On the Sunday afternoon of Green Man Festival in August, Samantha Morton joined me onstage in the Talking Shop tent to discuss her life in music. The celebrated actor and director is currently in cinemas as the scene-stealing Circe in The Odyssey, but she is also a musician. Later that day, she performed on the main stage later with Everything Is Recorded, the supergroup led by XL label boss Richard Russell, who also collaborated with Morton on her 2024 solo album Daffodils & Dirt.
More recently, she voiced her character’s title song on The Odyssey soundtrack. She thinks about playlists often, revealing that she makes them whenever she needs to get into character for a role and used to “carry tapes in my back pocket everywhere I went because I couldn’t have bad music.” Her earliest musical memories are of the record collection belonging to her father, who she lived with as child in Nottingham between foster home placements in the late-70s, early-80s. Of course: they needed a smooth surface for all the “head-spinning”.
Reggae factored into her musical upbringing in a big way. Nottingham is a massive Afro-Caribbean community, it’s a huge Windrush city. We’d be listening to the most beautiful music for the sound clashes, it was everywhere.” In the 90s, her love of soundsystem culture parlayed into a love of rave music.
When her favourite party song rings out, jungle classic Original Nuttah by UK Apache and Shy FX, Morton stands up and starts to dance. Her and her foster mother went “travelling with the free party movement,” specifically the DiY Soundsystem, “that went all over the country having parties.” “We did two summers at Breedon on the Hill,” she continued, referencing the legendary Leicestershire spot where festivals would run for days and days. It’s where I first learned how to make really lovely rice, or talk to people about politics or poetry.” Those formative experiences turned her into “not an original nuttah, perhaps, but an original thinker,” she said.
It’s also where she first heard another transformative track, Papua Nu Guinea by the Future Sound of London. I left the field that day and I felt healed. That music took me somewhere that made me feel loved, [like] a child of the universe.” As a musician herself, Morton found her voice gradually.
I used to do a bit of session singing for Nightmares On Wax and people like that and I used to sing in rave clubs in Nottingham. I wanted to be Dina Carroll so bad. And then I got into a lot of trouble with the police, things happened, and I ended up acting.” She still “wrote songs constantly” but didn’t think there was a possibility of performing them until she met Richard Russell.
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