One day, not too long ago, Tom Grennan was on the phone to his mum and dad and told them he was paying off their mortgage.
The money came from singing a few simple lines, culminating in the lyrics many now know Grennan for: “Gillette! The best a man can get.”
Anybody who stays on the sofa through half-time while watching a Premier League football game will have his voice beamed into their living room. Grennan embraced it, using it as his entrance music for a landmark gig in Gunnersbury Park. Amid demand, he even added it to Spotify, completing a cultural takeover for what is ultimately an advert jingle.
It enabled this. As he spoke to his parents, they talked about moving house because they were unable to pay the mortgage. It was the house they moved into when he was 13.
Tom Grennan playing TRNSMT in Glasgow, 2022. Image: Findlay / Alamy Stock Photo
“To be able to do that for my parents – they’ve always been those parents who’ll do anything for me and my brother,” says Grennan, sporting his curly hair, tight-trimmed beard and eclectic array of tattoos.
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“To give them something back was such a lovely feeling. But I didn’t think about it. It was like, ‘Oh I’ve got that money, sweet, I’ll do that’.”
Which is to say, Tom Grennan seems like a charitable man. That trait explains the first attempt of his interview with Big Issue. Still recovering from illness as we speak in a sweltering and stuffy church basement, the singer tries paracetamol, water. They do not hit the spot. As a final gambit Grennan removes his shirt and attempts to answer my questions topless. When he later talks about early-morning gym sessions, I believe him.
That charitable side also explains the reason we were chatting: as you read this, Grennan is preparing to return to his adoptive home of Coventry to busk for Big Issue.
“I think the Big Issue is an important magazine. I think it helps a lot of people get back on their feet. It also highlights a lot of the things that are going on in the UK and across other places. I also think it gives the chance for artists like myself to have their face on it,” he says, with his top back on as we sit in the drizzly courtyard cafe of St Martin-in-the-Fields church, just off Trafalgar Square in London.
“I chose it because it helps a lot of people and I think it’s the only magazine that’s still doing that stuff.”
News coverage of Grennan seems to focus on his acts of kindness. During a gig in Coventry in 2023, he wore a #RallyforHallie t-shirt emblazoned with a QR code leading to a fundraising appeal for a young girl with cancer. The same year, he offered £2,000 to fly a fellow Coventry fan all the way from Argentina to Wembley to watch the team in the Championship play-off final. This year, he donated to a campaign funding a statue for two Coventry City legends.
“I don’t go running around saying, ‘Can I help you, can I help you?’ But I just feel like music and things like that can help people who are in need. And these people, it’s my music that these people are listening to. So if I can help in any way, then I will do that,” he says.
“I’ve always wanted to help people. If I can help in any way I will, but I’m not running around the gaff saying ‘I’m Tom Grennan, so I can help you.’ I’m not doing it like that. I’m doing it because I like helping, and that’s it.”
Tom Grennan photographed for Big Issue on 6 August 2024. Image: Tom Oldham
Grennan chews a toothpick while we speak, disintegrating it over the course of the conversation. He wears the charitable acts lightly, but perhaps there are clues in his background.
Growing up in Bedford, with an English mum and an Irish dad, Grennan learned the value of hard work and considers himself both Irish and English. His hometown is also one of the most diverse places in the UK.
“I was blessed to be raised around all sorts of different skin colours, religions and just different people, different communities. Coming from Bedford was amazing,” he says.
He finds it sad that the recent riots were sometimes blamed on working-class people. “It’s uneducated racists that are going out and doing these things, and they’ve been led on by things they’re seeing online and people that they’re seeing online,” Grennan says.
“For me, it’s sad, because I come from Bedford, and I’ve grown up with all different cultures, all different religions, and I don’t know how that even enters somebody’s head saying the words that they’re using and the comments that they’re saying. It’s just sadness, man, sad. It makes me sad to come from England.”
Faith is important to Grennan, bred into him as an Irish boy and reinforced while his grandad was ill a year ago. “For me, it’s a personal thing. Have an open conversation with whoever it may be. I don’t go to church. I wouldn’t even call it religion, like it isn’t. I’ve just got faith, and I don’t know who the hell it is that I’m talking to, but it gives me a little bit of comfort knowing that somebody, fingers crossed, is listening,” he says.
Tom Grennan performing at AO Arena in Manchester in 2023. Image: Gary Mather / Alamy Stock Photo
“It’s only recently where I’ve kind of gone, ‘You know what, I believe in something’. Religion is not for me, I think religion is a-whole-nother thing. But I believe in something, and I put my faith in that. And that’s people.”
Football was serious in Grennan’s youth, bouncing between Northampton Town, Aston Villa, and Luton Town for five or six years, until he was 17. “I was never good enough to play football, but I always had this thing of, like, I knew I was going to do something special. Didn’t know what it was, but I knew I’d do something cool,” he says.
The Big Issue busk takes Grennan back to the very start of his career, when he gigged in pubs around London. He relishes the instant feedback from the small crowds – can he get people turning round and singing? Grennan was, as every pub singer longs for, discovered. By chance, while Grennan performed at an open mic night at the Finsbury pub, a record label rep was having a beer.
His first time in a studio was with dance titans Chase and Status, recording vocals for the 2016 track All Goes Wrong. “It was a nutty experience. A lot of shit went on in that studio, which was fun, then I went back to uni that evening,” he recalls. Then it took off.
All three of his albums have charted in the UK top five. His two most recent albums, Evering Road and What Ifs & Maybes were number ones. He has had four top 10 singles. Two singles from Evering Road were in the top three most played songs of 2021, by the PPL measure. Found What I’ve Been Looking For even featured as music for an instalment of the FIFA video games – a bigger honour than it may sound to the uninitiated. A fourth studio album is coming.
For inspiration, he’s been listening to “a lot of fun music” – Queen, Wham!, Prince, Elton John – and scouring records shops, picking up old blues records, Tom Jones albums and LPs from Khruangbin and Michael Kiwanuka.
“I didn’t want to do music that was just gonna place me in this box. I wanted to be experimental with my music, and not just doing down-the-line boring pop,” he says.
Does he worry about ‘straight boring pop’? “I don’t worry about that, but I just felt like I was kind of slipping into something that I wasn’t in love with. So I was like, well, I need to start making the music that I love.
Tom Grennan playing for England at the Soccer Aid match for Unicef. Image: PA Images / Alamy Stock Photo
“Do it in my own way, and not fall down the trap of making music… shit pop basically, shit music. Wasn’t down for it,” he says.
“I felt like I was just kind of… not getting lazy with it. Because I’ve never been lazy with it, but I was making decisions where it was like, ‘yeah that’ll do’ kind of thing. But yeah, not this one.”
With the new music comes a new attitude for recently married Grennan. “People say, ‘You’ve done it, you’ve made it.’ I haven’t made nothin’,” he says. He had begun taking music for granted, he admits. A wake-up-call came when John – his manager, who he says has had the biggest impact on his life and sparked his love of Coventry City – gave him some advice. “He’s the guy who said ‘There’s going to be 100 more of you, you’ve got one chance of this, like what are you doing?’ That shifted my mindset. I look up to him so much,” says Grennan.
He’s changed who he’s hanging out with and started “training my bollocks off at the gym” from 6am, keeping to a set diet and sleeping during the day. Pre-show nerves remain, however. It shows he cares.
“What am I like when I’m nervous? You ever done pills?” he asks. “It’s like waiting for you to come up, and then you go, ‘Fucking hell, there you go’. That’s what it’s like”. After a show, he’ll be straight to bed. Compare that to the glimpses of the before-times Grennan gives. “You’ve probably got a world in your head. Think about it, and that’s the world,” he says.
“I don’t know how far I can go into this without me sounding like I… I was just in a bad place, you know what I’m saying. I was doing all sorts of crazy shit, and now I’m not, and they’re just the changes I had to make,” he says, admitting he could have quickly lost what he’d worked to build.
“My attitude wasn’t the best for a bit. Then I had to flip my life around and say, I’ve got this chance, don’t do what you did with football and fuck it up. That’s what I did, and what I’m trying to do now.”
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