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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. “I love talking about music,” she says. “I never really get asked enough to talk about music.”
For this in-depth conversation with Guardian Live, Morton took us through her Honest Playlist of songs on various themes that have meant something to her, including the first single she bought, Musical Youth’s reggae-pop hit Pass The Dutchie, the song she’d do at karaoke, Michael Prophet and Ricky Tuffy’s Your Love, and a great song to fall in love to (Moments In Love by Art of Noise). 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. “My dad had the most beautiful music taste,” she said, though it was selective: “He had all the Beatles albums, Bob Marley, Don McLean, and that was it.” She recalled a hilarious story of watching her older brother and stepbrother getting into hip-hop – and up to mischief. “They cut the lino out of the back of the kitchen floor because they were breakdancing in town,” she said. Of course: they needed a smooth surface for all the “head-spinning”.
Reggae factored into her musical upbringing in a big way. “I moved around a lot because we were homeless,” she continued, “so we were either in a hostel or I was in care, or I was back with my dad when he was out of prison. 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. “I was an original raver,” she said. 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. “I was a kid, but this was my world. 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. “People talk about things like ayahuasca, or medicinal mushrooms for healing trauma,” she said, but hearing songs like this in the English countryside “was spiritual. 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’m not a trained singer. 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. The producer helped to “open up a world for me where I can revisit my first love, music,” she said.
In 2024, they collaborated on her first solo album under the name Sam Morton, Daffodils And Dirt – an “intoxicating trip-hop debut”. “We started talking, and we had so many connections to do with influences,” Morton explained. “And I said, listen, ‘I’ve been writing songs since I was about 13. Actually, the first song I wrote, I was about seven, and he was like: ‘We’re going to put it on the album’.” She said that working with Russell, both on her debut and with his collective Everything Is Recorded, “is a dream come true, I swear. I’m 49 now. You think you’re done, you think you can’t do the thing that you’ve always wanted to do, and you get pigeonholed, but you can.”
New music is on the horizon, though she’s keeping details underwraps, but for now, she ended by saying she took great pleasure in performing with the “incredible musicians” of Everything Is Recorded. “This is how beautiful and spontaneous music can be,” she said. “Don’t overthink it. Don’t worry about it. It’s the act of doing that fills you with joy.”
