In Conversation With... Tugboat Captain

Words by Ant Noonan

I sat down with Alexander Sokolow, band leader and vocalist of South London baroque pop sextet Tugboat Captain, known commonly as Sox, outside a café in Nunhead to discuss the difficulties of pursuing art, the cinematic beauty of domestic life, and hope in change. Sox had just arrived home from the first leg of their current tour at just past four o’clock this morning. He’s had maybe three hours sleep but Sox is lucid, reflective and unreservedly candid. All elements found on the latest Tugboat Captain album, ‘Dog Tale’, one of the most touching and intimate releases of 2025.

"I am always reticent about playing in the UK just because of the awful state of the music industry in this country. What's really nice though, is that I still have a residual network of grassroots DIY people who I think do a really good job of looking after artists and making them feel welcome."

In smoking areas across the capital's venues, when you mention the name Sox, heads nod. To be involved in the London music scene as a performer, professional or punter is to know Sox in some capacity. Formerly the promoter of The Cavendish Arms in Stockwell, Sox has been a mainstay in the London scene for a decade. Alongside bandmate Joshua Cobb, Sox runs Ctrl P, a recording studio in the sprawling industrial backroads where Peckham meets Bermondsey; a wood-panelled cocoon nestled among miles of steel. His group, Tugboat Captain, have been one of the few remaining stalwarts of an increasingly hostile artistic landscape defined by low pay, high rent and dwindling venues. This material reality is the bread and butter of Tugboat Captain who despite the challenges around them, create art that emphasises intimacy, domesticity, and love. The beauty of small things.

"We are people who live incredibly precarious lives in London," Sox reveals. "None of us work nine to five jobs. I'm a freelance record producer, which comes with endless anxieties and this record was written at the beginning of that period of time. It's just about my life, and I don't think being me is a particularly unique thing. I feel like a relatively normal person living a relatively normal life."

Recorded in a blisteringly hot August week at Ctrl P, the bands latest offering ‘Dog Tale’ is a record of finding solace among this precarity. Across fourteen tracks, Tugboat Captain lay bare the refuge of domesticity in a world that is perpetually unsympathetic. A gentle series of tableaux beautifying morning pots of coffee, lipstick traces on a shirt and dogs eating your slippers. In essence, it is a record about home.

"It's the whole world building on it and we've thought about that from end to end,’ Sox adds. ‘The artwork on the front embodies it – that's my dog on Hilly Fields and it's London and it's real, and there's literally rats in my fucking basement!" These elements are not invented for attempts at bohemian authenticity, they are true and they are tangible and therein lies the weight behind ‘Dog Tale’. It’s what Sox calls the ‘cinematic moments in the minutia.’

If ‘Dog Tale’ attempts to capture the beauty in the everyday, it achieves this by pointing its lens at the comfort that love and connection provides against the hard edge of change. When I ask Sox about this, he pauses. "I think we all live our lives in this constant state of flux and I think records that I've made in the past have always found people dealing with change and the way we interrelate with each other. We spend our lives with this, just day to day things like trying to figure out how do I deal with the fact that the landlord is going to kick me out? How do I deal with the fact that my sister (Anouska Sokolow of Honeyglaze) has a very successful career or that my friends are off making loads of money? How do we deal with these things?"I ask this back to him, how do you deal with this? He takes a moment."You want to sit in those beautiful moments," he answers. "I think about songs on the record where there are lyrics about things that I think are beautiful, and it's like putting them into a song almost allows them to exist for a little bit longer. Maybe that's what it is. It's like when you paint a beautiful painting of some flowers or something, what you're really doing is you're stopping death, right? You're stemming change. You have a beautiful painting of flowers and that means there's no decay. And I think it's the same thing when there's lyrics about those quiet little moments of love and intimacy, it stops them going away in so many ways."

Amongst the anxieties and confessions tied up in ‘Dog Tale’, it is objectively a record of preserving hope. Through ornate arrangements, impeccable musicianship and heartfelt lyricism, the faith in beautiful things sings forth. These are held aloft through friendship, community, support and love - ideals that are the beating heart of Tugboat Captain and ‘Dog Tale’ as a singular piece of art. 

Tour Dates

5th June - Falmouth - The Fish Factory

26 th June - Portsmouth - Deco

27 th June - Brighton - Folklore

28 th June - Rainham - The Oast

29-June – Oxford – The Tap Social

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