It wouldn’t be until 2019 that Rafferty first wrote a song. “I feel like it was quite late in the game, to be honest,“ he chuckles. Remembering those first moments of a song coming together out of thin air, as a late-teen, small village boy, a world away from those icons that formed him, that’s where the magic struck for Rafferty. Piecing together songs, building his confidence, eventually he began gently singing his songs, specifically when his brother was in earshot. “I'd be pissing about on the guitar and I'd sing daft stuff, and I sang one of my songs and I knew that if I played something that he didn't know he would go ‘What is that?’ if he liked it," he recalls. "I remember singing something and I thought if he reacts to this that means it's quite good so I did it and he went ‘What is that?’ And I went, ‘I wrote it.’ And he went, ‘No, fuck off. What was it?’”

A fondness suddenly overcomes Rafferty. “I look back on it now, and I miss how exciting it was. It gets worse when you start to know how to do some of it. You don’t ever know how to write a song, but when you know your own strengths…you definitely try and get that innocence back, where you don't know what you’re doing because everything's new.” 

Rafferty’s understanding of writing as an art form began back in school. When they were studying , Rafferty was drawn to how his teacher spoke of F Scott Fitzgerald and his process.  “I became more interested in the writer than the book,” he explains. “If that makes sense. At that time, they were all fucking raging alcoholics, but there was a desperation behind what he was writing.” He also recalls discovering Billy Joel’s more regimented approach. “He'd get up in the morning and he would make coffee and he'd go and buy a special writing book, and there was a process behind it, and I fell in love with that side.”

Rafferty was always fascinated by authorial perspective. “I would read things that other writers had said," he tells me. "Like Albert Camus or Hemingway. It sounds fucking pretentious, I hate even saying stuff like that,” he turns bashful. “But when you listen to the way they talk about life and the way they pick apart things, through that I became interested in what their thought processes were as writers.”