances…

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