Sean Shibe: ‘Maybe there is a bit of clownery to what I’m doing, but I’m totally serious about it‘

Sean Shibe has spent much of his 33 years on the planet feeling at war with people’s expectations; teachers, managers, record labels, concert promoters, the specialist guitar press, the public, and sometimes even his own fans. It’s a non-exhaustive list, and the battle lies mostly with precedent. After all, the baseline feeling for guitar is almost universal, and Shibe is not an everyman guitarist. Particularly in the classical guitar world – which has its own lexicon of signifiers and rules of engagement – the Scottish musician is conspicuously daring, spilling over with ambition.

Powered by a drive to go beyond what he calls ‘the self-supporting classical guitar’ (shorthand for Joaquín Rodrigo and other usual suspects of the Spanish repertoire), he’s a spiritual heir of sorts to the late Julian Bream, who did much to de-anachronise the instrument in his lifetime. Shibe’s mission? To keep expanding the repertoire that the guitar is known for, not only through his own bold interpretations of the broader classical canon, but by actively commissioning new, contemporary pieces from composers he admires. ‘I’ve always seen the repertoire as something that needs to keep progressing, no matter how experimental things become,’ he says, ‘and I hope that people feel that’s true and obvious with what’s been achieved’.

Recently premiered works include Chanter, a guitar concerto composed by Cassandra Miller, inspired by the sound of bagpipes, and Doom and the Dooms, a fictional band performance composed by Oliver Leith and performed alongside GBSR Duo on piano and percussion and 12 Ensemble on strings. For Shibe, who plays the role of electric guitarist and bandleader Doom, it’s a weirdly logical extension of his own journey into plugged-in sound. ‘What are you going to do next?’ asked one disbelieving friend at the start. ‘Turn up on stage dressed as a clown, riding a unicycle and playing a banjo?’ Shibe half rolls his eyes. ‘Maybe there is a bit of clownery to what I’m doing, but I’m totally serious about it,’ he says. ‘It’s a serious clowning, like Pierrot or the Parisian clown school.’

Born in Edinburgh to an English dad and Japanese mum, both accomplished potters, Shibe grew up in a home full of music. Household favourites like Captain Beefheart and Sun Ra gave him an early education in psychedelic blues-rock and avant-garde jazz, while his dad’s nighttime lullabies of choice were socialist, pro-union songs from the coalmines. He remembers going to a lot of shows growing up, but while many of his friends have stories of grand revelations that inspired their deep love of music, that’s not Shibe’s tale to tell. There was ‘no Damascus moment,’ as he puts it, just a raw interest, the steady build of showing up, and a state funding structure that allowed for natural progression.

It’s true that his mum spontaneously bought him a guitar in the same week that a guitar club happened to open at school, but Shibe doesn’t play that up as fated, or anything much at all. ‘Mine is not a very interesting story, and perhaps it’s not very inspiring for others,’ he says. ‘But I think the reality is that if we want to build a societal fabric that places some importance on artistic interests, then my story is, I suppose, a more important one than isolated stories of divine intervention.’

The ordinary lore of Sean Shibe is as follows, then. At seven he attended the same music school in Edinburgh that nurtured Garbage vocalist Shirley Manson and composer Helen Grime. Encouraged by his dad to join an orchestra, he took up cello since the school had unusually few players at the time. One orchestra turned into two, plus a couple of string quartets, until the cello ‘kind of took over’ his life. Feeling frustrated, he told them he wanted to quit the cello for guitar, ‘and they said no.’ Instead, he quit the school altogether, moved to a rival school in Aberdeen (which also meant boarding away from home – he was 14), and continued his studies under guitarist Allan Neave. ‘I remember there was a sign-up list on the school notice board for the orchestra and my name was on there,’ he says. ‘So I crossed it out. And that was the point at which I stopped playing cello.’

Neave, he recalls, took ‘a very hands-off’ approach to mentoring, giving the headstrong teenager a freedom on guitar that he grabbed and ran with. His grand ambitions of ‘creating a 21st century literature’ for guitar wouldn’t develop until later, but the healthy competition he found among his peers at Aberdeen spurred him on. ‘Maybe it was even unhealthy competition, I don’t know,’ he says. ‘I just wanted to learn to play well.’

At the same time he was regularly flying in and out of Austria, where he was studying for a Master’s in guitar with Paolo Pegoraro – or attempting to, at least. Shibe had to give it up, but the Italian’s ‘great integrity’ sticks with him to this day. In contrast to Neave’s relaxed approach, Pegoraro’s mentorship was much more hands-on and direct. ‘There’s a phrase that goes something like, ‘people say performance is a matter of life and death, but I disagree. It’s far more important than that,’ and I think Paolo is somebody who really lives with that philosophy,’ says Shibe. ‘It was important for me to find somebody like him, someone with an almost agonising passion for music. It gave him so much energy.’

By the time he released his debut album, Dreams & Fancies: English Music for Solo Guitar, in 2017, Shibe had lived with some of the pieces for over a decade – many of them originally written for Julian Bream – and knew them inside out, reimagining the phrasing to tease out their hidden colours. ‘There were a lot of things I felt had not been expressed or accurately portrayed in that repertoire, and I wanted to correct that,’ he says. Then, once he had, he put those pieces away, almost certainly for good.

Asked if he ever feels burnout, Shibe comes back to an earlier thought – that no matter how hard it’s been to keep momentum going on a path that so few people seem to really understand, the constant battles have never not been worth it. ‘The work I want to create doesn’t fit into the usual idea of the classical guitar, and it’s not necessarily easy to listen to either,’ he says. ‘But music has always been something that has given me a dignity, in the sense of having space to explore things that improve my artistry and stretch my imagination, and that’s what keeps me going.’

When Shibe begins his Southbank Centre residency this September it will be with that same expansive mindset in tow, starting with a reprise of Doom and the Dooms and an after-show recital of pieces from Lost & Found, softLOUD and other works. Other scheduled performances include the Thomas Adès-composed ‘Forgotten Dances’ and a new work for electric guitar commissioned from German composer Carola Bauckholt, using the different spaces of the Queen Elizabeth Hall as a narrative tool. ‘I feel more liberated than ever with presenting things in different contexts,’ he says, ‘taking away the veil of familiarity to make people see them anew.’ If that’s a hint of what’s to come, the same may well apply for expectations too.