Riding high, the musician left
music to concentrate on his young family. So what led him to sacrifice his marriage and resume his career 15 years later?
In 2018, Stephen Fretwell was sitting in a class at the college where he had enrolled to do an A-level crammer course when a notification popped up on his phone. It was a link to a Pitchfork story about Arctic Monkeys recording a version of a track from his 2005 album Magpie. Fretwell watched in quiet astonishment as some of his classmates, almost half his age, opened the same news story on their phones and began openly discussing this unknown singer-songwriter that their favourite band had covered.
Fretwell stayed quiet. His new album, Busy Guy, is out this week but, at that point, he didn’t feel like much of a singer-songwriter at all. Magpie reached the Top 30 and he was called up to support Oasis, Elbow, Keane and others, but 2007’s Man on the Roof was followed by an extended period of musical inactivity. Years went by where he didn’t pick up a guitar, his life instead centred on being a stay-at-home dad to his two sons in Brighton. Fans wondered where he had gone, imagining some mythical rock’n’roll recluse. Not exactly: prior to redoing his A-levels with the intention of going to university and studying law, he was washing pots in his local Wetherspoons.