LA ROUX
At a London clubnight full of popstars where Beth Ditto, Mark Ronson and a
Klaxon or two are all milling about, Elly Jackson, still unknown, is quietly
watching the crowd as her debut single is played. “It's the first time I've
really seen a nightclub reaction to it,” she says, sweetly wide-eyed, as the
dancefloor erupts in approval. Quicksand is one of those massive songs, with
a catchy melody made from big clunking synthesizers and drum machines, an
unexpectedly huge vocal that whoops into the firmament like a helium-filled
pillow, and lyrics of heartbreak that pitch the “obsesser” against the
“upsetter”. Think of Prince in When Doves Cry or the Eurythmics doing a
speeded-up There Must Be an Angel.
Jackson, who calls herself La Roux, on account of her red hair, describes her
musical self as “the falsetto in the ghetto”, and co-writes all her
electro-pop tunes with her studio partner Ben Langmaid. At 20, with elfin
features like Tilda Swinton's, La Roux has the face of a changeling but the
brutal determination of a woodpecker. So when we meet again, in a café near
her family home in Brixton, it's amusing to learn that she got her big
industry break thanks to her father's bridge club. (He's a jobbing actor who
graced the cover of Chas & Dave's Rabbit single.)
“Me and my sister have cussed him for playing bridge our whole lives; he's
like a grandmaster or something. So he tells somebody at bridge that I'm
struggling to get a record deal, and she tells her lodger, who tells a
record label contact. My dad goes: ‘Oh so this guy's gonna call you next
week.' I'm like, ‘er, thanks', thinking, oh god it's gonna be some really
s**t old fogey. But the guy calls and says: ‘Hi I work for Polydor!'
Amazing.”
Cue a recession-busting record deal, though she stresses that it wasn't quite
into six figures. “I think you're more likely to succeed if you get slightly
less than a million-quid deal, there's less pressure. I think we got a
really good one, not one where you think, actually, you're being a bit silly
now. If you get six figures you know they're going to expect you to be Katie
Melua.”
It's not that odd that her dad helped though - her music is all down to him.
“He bought me a little guitar when I was 6 and played me loads of blues,
folk, rock'n'roll, ragtime, all sorts of stuff when I was really young. And
then the bigger pop stuff like Eurythmics and Stevie Wonder tracks such as
Part-Time Lover, My Cherie Amour, the ones with synths, and then Wham! and
Phil Collins.” Suddenly she is animated. “Oh my God, mate, me and my friend
were obsessed with Phil Collins, we used to listen to Genesis and I Can't
Dance all day long - just up the road here,” she gesticulates wildly up the
street, her voice speeding uphill at the memory.
Jackson is into big expressions, wears a clutch of big necklaces and has a big
raft of hair sticking out like a coastal shelf (“cab drivers ask me what's
wrong with it”). Yet she is boyish, doesn't wear much make-up or show off
her figure, and has a permanently serious expression. She hated her South
London school - it helped with her dyslexia “but everyone there was really
slaggy, blonde hair, looked like they'd been Tangoed. You wouldn't recognise
me now from the girl I was then.” Sixth-form college was better: she failed
her A levels “but got my life back”. Then she went to warehouse raves with
her sister, who's seven years older, enjoying lots of staying-up-all-night
bonding sessions, and found her mojo.
She had already started gigging with her guitar and her own folkish songs, but
the raves were what really inspired her and Langmaid. “It can be lovely to
see somebody sit down and play guitar at a party at five o'clock in the
morning, but you can just put on a Joni Mitchell album. What gets us going
is loud distorted sounds, faster party music.” Yet she recorded the whole
album with her eyes shut and has been known to cry when a vocal take gets
too emotional. A singing teacher who taught her Italian arias and what they
meant convinced her how crucial it is to put your heart into the words.
Now fame has come calling but she doesn't plan to leave home. “Dad's always
been a house husband, he kind of gave up his career for us. Cooked for me
every night of my life. He's an amazing dad. It was his 60th birthday on
Sunday so we rewrote the lyrics to Chuck Berry's Sweet Little Sixteen, to
sixty, and changed all lyrics like ‘They're really rocking in Brixton', not
Boston. My parents both wept.”
Plus, living with your mum and dad keeps you grounded “because you've got to
come home to them. If you start showing off: ‘Oh yaaah, I went out with
Miquita Oliver and Alexa Chung', they're just gonna say: ‘Who?' You can't be
a w***er.”
www.myspace.com/larouxuk
Sophie Heawood
BROKEN RECORDS
“You know you've got a cool mother when you ask her to pick between the X
Factor version of Hallelujah and the one by Jeff Buckley, and she goes for
Leonard Cohen's original.” Jamie Sutherland, frontman of Broken Records,
wonders if he might have enjoyed an advantage over his peers when it came to
overhearing his parents' record collections. His mother is a GP who “still
gets excited when she hears there's a new R.E.M. album out”, while his
cardiologist dad is “equally obsessive about Mahler as he is about his Bob
Dylan bootlegs”.
Discerning as the now separated Sutherland parents are about their music, none
of that explains quite how their son ended up attempting to make his lyrics
heard over the seven-man landslide of melancholy fiddles and emotionally
charged accordions that is Broken Records. “I don't know if I could even
explain that for you,” laughs the 26-year-old, who dropped out of an English
and philosophy degree at St Andrews to pursue music. “I think what's pretty
obvious from this group is that you don't sound the way we do if you want to
make a handsome living out of it.”
True, but as far as Sutherland is concerned, that's not so important right
now. Broken Records evolved into a proper band when he wrote some songs and
played them to his brother Rory, who then played his fiddle over them. Far
from paying their dues to traditional Scottish folk music, the brothers cite
the Austrialian intrumentalists Dirty Three and the French composer Yann
Tiersen as more kindred spirits. “I like to think I'm pretty open-minded,
but my tolerance for indie bands playing the same old instruments has
reached saturation point. And I can't be the only person that feels that
way.”
It seems that he isn't. Three seven-inch singles have appeared in the past
year, each selling more than the last one. Anyone who witnessed them in all
their combustible glory at festivals last summer probably won't have
concerned themselves too much with the subject matter of Sutherland's songs.
Nonetheless titles such as If The News Makes You Sad Don't Watch It and If
Eilert Lovborg Wrote a Song It Would Sound Like This beg further
investigation.
The former, Sutherland says, is “a song about apathy that ended up sounding
anything but apathetic”. His explanation of the latter is unlikely to
impress anyone at the Fife bus garage where he spent a summer painting
buses. “Eilert Lovborg is a character in an Ibsen play called Hedda Gabler.
It's probably the most pretentious song we have. Some bands can write really
well about getting wasted on a Saturday night. But what can I say? We don't
appear to be one of them.”
myspace.com/brokenrecordsedinburgh
Pete Paphides
Empire of the Sun
In the days when he was the creative lynchpin of the Sleepy Jackson, Luke
Steele didn't really do the mundane. Whether he was mixing make-up and
facial hair when the band made its 2003 debut, Lovers, penning psychedelic,
soft-rock song cycles to God on the follow-up, Personality: One Was a
Spider, One Was a Bird, he has come across as a man content to chase his own
muse. And yet, over time, even flights of fancy can become workaday.
“Being in a band, you play a show, you get in the van, you play another show,
you get back in the van...” sighs the singer from Perth, Australia. “It gets
old. I've been doing it for years, really. I wanted to sidestep that and do
something that's more... epic.”
The tonic? To start a “flamboyant, beautiful and romantic theatre project with
music” with Nick Littlemore, a producer he first met in a Sydney bar nearly
nine years ago. Steele kept in touch with Littlemore, the multifaceted
founder of the dance act Pnau, and the pair started collaborating under the
Empire of the Sun banner.
“From the very first time we met, it was like a light bulb had gone off over
my head,” Steele enthuses. “I remember, we got a cab back to Nick's parents'
house, and wrote a song together the next day.”
For their debut, Walking on a Dream, they wanted to make music that sounded
like “Fleetwood Mac meets Daft Punk”, and the result is a record of easy
elegance shot through with an oddness that's alternately electronic and
ethereal. For a record-buying public won over by MGMT, this could represent
an unusually popular proposition.
“Past records I've done, I've tried to write sermons in the songs, or get
famous quotes into them,” he smiles. "But with this, nothing was
forced. It just felt, the whole time, that God's hand was on it... sort of
leading us.”
But, divinely guided or not, Empire of the Sun isn't just about songs, Steele
insists: they've already been working on a film script, and plan to do
videos for every song on the album. Look up the video for the single Walking
on a Dream and witness Steele and Littlemore wandering around Shanghai
kitted out like sci-fi obsessed Adam Ants - a sartorial choice that extends
to their album artwork (“I'm ‘Emperor Steele',” he explains of his
character. “And there's ‘Lord Littlemore' - he's my disciple, kind of
thing.”)
They even want to make similar clothes available to their fans, so that they
can “build a clan... have our own Kiss Army. It's just going to keep
growing,” Steele promises.
“It's not going to stop at one record. It's going to be a lifetime that never
ends.”
myspace.com/empireofthesunsound
Ben Machell
WHITE LIES
When you dress solely in black, shroud yourself in dry ice during gigs and
write songs with names such as Death and To Lose my Life, it's only fair
that assumptions about you tend toward the gothic.
“But I think,” frowns Harry McVeigh, the singer with White Lies, “that it will
be a struggle for us to convince people that what we're doing is genuine.
People expect us to be very depressed, because our songs always have a dark
subject matter. But if our personalities were constantly like our music we'd
be basket cases.”
Instead, White Lies are three courteous, endearingly earnest 20-year-olds from
Ealing, West London. But what they lack in personal psychosis they make up
for with a knack for noir, mixing icily grandiose rock arrangements and
ghoulish couplets (“A desperate fear flows through my blood/ that our dead
love's buried beneath the mud”) to create soundtracks for a thousand World
of Warcraft sessions.
“The lyrics are all grand stories,” McVeigh insists. “There's definitely a
very romantic aspect to our music.”
With such melodrama in mind, it's perhaps a little odd to learn that the trio
began life as the breezy indie-pop outfit Fear of Flying, peddlers of
“Technicolor pop”, according to one critic. The change came in 2007, when
they made the switch from writing on guitars to writing on keyboards. When
married to McVeigh's grave vocal delivery, the results demanded a fresh
start.
“It was exactly what we'd been waiting for,” says Charles Cave, the band's
bassist and principle songwriter. “There was no last gig, no sweet farewell.
I suppose it would be easy for people to point the finger and say, ‘Isn't
this whole White Lies thing a little contrived? You've suddenly changed your
sound.' But if anything it was Fear of Flying that was contrived, because we
were making music we were not happy with and copying other bands. Now we
make music we want to make.”
Two singles last year, Unfinished Business and Death, each quickly drew
comparisons to any number of Eighties post-punk acts fronted by sonorous men
in eyeliner: Echo and the Bunnymen, the Teardrop Explodes and Joy Division
were regularly cited, shot with the “Hello Wembley!” sonic scope of, say,
the Killers or Editors. This month their debut album, To Lose my Life, will
be released. Replete with 20-piece orchestra and monolithic delivery, it
looks likely to help to reintroduce sun-dodging and black hair dye to a new
generation of sixth-formers.
“I believe we do something very original with our music,” McVeigh says. “There
are obviously links in our music and in the vibe of the band to acts from
the past, especially the Eighties, but we don't reference them as cliché or
parody. Maybe, five years down the line, people will be comparing bands to
us.”
www.myspace.com/whitelies
Ben Machell
PUMEZA MATSHIKIZA
It's strange to think of it now, but this young South African soprano - a
shining star in the current line-up of the Royal Opera House's Jette Parker
Young Artists - was once seriously contemplating an alternative and rather
more prosaic career as a quantity surveyor. “My teachers in high school
didn't want me to study music, because I was their top student in maths and
science,” she explains, slightly apologetically. “So I registered as a
surveyor, but I just couldn't cope with that. Then I went and registered at
the college of music instead.”
Matshikiza grew up in one of the poorest townships in Cape Town. She sang in
choirs at her primary and secondary schools, often taking solo parts as her
voice matured. “But black people did not have the opportunity to study music
at school - they taught us to read music at college. Some of the other
students had done it were they were 8 or 9.”
She soon made up for lost time. She met the South African composer Kevin
Volans, who cast her in his opera The Confessions of Zeno while she was
midway through her studies: she went on to tour Europe with the piece. Once
she had graduated, Volans flew her over to the UK and sponsored her
application to the Royal College of Music; he even gave her a place to stay
in London. The college offered her a scholarship on the spot, told her to
cancel any other auditions and to take a holiday in London instead. “It was
... cold,” she remembers wryly - an impression that didn't improve during
her first year at the RCM. “I cried almost every night, I was so homesick.
And the pace of life was so fast - auditions here and there, people
performing this and that, so I had to move fast.”
But if she was a bag of nerves on the inside, outward appearances - vocal and
visual - were ticking all the right boxes. At student performances she sang
the meaty parts of Monteverdi's Poppea - “Beauty enough to drive any emperor
mad,” reported the Independent on Sunday - followed by the flirtatious
Concepción in Ravel's L'Heure Espagnole, a role she singles out as a comic
highlight.
But no one was more surprised than her when she made it into the Jette Parker
scheme. “I didn't think I would be accepted, there were so many who wanted
to be on it.” Since then at Covent Garden she has shimmered as the Countess
in Capriccio (in a staged excerpt showcasing the young artists), sparkled as
the page Tebaldo in Don Carlo and teased her way through the Sandman's ethereal
cameo in Humperdinck's Hansel and Gretel.
Matshikiza is candid about the challenges she still faces. Working on the
flexibility of the voice is one, diction another (not so much in Italian,
which apparently uses simliar vowels to her native Xhosa, but the tricker
phonetics of French). But, unsurprisingly for the township girl who now
performs at Covent Garden, she's never regretted choosing the music. “People
always told me ‘There's no money, there's no guarantee', but if you love
something you don't think about those things. It was fate.”
Neil Fisher
IMELDA MAY
It's refreshing to encounter a singer who paid her dues playing the tough
gigs, a world away from the numbing blandness of TV talent show pop. Imelda
May used to perform in burlesque clubs. “I'd sing while the girls were on
stage. One of them would take an angle grinder to her crotch and produce a
shower of sparks. One day a spark flew down my throat while I was singing.”
There's still something elementally sexy about May's stage show - where the
spirits of Betty Page and Patsy Cline meet in a blur of leopard-print,
vintage swing and jangling guitars - even if the sparks that fly are
strictly musical.
It's been a big year for the Dublin-born chanteuse, whose break came when
Jools Holland asked her to support his Rhythm and Blues Orchestra on tour. A
showing on Later ... With Jools Holland brought her an invitation to work
with Elbow, plus the sort of compliment that only an elderly heritage rocker
can get away with. May recalls: “David Gilmour said to me:
‘You're very sexy in a trashy way, and I mean that in the nicest possible
way.' So I said, ‘You look like a pimp, and I mean that in the nicest
possible way'.” Last month Universal Music signed her and May's first album,
Love Tattoo, is being aggressively re-promoted.
So that's the hype in place - will it work for May in a crowded field? After
all, there are any number of young singers who can do a decent Sixties soul
turn but only one gets to be Joss Stone. On the evidence of May's first
album of “jazzabilly”, you'd like to think so.
May is not just a 1950s pasticheur: Johnny Got a Boom Boom, the lead single,
is a bracing blast of Stray Cats but with added Irish bodhrán. Knock 123
shows that she can pen a torch song that smoulders brightly. And next time
in the studio she will have the budget to sprinkle her self-penned material
with the fairy dust it deserves. It's a big leap from being someone who gets
the joint jumping by neatly reprising the past to being a true originator.
Imelda May is certainly the former, she might just be the latter. It's going
to be fun finding out which.
www.imeldamay.com
John Bungey
Pete Paphides' top ten picks for a poptastic 2009
KID CUDI
Last summer, Day N'Nite, the Ohio rapper's anthem for the “lonely stoner”,
became a huge track across European dancefloors. While other “backpack”
rappers have failed to cross over to mainstream tastes, the phlegmatic
fluidity of Cudi's metre defies resistance. Expect the new album Man on the
Moon in the spring.
www.kidcudi.com
FLORENCE AND THE MACHINE
With a Brits Critics Choice Award and a theatrical on-stage persona, Florence
Welch is destined for greatness. Surefire hits in waiting include My Boy
Builds Coffins and the sexually charged domestic sensationally detailed in
Kiss With a Fist.
www.myspace.com/
florenceandthemachinemusic
LITTLE BOOTS
There was something borderline subversive about Victoria Hesketh's recent
appearance on Later ... With Jools Holland. She sat at Holland's beloved
piano, placed some sort of primitive digital box on it and tapped out the
opening notes of Meddle. On a stylophone. Charisma and vision in spades,
with a healthy adoration of Sylvia Plath. Her debut album is due in the
spring.
www.littlebootsmusic.co.uk
ANIMAL COLLECTIVE
A Pet Sounds for the new millennium? Merriweather Post Pavilion, the seventh
album by this American quartet, has been gobbling up superlatives on the
blogosphere for some time. For UK fans, the group's arrival here this month
will be their first chance to hear the mesmeric, multi-harmonic wonder of
songs such as My Girls and Summertime Clothes - the febrile, otherworldly
highlights from one of most inventive albums of recent years.
www.myanimalhome.net
6 DAY RIOT
Fronted by Tamara Schlesinger, the recent EP of irrepressibly charming new
songs gave evidence of a band accelerating to greatness. An album,
provisionally entitled Have a Plan, is due in the spring.
www.myspace.com/6dayriot
HEARTBREAK
Anyone passingly familiar with Heartbreak's music will recognise the heroic
sincerity at the core of everything they do. According to Sebastian
Muravchix, “Disco has been suppressed by homophobia and racism since 1979.
The political significance of awakening these ignored voices is huge.” With
Italo-house and glacial Europop set to blaze a trail through 2009, the
pulsating digi-disco of We're Back and Regret should keep Heartbreak at the
centre of the action.
www.myspace.com/heartbreak
PAGEBOY
Fronted by Brooke Gengras, first impressions of Pageboy suggest an
old-fashioned female-fronted rock group with faint overtones of the
Pretenders. Gengras's band is capable enough, but all eyes are on a singer
who seems to have spent a lot of late-night vinyl hours in the company of
soul greats such as Dinah Washington and Irma Thomas. No singles have been
released as yet, but Monica and Brothers and Sisters deserve to be huge hits
ahead of this summer's debut album.
www.myspace.com/brookexmusic
THE BIG PINK
Shoegazing - an early Nineties strain of indie music - is surely due a
comeback and the Big Pink (Robbie Furze and Milo Cordell) could be just the
act to do it. Anyone seeking an entry point into their brand of soporific
euphoria should start with the recent single Too Young to Love.
www.tinyurl.com/4y8c6z
ANE BRUN
The Norwegian law graduate turned singer-songwriter Ane Brun has been refining
her mastery of the hushed autumnal confessional ever since her 2003 debut
Spending Time with Morgan. New album Changing of the Seasons is no
exception.
www.anebrun.com
RUMBLE STRIPS
This Devonian quintet were tipped to do big things in 2006. But on record, the
components that made them such a great live band - the brass section,
Charlie Waller's heart-on-sleeve yelp - didn't quite gel. But recent
sessions with pop Midas Mark Ronson have yielded a new lease of life for the
band, whose second album is now set for release on Ronson's Allido label.
www.therumblestrips.com
