2025)

December 7, 2025 / whenisbins / Leave a comment

Michael Gillette is an artist, a true artist. Over the past thirty-five years or so, as a painter, illustrator, cartoonist, designer and creative mind, he has produced a boggling torrent of material – in range and volume – primarily inspired by pop music and pop culture. His clients over the years have included Saint Etienne, Elastica and the Beastie Boys, and his work has appeared in a wide range of newspapers and magazines ranging from Select and Q to The Observer and the New Yorker. If you’ve bought any or all of Ian Fleming’s James Bond novels since 2008, chances are Michael’s done the cover art. But it’s a challenge to summarise that kind of career in a single paragraph, so in the first instance, I urge you to check out his website, michaelgilletteart.com, and a book of some of his many highlights, Drawn in Stereo, published in 2015.

I always sensed Michael would flourish as an artist. The clues were there early on, when we were at junior school in Swansea. Just watching him draw anything was captivating. He was amusing and thoughtful. At the turn of the 1980s, just as the lure of pop history dragged me in, so he’d seen the BBC2 season of Beatles films, and connected profoundly with that pop history’s ultimate figureheads. From then on, for several years, we discussed pop a lot. I now realise this was one of the main reasons to go to school.

At sixteen, Michael moved to Somerset with his family, and then gravitated to Greater London, graduating from art school in the early 90s, and soon finding his skills, talents and wit in considerable demand. As an obsessive reader of the music press and broadsheet newspapers, I saw his work everywhere – and yet somehow still didn’t quite connect this with the talented friend I’d known early on. For reasons that will be explained in the conversation that follows.

The penny dropped when I found Michael’s website in the early 2000s. By then, he was living in San Francisco. We had a long catch-up chat on the phone, and have kept sporadically in touch ever since – and then finally, this year, we had a catch-up in person, in the pub. Which inspired me to ask him if he’d like to do First Last Anything. I was thrilled when he agreed, and so one day in November 2025, we spoke via Zoom: me in Swansea, Michael in St Louis, Missouri, where he now lives with his family. Coming up, amongst other things: what it’s like to house-share with Aphex Twin, the outcome of a commission for Paul McCartney (yes, Paul McCartney), and living and working as an artist and how to share that kind of experience as a teacher and educator.

—-

JUSTIN LEWIS:

So, to begin at the beginning, what music do you remember early on in your home?

MICHAEL GILLETTE:

With mum and dad… Mum was listening to mostly classical music, Schubert’s The Trout, and Holst’s The Planets, I recall… and maybe a few pop albums. The Beatles ‘Red’ and ‘Blue’ albums, and the Greatest Hits of the Carpenters on repeat. Oh! And the The Beach Boys, 20 Golden Greats with an airbrushed painting of a surfer on the front. The musical equivalents of having a dictionary in the house.

Dad, I was not aware of his musical preferences. He saw Gene Vincent and Eddie Cochran play in Birmingham as a teen but in those days, you were only allowed to be a teenager for about fifteen minutes, right? He packed it away. He listened to Jimmy Young who would have been on Radio 2, or Radio 1…

JUSTIN LEWIS:

He was on Radio 1 in the mid-mornings when that started and then around 1973 moved to Radio 2.

MICHAEL GILLETTE:

So it would have been wall-to-wall Radio 2, that’s what I can remember.

JUSTIN LEWIS:

You’d have Terry Wogan on in the morning.

MICHAEL GILLETTE:

Oh yeah, for sure. And apart from that, it was just the homogeneity of the 1970s TV – Top of the Pops for Goalposts.

JUSTIN LEWIS:

It keeps coming up in these conversations for those of us in that generation. And there wasn’t a lot else, really.

—–

FIRST: ABBA: Arrival (1976, Epic Records)

Extract: ‘Tiger’

JUSTIN LEWIS:

We had this album as well in the house, although I think my dad borrowed it off someone for a while. But we were playing it a lot. But I remember coming to your house at the time and you had this album, along with – if I remember correctly – the first Muppet Show album.

MICHAEL GILLETTE:

Yeah, that makes sense.

JUSTIN LEWIS:

Which we put on. So how did you come to Arrival, then?

MICHAEL GILLETTE:

I think I had it for my seventh birthday, so I must have asked for it. I just think it was in the culture: Look-In, posters on the wall etc.. I’m sure they were on Seaside Special and things like that. Unavoidable, right? Utterly fantastic. And immediately sticky [laughs].

JUSTIN LEWIS:

The people who are ten years older than us thought ABBA were ridiculous.

MICHAEL GILLETTE:

They must be deaf.

JUSTIN LEWIS:

Because, firstly, ‘it’s Europe’ and unless it was Kraftwerk, no pop from Europe was meant to be any good, apparently. And then punk rock happened in Britain, even though ABBA were already making brilliant singles, and the Sex Pistols liked ABBA, for instance. And subsequently, there was a critical revival with ABBA – I remember Elvis Costello saying of ‘Oliver’s Army’… I’m sure you know this…

MICHAEL GILLETTE:

You can hear it – the piano.

JUSTIN LEWIS:

He used to cover ‘Knowing Me Knowing You’, live.

—–

JUSTIN LEWIS:

Towards the end of junior school – so this is 1980, 1981 – I remember two or three massive Beatles fans in our year, and you were one of them, and I remember talking to you about it. So you had the ‘Red’ and the ‘Blue’ albums in your house, but what was the next step for you with Beatles fandom?

MICHAEL GILLETTE:

Aw – BBC, Christmas 1979 – they showed all the films. I remember the Shea Stadium one, and especially Magical Mystery Tour…

JUSTIN LEWIS:

Which I don’t think had been on since the first showings [over Christmas 1967 – once on BBC1 which was still monochrome, and days later on BBC2 which had just begun broadcasting in colour].

MICHAEL GILLETTE:

I remember watching that in my grandparents’ house in my Cub Scout uniform [Friday 21 December 1979, BBC2, 6.10–7.00pm], and looking at it – because there’s a bit with a stripper in it which I was watching via a convex mirror because I thought ‘I can’t just turn around and watch this!’

That Christmas was the introduction, really.

JUSTIN LEWIS:

You having your Cub Scout uniform on suggests we must have been to some Cub event, because we were in the same pack. I’m trying to think what that might have been.

[The other showings of Beatles films that Christmas:

Sat 22/12/79, BBC2 1835–2000: Help!

Sun 23/12/79, BBC2, 1740–1830: The Beatles at Shea Stadium [first showing since 1966]

Mon 24/12/79, BBC2, 1740–1900: Yellow Submarine

Tue 25/12/79, BBC2, 1500–1625: A Hard Day’s Night

Wed 26/12/79, BBC2, 1750–1910: Let It Be]

MICHAEL GILLETTE:

They just made me never want to wear a uniform again. It sparked off something :‘What on Earth is this? How do people get to live like this?’ It was the whole package – to see the comedy and the style. I’ve always had these two things together – visual/musical – and seeing them [together] made a massive difference. No regular job plans after that.

JUSTIN LEWIS:

One of the themes of your career, really, is how you’ve channelled pop music into artwork, but with the Beatles, I feel as if you’ve particularly latched on to the fantasy and mythology over the reality of them. I’m not suggesting you haven’t studied the latter! But it’s about setting the imagination free, and Magical Mystery Tour certainly encourages that. As much as something like Get Back would show them making a record in real time, you get this other side to them which has them having adventures. Like they’re comic book characters.

MICHAEL GILLETTE:

Yeah. Perfect for children, as a gateway. It was the scarcity of it. Even though it was on at Christmas that year, after that, it was gone. Until John Lennon died.

Just before he died [December 1980], I remember you used to write the charts out every week, and I saw that John Lennon was in with ‘Starting Over’, [a brand-new single]. And I was like, ‘What do you mean, John Lennon’s got a new single out?’ When I heard it, I couldn’t equate it with The Beatles, it seemed like a dimmed bulb. So when he died, part of me felt, ‘Oh great, The Beatles are now everywhere!’ I was spending all my pocket money on everything I could get, all that merchandise that appeared! It’s a terrible way to think about it really.

JUSTIN LEWIS:

But he’d also been away for five years, of course, prior to that single, which is a long time. And were you a John fan or a Paul fan?

MICHAEL GILLETTE:

I didn’t know who sang what until later. When I started buying their records, I would look for the albums with the least amount of music that I already knew, to get the best value out of it. The first one I bought was Revolver.

JUSTIN LEWIS:

Funnily enough, the critic David Quantick once pointed out [on the superlative Beatles podcast, Chris Shaw’s I Am the Eggpod] that Revolver (along with the ‘White Album’) is probably the least well represented album on ‘Red’ and ‘Blue’.

MICHAEL GILLETTE:

Yeah, that’s why I would have bought it. ‘She Said, She Said’ – that song really opened things up for me, it’s in my DNA. I don’t think Paul McCartney’s even on that song.

JUSTIN LEWIS:

An enduring Beatles mystery, so many conflicting accounts and fragments of evidence.

MICHAEL GILLETTE:

I read a lot of philosophy and psychology. Partly it’s helped me understand and justify pop’s importance rather than its triviality. Pop’s taken up a lot of my bandwidth!

I learnt a lot from René Girard, who, as an anthropologist at Stanford in the eighties, coined theories around mimetic desire. We’re all porous to suggestions and mimic others. We desire what other people desire. We can also hate what other people desire. This causes tribalism and scapegoatism. Girard’s warnings are important because many Silicon Valley bros, including Peter Thiel, took his class. They saw his cautions as business models. Look at how that’s played out with social media…

Anyhow, I thought, ‘oh, this is kind of what happened to me with the Beatles and pop music.’ The Sergeant Pepper cover – it’s a mimetic map of culture, religion, art, everything. Probably 90 per cent of my interests all connect back to the Beatles. Ultra mimetic.

We both grew up during the high watermark of youth cults [JL agrees]… music with distinct looks and styles…These are explained by mimetic theory too. We were kind of outside it in Wales – couldn’t get the right clothes [laughs], but it saturated those impressionable years for our generation, right?

JUSTIN LEWIS:

Yeah – you’d look at London or Manchester and you’d think, ‘How do you get to go there then, a city where it’s all happening?’ Because nice beaches that there are, amazing coastline, Swansea didn’t really have that kind of magic. Bands didn’t come very often, and it wasn’t easy to go and see people if you were under eighteen.

MICHAEL GILLETTE:

Billy Bragg I managed to see in Swansea, a miners benefit gig [7 April 1985 – Easter Sunday, in fact]. At the Penyrheol Leisure Centre. I saw The Alarm there too [16 November 1987].

JUSTIN LEWIS:

Just before we move on from The Beatles, though I’m sure we won’t move too far, can you tell the story about your Paul McCartney album sleeve commission? Because this is extraordinary.

MICHAEL GILLETTE:

I’d done some work for the Beastie Boys, an animation for their [To the 5 Boroughs] tour (2004/05). They were signed to Capitol Records. The lady I was dealing with there rang me one Friday afternoon, and said, ‘Paul McCartney is coming in on Monday and we’re going to do a “Greatest Love Hits” – for the first time, a compilation of his Beatles and post-Beatles work.’ They were very specific: ‘We want him doe-eyed and lovely, from ’67, ’68…’ I was like, ‘Can do.’ So I worked over that weekend, so confused at how this had happened. Anyway, I did it, and the next week they got back to me: ‘Oh he’s just come in, and no Love album for him, he’s getting divorced.’ So that was the end of it. They said, ‘Oh he says it’s really great, he really likes it!’ They tried to buy the artwork. That was the closest brush with my obsession.

JUSTIN LEWIS:

I knew you as a brilliant artist even at school, but what sort of sleeve art was inspiring you back then?

MICHAEL GILLETTE:

Well, anything to do with the Beatles!, so, Klaus Voorman, Peter Blake and then Richard Hamilton – there’s three. My mum would buy me bargain bin books from WHSmiths in Swansea. One of the first was a Rick Griffin monograph. He was one of the San Francisco psychedelic hippy poster artists – all imagery inspired by music. Another was by the artist David Oxtoby, Oxtoby’s Rockers. He was a contemporary of David Hockney, from Bradford. He did incredible paintings of rock stars. I was twelve and had chicken pox when I got it – after two weeks off school itchily looking at this book, this massive door had opened in my mind. I thought, ‘Oh, this is also possible’ [laughs].

When I eventually visited San Francisco for the first time in 1997, the posters of the ‘60s had acted as sirens. I ended up living just a couple of streets away from where Griffin made most of his famous work in the late sixties. I used to pass his old house every day. He was long gone by then. He died in a motorbike accident in the 1990s, he’d been doing covers for The Cult just previously. He became a born-again Christian in 1969 and moved down to Southern California and became a massive influence in that world. An amazing character.

—–

JUSTIN LEWIS:

I’m going to quote from your excellent collection of artwork, Drawn in Stereo. ‘Art wasn’t my first career choice. I wanted to be a pop star.’ Now, I knew you were a good guitarist, that’s what I remember, but I hadn’t quite realised you had that in mind, so I was quite surprised to read that.

MICHAEL GILLETTE:

Yeah, I wasn’t that good at music. When we moved to Somerset, I did my art foundation year in Taunton. The West Country had a good music scene. PJ Harvey came out of that time and place. In Taunton, bands were everywhere… When I got to Kingston Art School, no-one was interested in forming groups. Disappointing. The thing about getting into colleges that are ‘good’ is people are focused on the job at hand! I wasn’t. I was in a band for the first year… but I just knew: Nope – you don’t got it.

JUSTIN LEWIS:

The thing about being in a band – maybe even if you’re a solo artist – is there’s a career arc you’re expected to follow, and it’s all about compromise. Whereas if you’re an artist, you can surprise yourself. You’ve got the freedom to be inventive. And it seems to me, given what you’ve gone on to do, you’ve just kept changing. You’ve never stuck to one thing for too long.

MICHAEL GILLETTE:

I was reared on that Beatles or Bowie [arc] to keep changing and evolving. The visual side of music is such a rich seam to mine – you can tap into two completely disparate things like, say, two-tone and psychedelia and evolve something fresh. But yeah, you’re right. It’s a control thing, and you don’t have that in a band. I didn’t much enjoy being on stage. I got very nervous, I’d play real fast.

JUSTIN LEWIS:

Were you trying to write songs, by the way?

MICHAEL GILLETTE:

A bit, with bands, but I didn’t have that gift on my own. I thought I would join a successful band at art school. Instead, I graduated off a cliff. At the end of Kingston, in ’92, some student friends knew Richard – the Aphex Twin and we all moved to Islington together. I didn’t know his music at the time, but holy WOW!

JUSTIN LEWIS:

The first time I heard him, that first album [Selected Ambient Works 85–92, 1992]: ‘What the hell is that?’ I was listening to quite a lot of electronic music at the time, but that felt like a real departure from everything.

MICHAEL GILLETTE:

I knew he was groundbreaking – anyone with half a tin ear could tell that. I think the groups I was involved with, during Britpop, were fantastic fun, but there was already so much of the guitar pop canon established. Richard was off the maps making his own worlds.

JUSTIN LEWIS:

Yes, I love Blur, but… a lot of it was good pastiche, but pastiche nonetheless.

MICHAEL GILLETTE:

I can understand pastiche, I personally don’t re-invent the wheel, I just put new rims on.

Oasis… I never saw them as Beatles-like, more Slade in Cagoules.

JUSTIN LEWIS:

But they weren’t going to reinvent themselves with every record like the Beatles did. We’ll come back to Aphex Twin in a second, but I just wanted to ask you about something else that happened in summer ‘92 when you’d just graduated from Kingston. You stuff an envelope of your stuff through the letterbox of Saint Etienne’s house in north London. I know that you’d really enjoyed Foxbase Alpha, their first album, but what made you think of choosing them to approach?

MICHAEL GILLETTE:

When did that album come out?

JUSTIN LEWIS:

October ’91. I remember I bought it the day it came out.

MICHAEL GILLETTE:

Okay, I must have too. In late 1991, I was in Russia on a month-long student exchange, I had it on tape, and listened to it there. That album’s very atmospheric and kaleidoscopic – it fit Moscow. Back in London, I listened to it driving around, it fit there too. ‘Nothing Can Stop Us’, what a fantastic song. Bob Stanley told me they paid £1,000 to clear the Dusty Springfield sample. Money very well spent.

Meanwhile, I fell out of Kingston. I wasn’t ready to leave college, I’d been expecting to do an MA – at the Royal College of Art, but they passed. In that last month of Kingston, I realised I’d better start approaching people. It was almost a desperate thing. I knew Saint Etienne were working on another album. But there was some magic involved, definitely – Foxbase Alpha, finding their home address on the back of the ‘Join Our Club’ single, picking them to stalk … They understood my fandom.

JUSTIN LEWIS:

Yeah, that first album, in the booklet, you’ve got all these photographs of icons, so Micky Dolenz is there, Billy Fury, Marianne Faithfull… Eight or nine of them.

MICHAEL GILLETTE:

It’s another mimetic gateway. The glamour of formica caffs that’s open to all. It wasn’t like the eighties, where you needed a zillion dollars to go into the studio and make some shit, atmosphere-free record; all boxy drums and Next suits with padded shoulders. Instead, it was the longings of the fan, lost treasures and pop theories. That record has a dreamy hiraeth.

I stuffed that envelope through the letterbox, went back to Surbiton for the last couple of weeks college. Next, I went up to Heavenly, their record company, rang the bell. Martin Kelly, their manager, opened the door and said, ‘Oh, they told me about you. Come on up!’ I thought, ‘My god, it’s this easy?! This is great! Is this how it’s going to work?’ And of course it doesn’t often work like that. Magic was afoot. You have to knock though.

JUSTIN LEWIS:

They’ve always been very interested in the contemporary, but shot through with something of the past at the time.

MICHAEL GILLETTE:

Yeah. Reinterpreting the past, excavating and curating. Bob Stanley was like meeting an older cousin who knew everything about pop. So anyway, that’s what happened, and they paid me £2,000 which was a lot of money straight out of college. I didn’t see money like that again for a long time.

JUSTIN LEWIS:

And then you started to do bits for Select magazine, right? Which was a sort of indie-dance version of Q magazine, for those who may not remember.

MICHAEL GILLETTE:

My flatmate Stu’s brother [Andrew Harrison] was the editor of Select. Andrew had a ‘no nepotism’ rule, he couldn’t be seen giving jobs for the boys. But when he found out I’d worked for Saint Etienne, he was like, ‘You must be bona fide.’ So that’s how I got the job doing the illustration for the Stuart Maconie article about Britpop [Select, April 1993 issue].

JUSTIN LEWIS:

And then you did this regular feature called Pop Tarts, every month, and it’s reminded me how much you made me laugh in schooldays. Because you found room for humour and irreverence as well in many of these pieces.

MICHAEL GILLETTE:

Definitely. When I left college, I was a headless chicken, didn’t know what to do, and was thinking, ‘I’m only going to make serious work, try and do stuff for Faber & Faber’. Then I thought: ‘That’s not who I am – humour is really important.’ That’s yet another lesson from the Beatles – they could reach the highest rung of an artform and still be silly. I can’t bear serious pretension – when the scene gets pretentious, I get really uncomfortable. I did fifty Pop Tarts. By ’96 I couldn’t take it anymore, but it was a good calling card for a while.

JUSTIN LEWIS:

That might be the longest-running thing you’ve ever done, then.

MICHAEL GILLETTE:

It probably is, yeah.

JUSTIN LEWIS:

And then you’re doing newspaper commissions, you’re in a lot of the broadsheets in the late nineties, doing accompanying illustrations for things. I found a thing in the Telegraph archive of all places, a culinary feature.

MICHAEL GILLETTE:

I did The Observer for a year, too. I did their back page column called ‘Americana’. Louis Theroux wrote many of the articles. I came back to London this last summer, went to Bar Italia, and there’s a drawing I did – maybe for the Telegraph – framed on the back wall! It was about Italian clothes culture, and I had decided to include Bar Italia. Not a work of genius, but when I saw it, I was thrilled [laughs]. I couldn’t think of a better place to hang!

JUSTIN LEWIS:

How do you feel in general now, seeing work you did thirty years ago or longer?

MICHAEL GILLETTE:

I’m just glad to be alive, and to have been able to make a creative living. Sometimes I have barely any recall of pieces – the Bar Italia picture for example. I’ve made so much stuff, it’s a rodeo schedule. I chose pop media – magazines, books, records, videos – rather than gallery art where ten people might see it. I wanted to be seen. It’s a really proletarian art form. Masses of art for the masses.

JUSTIN LEWIS:

Your stuff did get everywhere, and I saw a lot of it, although somehow I didn’t make the connection that it actually was you for some time. I should explain here that your surname has grown an extra ‘e’ at the end since we were at school.

MICHAEL GILLETTE:

Either Select added that to my name or maybe Saint Etienne.

JUSTIN LEWIS:

Was it in error?

MICHAEL GILLETTE:

It was, yeah. But I wasn’t going to argue with that. I just let it go. Everyone was dropping Es in the nineties. I picked one up.

JUSTIN LEWIS:

So what did you do for Saint Etienne’s So Tough album? You certainly came up with the logo, right? And you designed the cover?

MICHAEL GILLETTE:

I initially did a painting of the 1970s photo of Sarah, which her father took. They went with his photo for the cover, which was the right decision. I did paintings of Bob and Pete for the inner sleeve. I wasn’t match fit yet. I hadn’t advanced much at college. I comped together some logos and they went with one set in a font called Bunny Ears.

JUSTIN LEWIS:

And that was the logo they used when they first went on Top of the Pops, for ‘You’re in a Bad Way’.

MICHAEL GILLETTE:

I was so excited: ‘My logo is up there.’ A little bit of me is on TOTP.

JUSTIN LEWIS:

So, with Aphex Twin, you were living in the same house around this time, 1992–95, three years or so. Was that a creative environment, a chaotic one, or both?

MICHAEL GILLETTE:

Both, definitely. We lived in two different locations. In the first one, he and his girlfriend lived above us. So my introduction to him was through the floorboards, really. He was right above my bedroom, it would be very quiet for long periods of time, when he was listening through headphones making stuff, and then it would be uproariously loud and sometimes terrifying, sometimes beautiful.

Then we moved to Stoke Newington and he had a tiny studio in the midst of the flat, so there was no separation. There were a lot of people coming and going, hangers on, and basic early twenties bad behaviour from young creative types. We all wore each other out because we were so much in each other’s pockets. But everybody was interesting and funny. And for all that people think of Richard, he was not a pretentious human being.

JUSTIN LEWIS:

I always think there’s quite a lot of humour in what he does anyway.

MICHAEL GILLETTE:

Yeah, often puerile!

JUSTIN LEWIS:

How did his remix for Saint Etienne’s ‘Who Do You Think You Are?’ come about? Is it true you were a sort of messenger with that?

MICHAEL GILLETTE:

I asked him, yeah. I hadn’t known him for long – and I wouldn’t say I had the capability to sway him in any way, but he was open to doing stuff at that time. I think he did a good job.

JUSTIN LEWIS:

I find it quite funny he did it, given the choice of song. Because I can imagine him being offered ‘Avenue’ to remix, for instance, but ‘Who Do You Think You Are’ (nothing to do with the Spice Girls by the way, this was earlier!) was a cover version of a song recorded by the Opportunity Knocks-winning comedy showband Candlewick Green in 1974, and the Saint Etienne remake had the potential to be a huge hit. And it’s not a remix you’d expect from a commercial single at all. But then Saint Etienne were great at being leftfield pop stars.

MICHAEL GILLETTE:

I’m sure they were elated with that remix. I don’t think they were looking for a Fatboy Slim banging track.

JUSTIN LEWIS:

And you did some video work for Elastica too.

MICHAEL GILLETTE:

I did two animations for their videos, which was very stressful, and some sleeve work for them too.

JUSTIN LEWIS:

The ‘Connection’ single.

MICHAEL GILLETTE:

I did a painting for that, so I saw them from lift off to stratosphere. Justine [Frischmann] moved to Northern California in the noughties. We wound up living in the same neighbourhood – she helped us out to move there after we left San Francisco, so that was an enduring connection from that time.

JUSTIN LEWIS:

In 1997-ish, you finally got to visit San Francisco because, as I understand it, you had a show on at the Groucho Club in London and lots of wealthy people bought lots of your work, and so you could afford to go. Is that true?

MICHAEL GILLETTE:

Yes, that is exactly what happened. I had a show at the Groucho the same week that Labour were elected – a high watermark and possible end of Britpop – and I sold 14 out of 20 pictures.

JUSTIN LEWIS:

And Jarvis Cocker bought one?

MICHAEL GILLETTE:

Well, you know Ant Genn? He played with Elastica, he’d been in Pulp [and now writes scores for film and TV, including Peaky Blinders]. He bought three, one of which was for Jarvis, but Jarvis ended up paying for all three. I don’t know why. Who else bought one? Graham Linehan, who was then working at Select, Damon Hirst’s manager…’90s Soho.

JUSTIN LEWIS:

Do you ever miss Britain? You’ve been living in America a long time now.

MICHAEL GILLETTE:

Yeah, twenty-four years. Pound for pound, Britain punches harder than anywhere else. Music, comedy, history… I do love it. I feel a bit claustrophobic there now. I wish I’d spent more time visiting antiquity. I guess you always want what you haven’t got, right? Here, I want something pre-Victorian. I want to get my hands on something ancient!

—–

**LAST: THE LEMON TWIGS: ‘Ghost Run Free’ [2023, from Everything Harmony album, Captured Tracks Records]**

JUSTIN LEWIS:

Lemon Twigs have come up before on this series, and rightly so [FLA 24, Alison Eales]. What was it about ‘Ghost Run Free’ in particular?

MICHAEL GILLETTE:

Well, it’s like the offspring of The La’s and Big Star, isn’t it? I’d adopt that kid and bring them up as my own. Just instant ear candy, pressing all my buttons. I’ve played that song a lot – I like the rest of the album, but something about that song absolutely chimes. I was lucky to see them play here in St Louis – people tend to skip over the Midwest. I decided to wear a hat and stand at the back, not to spoil the kids’ fun. But the audience were all older than me! It was almost like a vampiric ritual… the band’s so young, what must it be like for them, looking out at the Night of the Living Gen Xers?

JUSTIN LEWIS:

It’s a breath of fresh air, this album, and while there’s lots of stuff I like at the moment, you don’t tend to get things that are big on chords, harmonies or melodies charting particularly highly. It’s unusually tuneful – the last time they got picked on this, I was referencing early seventies Beach Boys and Todd Rundgren, but now I can also hear Crosby Stills Nash and Young in it, even Roy Wood’s Wizzard.

MICHAEL GILLETTE:

They can all play, the band’s been together a while. They look like they were made in a pop culture laboratory. Live, they’re all swapping instruments. And then you’ve got the two D’Addario brothers, like the Everlys, Kinks or the Bee Gees. I’m going to quote Noel Gallagher here – ‘brothers singing is an instrument you can’t buy in a shop’. Like ABBA, where harmony and melody is absolutely everything. There’s always a chorus with multiple voices, so you feel like you’re included in the song. That’s one of Brian Eno’s pop observations/recipes.

Most songs I really love have got harmonies. Apart from The Smiths – I don’t know why they never had that.

JUSTIN LEWIS:

That’s a good point. I suppose with them, the harmonies are in the guitars.

MICHAEL GILLETTE:

Yeah, but Johnny Marr can sing – he’s got a good voice. Why did they never sing together? I suppose Morrissey won’t share his crisps.

—–

**ANYTHING: JOHN O’CONOR: Nocturnes of John Field [1990, Telarc/Concord Records]**

Extract: ‘Nocturne #1 in E flat Major’

MICHAEL GILLETTE:

I came to a point where pop music was just frazzling me. To quote that ‘Alfred Prufrock’ poem by TS Eliot: ‘I’ve measured my life out in coffee spoons’, whereas I’ve measured my life out in poppy tunes. There just came a time, especially working and reading, for [something else] and hearing these Nocturnes…

JUSTIN LEWIS:

What sort of age were you?

MICHAEL GILLETTE:

Oh, late forties. I’d always listened and worked to lots of soundtrack stuff, John Barry, Lalo Schifrin… But here, just the solo piano is so peaceful. Going from a world where I know everything about a musician, to this, where I didn’t know anything. I just listened without any baggage – a blank slate.

JUSTIN LEWIS:

Can you remember how you came across it, then?

MICHAEL GILLETTE:

I really don’t know. Maybe through YouTube’s algorithms… do you know anything about John Field? [Born in Dublin, 1782, lived till 1837] He had a riotous life. He was basically a rock star. His life would make a great film, Barry Lyndon-esque. Eventually I looked him up, but for years I knew nothing but the music.

JUSTIN LEWIS:

I knew the name, but it transpires he invented the nocturne form. Chopin was a fan. So he’s an innovator.

MICHAEL GILLETTE:

Yeah, I’m no connoisseur. I’ve listened to Chopin’s Nocturnes, I don’t enjoy them as much. Satie’s are good too, but Field’s are like an instant warm bath, reliably calming.

I’ve been thinking about the Aphex Twin this last couple of weeks because one of my students at college was drawing his logo over and over.

‘Oh, the Aphex Twin,’ I said.

‘Do you know that guy?’

‘Actually, yeah, I do know that guy.’

Then yesterday, my screen printer was wearing a homemade Aphex Twin T-shirt, with a picture of Richard in the Stoke Newington house studio. I’ve found folks want to keep the mystique of him intact. We are so overloaded with information. I think the mystery allows for purer engagement.

I feel like that about classical music. I won’t reach the point where I need to know what the third horn player had for his tea and how that affected anything. You know what I mean?

JUSTIN LEWIS:

When we were at school, the running joke about pop trivia knowing no bounds would be ‘What colour socks was Paul McCartney wearing when they recorded “Get Back”’?, and now the Get Back film exists, you can bloody well find out! It’s ridiculous really. I suppose thirty, forty years of reading the pop music press has created this frame of mind, and you can’t do that with everything. One of the nice things about new music now is I often come to things and I don’t know anything about them, who they are, nothing beyond the bare bones. It’s like being eight again.

MICHAEL GILLETTE:

It is. What I see with my children is they’re not interested in context, it’s all delivered scrolling on a phone. Recently, my daughter learnt to play ‘Love Grows Where My Rosemary Goes’ on the violin, and I asked:

‘How do you know that song?’

‘Instagram… How do you know it?’

‘It’s from the late 1960s.’

‘Oh I thought it was new.’

It’s trending audio… stuck behind reels. Folks use trending audio, and the algorithm boosts the post. It’s kinda greasy. My daughter was humming ‘Golden Brown’’, same thing – it’s used on medieval themed reels.

We were groomed [laughs] to be obsessed with pop minutiae. Now, it’s just another bit of content in the feed. They do introduce me to some new music though, Olivia Rodrigo I enjoy.

JUSTIN LEWIS:

Well, we were in the analogue age where knowledge was difficult to come by, so you’d collect fragments of information until you had far too much of it all. [Laughs] That’s what happened.

MICHAEL GILLETTE:

YES! – the scarcity back in the day. So maybe what I’m trying to do with jazz and classical music is to go back to pre-knowledge. I love Lou Donaldson, I love his music, but I wouldn’t know him from… Donald Duck. I know he’s Mr Shing-a-Ling. But I don’t really have any interest beyond listening and enjoying.

JUSTIN LEWIS:

And it makes it more random, you can make your own connections with it. For a long time, we got used to other people shaping music history, and now I guess you can create your own experience.

MICHAEL GILLETTE:

Totally. That’s the big difference. When you used to bring Smash Hits in to school, and we’d pore over it at lunchtime, Mark Ellen was the editor at the time. That Britpop illustration I mentioned earlier… Mark Ellen [by 1993, the Managing Editor of Select] was who I handed it over to. Did the obsession bring that to pass? I suppose what you give your attention to grows.

—-

JUSTIN LEWIS:

You’ve designed [in 2008 and again in 2024] two very differently styled series of covers for Ian Fleming’s collection of James Bond books. Did you read the Bond books as a kid, or did you connect with the films first?

MICHAEL GILLETTE:

My dad had the books, Pan paperbacks from the sixties – great covers. They were stashed away in my bedroom in a little attic space. I read them when I was probably 12, 13… but the films… apart from occasional Bank Holidays, I don’t really remember them being on much. Do you?

JUSTIN LEWIS:

I don’t think they were on TV much before the eighties.

[Note: The first Bond film to be shown on British TV was Dr No, on ITV, on Tuesday 28 October 1975. In January 1980, the UK TV premiere of Live and Let Die attracted 23 million viewers on ITV, still unbeaten for a single showing of a film on British TV.]

JUSTIN LEWIS:

The main thing I remember with Bond was going with my dad and my brother to see a double bill at the Swansea Odeon on the Kingsway [don’t look for it, it’s not there anymore], this would have been Summer ’78. It was Live and Let Die and The Man With the Golden Gun, a double-bill. Two hours long, each of them, that’s a long afternoon. Especially when you’re eight years old. It’s actually a long time since I’ve seen a new Bond film. But I was also wondering to what extent the music of Bond films inspired those designs of yours. Were you thinking a lot about John Barry scores?

MICHAEL GILLETTE:

I do absolutely adore his music, yeah. Because I’m involved in the Bondiverse, I understand people are as passionate for 007 as we are for bands. I understand the draw of Bond. My job as a designer is to translate visually as a composer would do musically. The most enduring Bond thing for me is Barry’s scores, so sophisticated and timeless.

JUSTIN LEWIS:

They really hold up, as do the themes which generally hold up better than the films. Not many duds, surprisingly.

MICHAEL GILLETTE:

With John Barry, it’s the whole score… Things like Petulia from 1967, that’s a great soundtrack, or The Knack, and The Ipcress File. I listen to those more. I’m not an obsessive in the Bond world. And that possibly helps because you can get lost in detail. It helps to take a wider view.

JUSTIN LEWIS:

I was just thinking: have you ever tried to pastiche the Beatles’ album sleeves?

MICHAEL GILLETTE:

The only thing I remember doing, and it’s in Drawn in Stereo, is Oasis as the Yellow Submarine characters for Q.

JUSTIN LEWIS:

Of course, that’s right.

MICHAEL GILLETTE:

But otherwise, for years, I felt like I didn’t have enough skills to represent what they meant to me.

JUSTIN LEWIS:

You were too close to it!

MICHAEL GILLETTE:

But record sleeves remain the same and book covers keep changing. It’s interesting why that is.

JUSTIN LEWIS:

Why does that happen, I wonder? Even modern books do that – often the paperback edition six months later looks nothing like the hardback.

MICHAEL GILLETTE:

Music and visual culture are so locked together, I can’t disassociate them. I can’t imagine 2-Tone without that Walt Jabsco image. With a book, you don’t just stare at the cover for hours while you’re reading it. But a record… think of that bus journey between HMV in Swansea and home, where all you’ve got to look at is the sleeve.

Doing the Bond covers both times… immediately the reaction from some fans was that I’d performed an act of heresy. Changing record sleeves would cause a riot, unless you are Taylor Swift, but like many things about her, she defies logic and gravity.

JUSTIN LEWIS:

What’s your working routine like now? Do you sit at the desk every day, working on something, even if you’re just sketching?

MICHAEL GILLETTE:

Things have changed since COVID. My career has been mostly that of a rodeo illustrator: showing up every day, seven days a week, moving between clients, which went on for a quarter of a century plus. I don’t quite do that anymore. Now, I teach and do more selective commissions, because the world’s changed and I’ve changed. You know what it’s like with deadlines, right? For four years I worked for the New Yorker pretty regularly. I’d be about to clock off on Friday afternoon, and they’d e-mail and that’s the weekend done. For many years of my life, I leant in very hard.

JUSTIN LEWIS:

Are there things that surprise you about the young generation of new artists – in a good way, I mean?

MICHAEL GILLETTE:

I feel that we are fed a story that this generation is ‘hopeless and weak’. It’s been the same call since biblical times. By the end of teaching a class, or seeing my kids create, I have hope for us as a species. I believe in magic. I believe there’s an indomitable spirit of creativity that everyone’s got. We’re born with it, and we’re here to represent it the best way we can. I think that’s why people get unhappy when they don’t have outlets for their creative energy.

JUSTIN LEWIS:

It worries me in this country that young people are now supposed to only foster the talents that are going to get them a job or are going to get them a way of making money for other people rather than what they might actually be good at. And that’s really kicked in, in recent years. Obviously, education and passing exams is important, but what about the imagination?

MICHAEL GILLETTE:

Well, when you saddle people with debt in college, that puts an entirely different slant on it. The two grand from Saint Etienne paid off my student debt. I worked all the way through college to keep it low, but that’s the difference – I could afford a London life, albeit a tight one. Two thousand pounds at a time when my rent in Islington was £55 a week. That kind of maths wouldn’t work now with London housing. The pay for a similar gig in 2025 would be more or less the same, and cover about five weeks’ rent.

I’ve had a career, but it wasn’t encouraged, it was unlikely even then. Most folks who studied illustration didn’t become illustrators. Not saying that being an illustrator is the high bar of anything. We’ve saddled students with middle-aged debt and the anxieties that go with it. It’s unfair. As a teacher, I try to help as much as I can. My teachers were often art school bullies who’d give you a good kicking. Maybe that was the point; maybe if you survived that, you were strong enough for the outside world! But I try to do the opposite, I hope to encourage.

JUSTIN LEWIS:

What sort of age are your students?

MICHAEL GILLETTE:

19, 20, 21. They’re super-young, but the same impulses are inherent. There’s that beauty of openness and that’s why avoid telling them ‘it’s like this’ and ‘you have to do that’. You make it up [for yourself]. I made it up by knocking on Saint Etienne’s door.

JUSTIN LEWIS:

You find a way.

MICHAEL GILLETTE:

You find a way, be creative. Where one person will walk into a room and see nothing but walls, another will find an open door. That’s why I believe in magic – it’s very mysterious how it all works. We’ve known that from all the music stuff we’ve read, the connections and the odd chances of luck.

JUSTIN LEWIS:

Nobody really knows where ideas come from.

MICHAEL GILLETTE:

Hundred per cent, yeah. Writer’s block, artist’s block… who’s doing the blocking? It’s not the universe, it’s the writer and the artist. You can shut it down really easily. [With creativity] it was never encouraged, but now it’s probably worse, it’s harder to freelance. But where there’s a will… I needed a period of time to be able to make mistakes, be slack, be lost and not worry about finances. Talent will out, but it needs support.

JUSTIN LEWIS:

Yes, particularly the process of trying out things and making mistakes. Unless you have particularly wealthy parents now, it’s difficult to do that. And especially when you’re young, you have the energy – you can stay up till three in the morning doing creative things.

MICHAEL GILLETTE:

You get an era where you can batter yourself almost to death and continue working and somewhat thriving. I’ve lived in two of the most expensive cities in the world – London and San Francisco – and managed to survive making artwork. It’s a bloody miracle. For younger people, maybe they’ll think in a different way, and it’s not about London or San Francisco, because those are overrun with investment bankers and tech workers… St Louis, where I’m living now, is different, it’s a post-industrial city, there are opportunities to live creatively.

In London, the generation before us had studios in Covent Garden. Our generation… my studio was in Hoxton Square. Now… Pushing out people who are regular human beings, let alone artists from a metropolis like London – that’s tragic. It’s everyone’s loss. But the fundamental soul of creativity that I see in young people is exactly the same. It’s like a timeless river. That spirit always makes me feel hopeful.

————-

All images in this piece (apart from my usual FLA header and cassette inlay) are (c) Michael Gillette. Thanks so much to him for allowing FLA to include them.

Much more on Michael Gillette at his website: https://michaelgilletteart.com

You can order the book directly from his website, here: https://michaelgilletteart.com/products/drawn-in-stereo-book

You can also order art prints for Michael’s James Bond book cover designs (pictured here): https://michaelgilletteart.com/collections/prints

You can follow Michael on Instagram at https://www.instagram.com/michaelgilletteart/

——

FLA Playlist 35

Michael Gillette

(For the time being, this site and project uses Spotify for the conversation playlists, but obviously I disapprove that Spotify doesn’t pay artists and composers properly, and other streaming platforms are available, as are sites to buy downloads and buy recordings. For consistency, you can also listen to the selections via YouTube (where available), and links are provided in each case, below.)

Thanks to Tune My Music, you can also transfer this playlist to the platform or site of your choice by using this link: https://www.tunemymusic.com/share/5yuhEgpQ6o

Track 1:

CARPENTERS: ‘We’ve Only Just Begun’:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=xeBoRF5tgDo&list=RDxeBoRF5tgDo&start_radio=1

Track 2:

ABBA: ‘Tiger’:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=htziQt0pCAQ&list=RDhtziQt0pCAQ&start_radio=1

Track 3:

THE BEATLES: ‘Baby You’re a Rich Man’:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=i5m-sgtwFck&list=RDi5m-sgtwFck&start_radio=1

Track 4:

THE BEATLES: ‘She Said, She Said’:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=NZOBWYHgZjw&list=RDNZOBWYHgZjw&start_radio=1

Track 5:

BILLY BRAGG: ‘Walk Away Renee (Version)’:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=iHrFkSeLukA&list=RDiHrFkSeLukA&start_radio=1

Track 6:

APHEX TWIN: ‘Xtal’:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=2tOutF8B3f8&list=RD2tOutF8B3f8&start_radio=1

Track 7:

SAINT ETIENNE: ‘Nothing Can Stop Us’:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=RAZUwvYqhpg&list=RDRAZUwvYqhpg&start_radio=1

Track 8:

LEMON TWIGS: ‘Ghost Run Free’:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ewKdcUl3J7c&list=RDewKdcUl3J7c&start_radio=1

Track 9:

LOU DONALDSON: ‘One Cylinder’:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=F8RCGr8FEt0&list=RDF8RCGr8FEt0&start_radio=1

Track 10:

JOHN BARRY: ‘The Knack (Main Theme)’:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=k3utY_mJjK8&list=RDk3utY_mJjK8&start_radio=1

Track 11:

JOHN BARRY: ‘Petulia (Main Title)’:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=qhKQ1UT-MjE&list=RDqhKQ1UT-MjE&start_radio=1

Track 12:

JOHN FIELD: ‘Nocturne #1 in E Flat Major’

John O’Conor:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=2YJXgmLXTew&list=RD2YJXgmLXTew&start_radio=1

FLA 34: Emma Anderson (23/11/2025)

November 23, 2025December 5, 2025 / whenisbins / Leave a comment

As a first-year university student, one of the first songs of the 1990s I cherished was ‘De-Luxe’ by the London-based quartet Lush, who were signed to the independent record label 4AD. I was in the habit of taping Annie Nightingale’s Sunday night programme on BBC Radio 1 at the time, and I’m pretty sure that’s where I first heard it. It opened their first EP, Mad Love, and I quickly bought that on CD. I wasn’t a particularly big follower of indie-rock at the time, though I liked The Sundays and Pixies and the Cocteau Twins, but there was something about the sound of Lush that drew me in.

Lush – co-founded by Emma Anderson and Miki Berenyi, and completed by bass guitarist Steve Rippon (succeeded by Phil King from 1992) and drummer Chris Acland – had already released a mini-album called Scar (1989), and they went on to issue a compilation of their early EPs (Gala, 1990), and three full-length albums: Spooky (1992), Split (1994) and Lovelife (1996). A relentless touring schedule, and especially the unexpected and devastating suicide of Chris Acland in October 1996, hastened the end of the group. Emma Anderson formed a new duo in the late 1990s, Sing-Sing, with singer Lisa O’Neill, and made two (in my opinion) undervalued albums. But in the past few years, Emma has re-emerged in her own right with the terrific album Pearlies (2023).

Emma and I connected via social media a while back, and I had wanted to talk to her for this series for some time, especially after I heard Pearlies. I was thrilled when she accepted my invitation. A new reissue of Lush’s Gala in November 2025 seemed an opportune time for us to chat at length on Zoom one Sunday about first, last and wildcard recordings, and it was in that same month that 4AD uploaded Phil King’s film of Lush footage, Lush: A Far from Home Movie, to YouTube. The 35-minute film is fondly dedicated to Chris Acland’s memory.

—–

JUSTIN LEWIS:

I always start with this question. I’m aware you had a slightly unusual upbringing, which we’ll come to, but what music did you have in your home early on?

EMMA ANDERSON:

This was probably before we owned a record player, but I had one of those mono tape recorders with the buttons at the front which were probably really meant for recording speech, and I used to tape stuff off the telly.

JUSTIN LEWIS:

Oh, I used to do this.

EMMA ANDERSON:

I think a lot of people did!

JUSTIN LEWIS:

Before there were video recorders.

EMMA ANDERSON:

And your parents would walk in and start talking over it, and you’d go, [loud whisper] “Be quiet!”. But I used to tape stuff mainly off Top of the Pops and the Eurovision Song Contest.

JUSTIN LEWIS:

The Eurovision Song Contest, prior to things like Live Aid, was the most amount of music you’d see on TV in one go, really. You’d get three hours once a year. And it was also television from another country, quite often, there didn’t seem to be a house style for Eurovision like you tend to get for it now.

EMMA ANDERSON:

I also liked Eurovision because as a kid I loved geography, maps and stamp collecting and the rest of it [laughs] so Eurovision kind of fed into that. I collected all these cassettes of Eurovision which I used to listen to repeatedly.

JUSTIN LEWIS:

I had a black and white TV in my room, from about the age of eight – an extravagance, I soon discovered – and am I right in saying you did too?

EMMA ANDERSON:

Yes, and the reason for that was, my dad was the secretary of a gentleman’s forces club in Mayfair and the flat we lived in was part of the building. Needless to say, it was a strange place for a child to grow up. We moved there when I was about three and we left when I was about fifteen so that’s quite a big chunk of my childhood. The flat came with the job and in the same building were hotel-like rooms which members could stay in, and all these rooms had rental TVs in them. So, my parents didn’t pay for the two rental TVs in our flat, they were paid for by the club as part of a deal, I guess.

JUSTIN LEWIS:

The reason I asked about a TV in your room was because of the possible relationship with the technology. The reason I had one… we weren’t rich, but I was a complete TV obsessive in those days, and it was a window on the world, and I did learn a lot from it.

EMMA ANDERSON:

I did watch a lot of TV and I was an only child as well so I consumed a lot of not just pop music but culture and films… I was quite unsupervised too so was even able used to sit up late and watch horror films which were on quite a lot in the 1970s!

The other thing was, because we lived in the club, and a lot of the members didn’t live in London, they’d come in from the Home Counties and they’d visit our flat and sit and a have a drink in the living room with my parents. So another reason to keep me occupied in my room was because there were constantly guests around and my parents wanted to keep me away from ‘the adults’.

It was an unusual, atypical upbringing. I didn’t live in a normal house in a normal street in somewhere like Dorking, if you see what I mean.

—–

EMMA ANDERSON:

Going back to ‘tech’(or lack of it!), I do remember having a toy record player when I was quite small, I think an aunt might have given it to me. It only took 78s and it came with its own records and the two I remember were ‘Tea for Two’ and ‘Doing the Lambeth Walk’! [Laughs]. It was not a technological marvel; it had one of those massive needles. But then, we got a ‘real’ record player (sort of) – my mother was quite a heavy smoker, she smoked Embassy cigarettes, which came with these little vouchers in the pack. She saved all these up in a jar, and there was a catalogue you could from and ‘pay’ with the vouchers so we got the record player like that. I must have been about ten.

To be honest, my parents weren’t massively into music; they were from a different era. My dad was born in 1919 [laughs], and my mum was born in 1928. He was forty-eight and she was thirty-eight when I was born both of which, of course, these days doesn’t seem that old…….

JUSTIN LEWIS:

…But in those days, it would have been.

EMMA ANDERSON:

Yes, and I was adopted too (that’s another story for another time). Both my parents had been married before they were with each other and their heydays were from a time before popular music as we know it now, I suppose. I think there’s a watershed time where people’s teenage years and twenties were before the Sixties and The Beatles and so on.

JUSTIN LEWIS:

Well, in your dad’s case, it would have been before the word ‘teenager’ even existed. That wasn’t a thing.

EMMA ANDERSON:

Exactly. They did buy some records when we got this record player, though: my dad bought some Edith Piaf. He liked classical too classical but popular classical – eg A Little Night Music by Mozart…

JUSTIN LEWIS:

I mean, Radio 2 in the Seventies – and Radio 4, actually – would play popular classical music.

EMMA ANDERSON:

Yes, obviously they catered to a different demographic then. My mother also bought some records, She loved Frankie Vaughan but also The Ink Spots and Nat ‘King’ Cole’… Those are the ones I really remember.

—–

FIRST: LA BELLE EPOQUE: ‘Black is Black’ (1977, single, Harvest Records)

JUSTIN LEWIS:

It’s occurred to me there was this period in the mid-to-late 70s when there are these disco remakes of 60s hits. That version of ‘Don’t Let Me Be Misunderstood’ by Santa Esmeralda, and ‘Painter Man’ and ‘Sunny’ by Boney M, and even ‘Macarthur Park’ by Donna Summer, like quite a European disco take on 60s music. And then there’s this.

EMMA ANDERSON:

I didn’t know, until I was going to do this interview, that ‘Black is Black’ was a cover. And the song was only about ten years old at the time – you know if you had someone today doing a cover from something in 2015, it wouldn’t feel that long ago.

JUSTIN LEWIS:

Yes, They were Spanish, Los Bravos who did the original of ‘Black is Black’ – although it was Johnny Hallyday who had the big hit in France with it, so maybe La Belle Epoque took their cue from that version.

EMMA ANDERSON:

There was a record shop near where I lived, and I bought this there. What else from that time? Baccara, ‘Yes Sir I Can Boogie’, ‘Silver Lady’ by David Soul.

JUSTIN LEWIS:

This is all literally from the same few weeks, autumn ’77.

EMMA ANDERSON:

Oh ha – maybe I bought them all at the same time. And then – slightly later I remember buying ‘Northern Lights’ by Renaissance and we had the Grease soundtrack album. This feels like quite a strange thing for a ten- or eleven-year-old child to have, but I bought a Gladys Knight and the Pips album, Still Together.

JUSTIN LEWIS:

She’s quite underrated, I think, she’s got a brilliant voice. Sifting through all the interviews you’ve done over the years, I was reading how you started reading Smash Hits, around the same time I did, in the very early 80s. And it feels odd to think now that, in those days, they had a section on indie, the independent charts, they’d write about people like Crass.

EMMA ANDERSON:

Yes, the first one I bought [25 June 1981] had Kirsty MacColl on the cover and it had a feature on Crass, a review of Cabaret Voltaire. I was obviously into pop, but I was fascinated by the indie page as well. I am planning on seeing Cabaret Voltaire live next year, funnily enough.

JUSTIN LEWIS:

I inherited my first several issues of Smash Hits from my cousin Philip, who’s five years older than me, he happened to be getting rid of them, and I asked if I could have them. I think the earliest issue had the Undertones on the cover [26 June 1980], and there were all these references in it to Joy Division, because Ian Curtis had just died, but it took a while to work that out because I wasn’t a John Peel listener or anything like that.

EMMA ANDERSON:

It’s funny you mention The Undertones because in 1981, getting into more ‘alternative’ music (though still in the Top 40) really started for me and I bought ‘It’s Going to Happen!’ by The Undertones, ‘Treason’ by The Teardrop Explodes, ‘Sound of the Crowd’ by The Human League, and ‘Everything’s Gone Green’ by New Order. And I can tell you where I got ‘Everything’s Gone Green’ from – we lived on Half Moon Street, just off Piccadilly, and at the Curzon Street end there was a newsagent’s which sold ex-jukebox singles really cheaply – you could tell because the middle was knocked out. I had no idea who New Order or Joy Division were at this point in time. I had just heard the song in the Top 40.

JUSTIN LEWIS:

At what point did you start to think, ‘Maybe I could do this? Maybe I could be in bands?’ Because you were going to gigs, right?

EMMA ANDERSON:

The first gig I went to was Japan, supported by Blancmange [Hammersmith Odeon, 23 December 1981], and then The Teardrop Explodes…

JUSTIN LEWIS:

Was that when the Ravishing Beauties were supporting?

EMMA ANDERSON:

That’s right, with Virginia Astley – and I remember Julian Cope poured honey all over his body in the encore. There was also Soft Cell. Echo and the Bunnymen – but I also saw Haircut One Hundred and Duran Duran, the more poppy end. ABC, I saw. My friends went to see Spandau Ballet, I had a ticket for that, but I was ill and I couldn’t go and I was gutted.

JUSTIN LEWIS:

And this is still early 1980s, before these groups are playing arenas. They’re playing theatres.

EMMA ANDERSON:

I saw Duran Duran, Japan, ABC and Haircut One Hundred at the Hammersmith Odeon. Teardrop Explodes, Soft Cell, Bunnymen, U2, were all at the Hammersmith Palais.. I saw Simple Minds at the Lyceum… these were fairly sizeable venues but compared to where some of them they went on to play… quite small, yes.

JUSTIN LEWIS:

I can’t bear arena gigs, for the most part.

EMMA ANDERSON:

No, I can’t. At these gigs, we’d run down to the front of the venue when the doors opened and so we’d watch the whole of the support band. But you were asking ‘What made you think you could do this?’ Later on, I started to go to a lot more gigs in the back of pubs – and that’s when I started to think about that. Because it was a more DIY/post-punk environment, and you started to get to know people, especially in London when you’d get used to going to a huge number of gigs. Because it wasn’t glossy, the stage might only be a few inches off the floor. There was quite a community and in that era of late 80s London, people were squatting, a lot of people in bands were signing on – you could live in London cheaply. Camden and Notting Hill even were full of squats – hard to believe now, obviously. East London too – Hackney, Stoke Newington – and Brixton as well. But in that environment, you could pick up a guitar, bass or drumkit, and have a go. It’s a lot harder now.

JUSTIN LEWIS:

Oh god yeah. I don’t know how anyone gets started now.

—-

JUSTIN LEWIS:

Before you and Miki Berenyi formed Lush, around 1987 you were both in separate bands playing bass, right?

EMMA ANDERSON:

Yeah, they were both kind of rockabilly/garage groups (before what ‘garage’ means now!). I was asked to join The Rover Girls. They’d done a lot of gigs without a bass player already then I think they thought, ‘actually, I think we need one’. We did a few covers in that band (actually it all bordered on cabaret a little) – we did things like ‘Folsom Prison Blues’ and ‘These Boots Are Made for Walkin’’. One of our original songs was called ‘I Fell in Love with a Kebab Man’ – which I had no hand in writing, I should add! It was a bit of fun really.

When we formed Lush originally, we were a five-piece. As you probably know, there was another singer, Meriel [Barham, who later joined Pale Saints]. We played a lot of gigs on the London circuit, supporting a lot of people, and then after Meriel left, the songwriting changed a bit.

JUSTIN LEWIS:

It feels like things started to happen quite quickly after ’88, you get signed to 4AD, you get to make a mini-album [Scar] in ‘89.

EMMA ANDERSON:

Personally, I don’t think it happened particularly quickly. I mean, you heard of bands like Flowered Up who played two gigs or whatever who ended up on the cover of Melody Maker. I do consider that we did pay our dues. We played in a lot of pubs supporting a lot of bands!

JUSTIN LEWIS:

I suppose I was just thinking in terms of how the priorities of the independent sector change completely during the career span of Lush (1988–96) because the definition of ‘indie guitar music’ changed. And it must have been a thrill to sign to 4AD because I know you were a fan of a lot of the bands.

EMMA ANDERSON:

Oh, I was a massive fan. It’s not a secret!

JUSTIN LEWIS:

And the sleeve art for 4AD releases just looked so special. I’ve never quite understood when people say, ‘As long as the music’s great, that’s all that matters’ because something on 4AD – or Factory come to that – always looked so special. It looked like something you wanted to own.

EMMA ANDERSON:

Yes, they were pieces of art.

JUSTIN LEWIS:

Were the Lush sleeves all Vaughan Oliver’s work?

EMMA ANDERSON:

Yeah, there was no collaboration with the band. You didn’t collaborate with Vaughan Oliver! It was fine to let him get on with it [Laughs]

JUSTIN LEWIS:

So did he design the sleeve not knowing what the record would sound like?

EMMA ANDERSON:

No, he was definitely inspired by the music because I remember that the scratches on the Scar sleeve were there because of the kind of raw abrasiveness in the guitar sounds. And then later, Spooky, which Robin Guthrie produced, was a much rounder, softer sound. And the sleeves reflect all that. Lovelife, Chris Bigg did that one (I don’t know if Vaughan liked Lovelife much).

JUSTIN LEWIS:

Looking back now, you and Miki did write certain songs together, but most of the songs are credited either to you or Miki as solo compositions. How did you get started as a songwriter?

EMMA ANDERSON:

When Meriel was in the band, we did a demo which we used solely to get gig at that time.. I wrote a song, Miki wrote a song, Meriel wrote a song, and I think the last one on the tape was ‘Sunbathing’ which was the only one that then made it on to a later Lush release.

JUSTIN LEWIS:

The Sweetness and Light EP, right?

EMMA ANDERSON:

Yeah, I remember when we were making that [1990], ‘Oh god, we need another B-side!’ [Laughs] So we went back to that demo tape, and since then, you know… Jenny Hval has covered it, it was used in a Canadian TV series a couple of years ago… Of the other songs on that first demo, Meriel’s was actually the best! After she left, I did start writing differently. I don’t really know what happened, but something clicked where I did start writing better melodies and structures. How and why, I don’t know.

JUSTIN LEWIS:

When you look at the back catalogue of Lush, do you have a favourite album, one that you’re most proud of?

EMMA ANDERSON:

I can tell you the one I’m least proud of is the last one [Lovelife, 1996]. I don’t like being negative about our work, really, but I don’t think that one’s stood the test of time as well as the others. I think it lost something in that whole [mindset] of ‘Let’s go back to basics and get rid of the effects pedals.’ And obviously that whole Britpop influence was going on at that time. The only track I can listen to really off that album is ‘Last Night’, but that had a completely different approach as I was into trip-hop at the time and it shows there. Steve Osborne, who worked with Paul Oakenfold, mixed it so it has more of the dance, trip-hop vibe. I do love the outro of that song, actually.

JUSTIN LEWIS:

Quite apart from the terrible tragedy that happened with the loss of Chris shortly afterwards, I wonder if one problem Lush faced after the shoegazing scene was you never seemed to be considered part of subsequent scenes, which always puts established bands at a slight disadvantage. Because the music press had this idea of what category everything should be in. And also because 4AD put out two singles on the same day (‘Hypocrite’ and ‘Desire Lines’ in 1994)…

EMMA ANDERSON:

Oh yeah, that wasn’t our idea.

JUSTIN LEWIS:

…which may have seemed like an inspired idea when they’d done it with Colourbox [‘The Official Colourbox World Cup Theme’ and ‘Baby I Love You So’, both released on the same day in 1986], but the indie world was entirely different back in the eighties.

EMMA ANDERSON:

That idea came from our American A&R man, Tim Carr, and 4AD ran with it; there was a feeling that we weren’t going to get into the top 40 anyway, so it was, ‘Let’s do something a bit weird and sabotage things’ – why?!! But we had been in the Top 40 (‘For Love’, January 1992) but it charted quite low, and while ‘For Love’’s a great song, it was released on 30 December [1991], and it was a very quiet week.

But the other thing [by ‘94] was that almost everyone in the industry around the band was so obsessed with the idea of breaking America.

JUSTIN LEWIS:

Did you have a profile in America particularly? I know you had records coming out there, and ‘De-Luxe’ had got on the alternative rock radio playlists over there. Maybe it’s my age, but I feel very tired when I read about bands touring America for months on end for not particularly enthusiastic audiences.

EMMA ANDERSON:

We were signed to 4AD for the world and they had a licensing deal with Warners/Reprise. It was great that Warners were behind us there, and we toured a lot, and did things like Lollapalooza which, actually, I really loved. I had a great time. But, alas, I do think America took its toll on the band mentally and physically. Having said that, the audiences were actually very enthusiastic and we did build up a very good fanbase there, which exists to this day. But we didn’t sell a million albums, much to the disappointment of management/labels etc.

JUSTIN LEWIS:

I was quite surprised to find out quite how much touring in America you did.

EMMA ANDERSON:

Part of the problem, I think, was the band members had different ways of approaching this. We all enjoyed different aspects of touring (and to be honest of the whole business and being in a band anyway). I personally wasn’t particularly into these long tours and endless weeks away from home. One tour was OK but then not long after came number two and then number three. Miki had spent a lot of time in America, her mother lived there, so she was much more used to being in the US. I think Phil quite liked it; he had never been to America before being in Lush. I didn’t hate it but, I have to be honest, it was gruelling. On the last album, we were doing this tour of shows put on by local radio stations, all these gigs where the punters got in for free. They were throwing bottles and shoes at the stage and when I told management that morale in the band was low, they said, ‘You’re only here so we can get the radio station to play your record.’ But you’re just thinking, ‘Is this really why I wanted to do music?’

JUSTIN LEWIS:

You were doing a lot of TV back in the UK, round about Lovelife time. Is it true you did Live and Kicking one Saturday morning?

EMMA ANDERSON:

That was one of the better ones! We had a very good TV plugger, the late Scott Piering. We did Top of the Pops [for both ‘Single Girl’ and ‘Ladykillers’] … Big Breakfast with Zig and Zag, twice. This Morning with Richard and Judy, we went up to Liverpool to do that. Then there was Pyjama Party [co-hosted by Katie Puckrik and a young Claudia Winkleman], Hotel Babylon with Dani Behr, Dear Davina… We did some quite trashy stuff around the Lovelife time.

JUSTIN LEWIS:

I’m surprised I don’t remember seeing you on these, I used to watch quite a lot of night-time TV back then.

EMMA ANDERSON:

We did All Rise for Julian Clary [courtroom mock-up variety show for BBC2]… him and Captain Peacock [Frank Thornton] from Are You Being Served? That was Phil’s moment of ‘How low can we get with this?’, that show. So embarrassing.

JUSTIN LEWIS:

In what capacity were you doing that?

EMMA ANDERSON:

Basically, there was this young girl – about 12 years old. She’d collected a load of NMEs, a few hundred probably, and somebody had chucked them out by mistake. She was so upset that either she or somebody else wrote to this programme who obviously then contacted the NME who got together all these [replacement issues]… And our role was to come on and present this girl with all these NMEs. That was it.

—–

LAST: TAYLOR SWIFT: ‘The Fate of Ophelia’ (2025, single, Republic Records)

JUSTIN LEWIS:

You mentioned this as something you wanted to bring up.

EMMA ANDERSON:

I’m going to make a massive admission here: I don’t really consume a lot of new music. My finger is not on the pulse of new releases. But this obviously came to my attention because you can’t really get away from it. I don’t really have an opinion on Taylor Swift – I never understood why she was so massive, but I’ve also been intrigued by why she’s so massive. But I do think this single is alarmingly good. I cannot get it out of my head. I go to bed singing it, and I wake up singing it. The video is amazing, and then of course on Instagram when you look at one thing – in this case ‘the dance’ – the algorithm sends you all these clips, so I’ve now watched about fifty different people all doing ‘the dance’. And I’ve realised this really is quite a phenomenon.

So then I looked into the background of it, because I’m always interested in the production side, and it’s Max Martin and Shellback who’ve both worked with Britney Spears amongst others. And then, I started breaking down the actual song in my head. So there’s a chorus, but then as I said to my daughter, ‘It’s like there’s a post-chorus.’ And she said, ‘Of course there’s a post-chorus.’ My daughter’s been getting into K-Pop and that’s got post-choruses. I thought I knew about pre-choruses. But then I realised, actually, that there’s a song I’ve got on my Pearlies album called ‘The Presence’ and that’s got a post-chorus on it!

So I think I brought this Taylor Swift song up because it’s just made my brain ticking about lots of things. It’s quite fascinating, and so I am starting to understand why she’s so massive.

JUSTIN LEWIS:

There’s another thing I was going to say about Taylor Swift which I find a bit off-putting. With her previous album, two hours after that ‘dropped’, there was another album that came out immediately.

EMMA ANDERSON:

Oh, I was vaguely aware of that, yes.

JUSTIN LEWIS:

So what they said this time was: With the new album, no extra songs after it comes out, this is the album – only to then bring out lots of limited edition formats, each with one extra alternative version and demo of the existing songs on the album, which technically means there were no new extra songs, but it did mean that all the fans felt obliged to shell out for all these extra formats – and especially given her fans are often really young… I find it all a bit cynical.

EMMA ANDERSON:

Yeah, as much as I think aspects of her are great… that whole re-recording her back catalogue. You can slag off your original record company, but they put the work in in the early period. Is that taken into account? Without the work they put in, would you be able to do this now? But I get the idea that the fact they own your material is obviously quite an anathema to a lot of people, especially if you become huge (as she has done).

—–

JUSTIN LEWIS:

I wanted to ask you about Sing-Sing, the duo you formed after Lush broke up. Was this a way of trying to do something totally different from Lush?

EMMA ANDERSON:

After Chris’s death [Oct 1996], that whole year was just… awful. Even before Chris died, it’s not a secret, I wanted to leave the band. My way of coping after, in a way, was carrying on, and quite quickly start writing some more songs. But at that stage, I didn’t have a singer and I didn’t think I could sing.

JUSTIN LEWIS:

I mean, obviously, you were singing on the original Lush records.

EMMA ANDERSON:

Backing vocals, yes, which is completely different from doing lead which I had never really done at all. In fact, around 1997 I did some demos which 4AD paid for as they were interested in hearing new material and Pete Bartlett – our soundman who’d produced Lovelife – produced them in his flat. I gave them to [4AD founder] Ivo, and he said to me [laughs], ‘You can’t sing, Emma’. (Looking back, though, this is funny because Ivo actually really loves Pearlies, my solo album, and he absolutely thinks I can sing now. This actually means a lot to me as I have really obviously always valued his judgement.) Anyway, then myself and the remaining Lush members got dropped so I went looking for other singers. I found Lisa [O’Neill] via a couple of ways. She worked at an animation company called Bermuda Shorts with a really old friend of mine, Bunny, who I knew from school, but she also went out a guy who shared a flat in Camden with a guy that I was going out with. PLUS she’d also sung on the hidden track on a record by Mark Van Hoen’s project, Locust, an excellent album called Morning Light (1997). PLUS another connection: my friend Polly worked at a PR company called Savage and Best – they did Pulp, Elastica, Curve etc. John Best gave me a promo cassette of Morning Light. So, I thought, ‘Maybe this is meant to be’ – and we started working together.

The other thing about Mark Van Hoen was that he was an electronic musician and a whizz-kid programmer. After being in a traditional band set-up with a drummer and a bass player etc, for me, that was so refreshing. All the records I had made before, everything recorded had been recorded on to tape but this way you could just sit around the computer and it was BANG – it all got done very quickly and smoothly. But I still wrote songs in exactly the same way, and Lisa wrote songs too.

JUSTIN LEWIS:

Did you write together in Sing-Sing, or were these songs separately written compositions?

EMMA ANDERSON:

It was slightly different. Lisa couldn’t play an instrument, so she’d come up with melodies. Sometimes I’d flesh them out a bit, eg ‘I’ll Be’, and sometimes Mark would put chords to her melodies. But they were still her songs, and obviously her lyrics. But the whole process was just so different because it was of the computer-centric process. I’d never really done it like that before, and Mark’s such a excellent programmer. There were a few samples on the record, which were a nightmare to clear, legally [laughs]. But just watching him do it all was amazing, because he’d just pull out a record and say, ‘This would make a good drum sample’. And it would fit perfectly! It was a real eyeopener, and I enjoyed it immensely.

But then the problems weren’t about making the records, it was about getting them out there. I wasn’t on 4AD anymore…

JUSTIN LEWIS:

What was it released on in the end?

EMMA ANDERSON:

‘Feels Like Summer’ [the first version, 1998] came out on Bella Union but that was never going to be a permanent label. After that we actually became signed by Sanctuary and made the album with them but there were internal shenanigans and we got dropped and we were able to take the album with us, so I went to Alan McGee, who’d just started Poptones [his label founded after the end of Creation Records]. I knew Alan because I’d worked for Jeff Barrett (who owns Heavenly Records now but had been a PR) in the late 80s which was in the Creation Offices at Clerkenwell. And Alan said ‘yes’.

It’s funny now, because Lush are really celebrated – there’s all these reissues – and everyone loves shoegazing, and Slowdive and Ride and My Bloody Valentine. But in the late 90s, Lush were not seen as a particularly cool band. I was in my thirties when I was doing Sing-Sing and it’s hard to believe this now this, but ‘older’ women in music weren’t particularly respected back then. Now you’ve got PJ Harvey, and Björk, and Alison Goldfrapp, Kim Deal, all in their fifties, early sixties, you know? And it’s fine. But back then, people would literally say to me, ‘Emma, you’re over thirty, no-one’s interested’, even though the music was good, it was really good. But I think it didn’t really fit in with the early noughties time, The Strokes and The Gossip and Kaiser Chiefs and all that.

JUSTIN LEWIS:

Not really my thing either, that. I had just turned thirty, in 2000, and I find that period of guitar music in the early noughties even harder to listen to than Britpop. I mean, I like some Britpop – I was suspicious of the tag, but most of the bands made at least one record I liked. But I find the noughties a very strange period to revisit now. I wanted to listen to something else. But the other thing about this period – you got a ‘proper job’ as it were, right?

EMMA ANDERSON:

I’d worked before Lush, As I said, I worked for Jeff for a while, and after that then obviously Lush was my job. But by 2000 I had to go back into the world of day jobs. My first job was working for Duran Duran, I was their PA, 2000–02 and it was when the line-up was Nick, Simon and Warren Cucurrullo. Now obviously they’re back with John and Roger and they’re playing arenas, but when I worked with them wasn’t their most memorable period, although the album I worked on at the time, Pop Trash, was actually pretty decent. The single that came off that, ‘Someone Else, Not Me’, was really good. So I did that for a couple of years, and Sing-Sing were going at the same time. Then I worked as a management assistant at the company that managed Goldfrapp, Ladytron and a band called The Shortwave Set. I did that for two or three years, and then worked for the PR company Hall or Nothing who did Oasis and the Manics, as office manager. After that I moved to Brighton and got a job at 13 Artists, which is the booking agency for Arctic Monkeys, Suede and Radiohead amongst others.

JUSTIN LEWIS:

One thing I often think about, with being in a band: there must come a point when you start thinking, ‘Where are we today?’ You know your role is to do a gig and then travel to the next gig, but when you have an ‘ordinary’ job, you at least have a sense of place.

EMMA ANDERSON:

There’s a lot to be said for actually living a relatively normal life, you know?! Not knocking being in a band, but the weird thing is, Justin, I was only actually in Lush for about eight years. I’m fifty-eight but people associate me solely with being in Lush though it took up a relatively small portion of my working life. I’ve actually been an office worker way longer than I was a professional musician! It’s true!

JUSTIN LEWIS:

I’ve got a quote, which I’m going to read back to you, and you said this in 1992, so I appreciate you might think differently now, but I’ll mention it because it ties in with what you just said. To Simon Reynolds, in The Observer newspaper: ‘It’s weird to hear people talking about us as pop stars. When we were young, I used to be mesmerised by them, and even now I think we still can’t help seeing ourselves as part of the audience.’

EMMA ANDERSON:

Even now sometimes people say to me, ‘You’re a pop star’ and I baulk at it to be honest… I suppose I consider pop stars to be Prince or Beyoncé or Taylor Swift. I do remember that quote, and I was a little criticised for saying it, actually, I seem to remember.

JUSTIN LEWIS:

There’s a lot of sense in it.

EMMA ANDERSON:

There was that whole Madchester thing at the time… there was a lot of swagger going around.

JUSTIN LEWIS:

‘We’re the best band in the world’ type of thing.

EMMA ANDERSON:

Yes. And journalists kind of liked that. Of course they did. To me, being in a band was just something I did. I was never particularly ambitious. I always felt that I just picked up a guitar, wrote some songs, got signed, and we toured, we were able to do that.

JUSTIN LEWIS:

With your solo album, Pearlies, which I can’t quite believe already came out two years ago: I gather some of these songs date back to the Lush reunion from about a decade ago.

EMMA ANDERSON:

I had one or two songs, and some bits left over from the reunion (as I thought we were going to make an album. Or three). But that’s how I write anyway, in bits and pieces and I assemble them into whole songs sometimes. And I thought, I’d quite like to carry on. Originally, I thought I’d find another singer, again, like I had done with Sing-Sing. I did some demos with Audrey Riley [great cellist, many credits], and we did three tracks, but even with that, I said, ‘I’m not singing’, and she said, ‘Emma, you can sing! Just do it!’ She got in one of her students, a Norwegian girl called Anna, who sang the songs very beautifully, but I didn’t end up doing much with those demos. And then when I spoke with Robin Guthrie about doing some more demos, he said, ‘I will only do them if you sing. Forget it otherwise’ And that made me think, ‘Maybe I should do this.’

Then COVID happened, and Robin lives in France… but I realised there’d been all these people telling me I couldn’t sing all that time. Even when I was at school, I was quite into music, I did like singing, and there was a choir which I so wanted to get into. Every term I auditioned for it, and he’d say, ‘I’ll put you on the reserve list’ – as he felt a bit sorry for me.

JUSTIN LEWIS:

I’m really glad you did do it for Pearlies. Because it’s all about having personality in your voice anyway.

EMMA ANDERSON:

I don’t think it’s just about the voice, though. The thought of standing at the front of the stage in the middle, being the focus, petrified me [laughs].

JUSTIN LEWIS:

Oh I can understand that.

EMMA ANDERSON:

I don’t have that personality. I don’t really enjoy being the centre of attention. I was perfectly happy being at the side with Lush and Sing-Sing – in fact, I found it preferable.

JUSTIN LEWIS:

Thinking about it, when you see a band on TV, the camera tends to focus on the singer, they only cut away to someone else when the singer isn’t singing. You haven’t been touring the record, but I know there are good reasons for that.

EMMA ANDERSON:

The main reason is that I’m a single mother of a school-age child so going on tour is – well, nigh on impossible. I also work (I am a bookkeeper) and there are some financial constraints to touring too, especially as I am a solo musician now.

Some people have suggested, ‘Oh, just do it with you and a laptop.’ But I don’t want to do it like that, I’d want a proper band – and if it was just me and a laptop and a guitar, and it was a bit rubbish, you get people filming things and putting them on YouTube. So there’s an element of caution with it as well.

JUSTIN LEWIS:

Speaking of YouTube, I note that the Lush film, Lush: A Far From Home Movie – which was quite hard to see here, but was on the Criterion streaming site in America – is on YouTube now.

EMMA ANDERSON:

It’s Phil’s film, and we did some live showings of it. It was great, actually. It’s a sweet film.

JUSTIN LEWIS:

It’s nice and prescient that someone thought to capture that footage at the time. We’re used to doing that now on a camera or phone, but in the 90s, people weren’t thinking like that so much. So even to just have some bits filmed, you weren’t necessarily going to do anything with them.

EMMA ANDERSON:

Yeah, Phil had a Super-8 camera, so black and white, no audio. You could only film literally a few minutes at a time. So it’s very evocative. Even though it was filmed in the 90s, because of the quality it looks like it could have been filmed in the 50s. And there’s lots of Chris in it as he was so good in front of the camera.

—–

ANYTHING: GAVIN BRYARS: ‘Jesus’ Blood Never Failed Me Yet’ (1975, Obscure/Island Records)

JUSTIN LEWIS:

I always have to take a deep breath before listening to this because I find it so overwhelming.

EMMA ANDERSON:

In a way, I chose it because you asked for something that made you think about music differently. I did my degree at what was then Ealing College of Higher Education but it is now, after many name changes, the University of West London. The degree was called Humanities – you did six subjects in the first year, and then you majored in one and minored in two. My major subject was History of Art but one of the minor ones was Music, and there was a teacher and lecturer there called Allan Moore, who’s a musicologist. He used to play us things like Karlheinz Stockhausen’s Stimmung, and also this by Gavin Bryars. I just remember sitting in this lecture room, in this college, and him putting this on, and being completely transfixed, as in ‘What am I listening to here?’ This obviously old recording, of this old guy singing, outside, looped over and over, with these strings that built and built… It’s a very emotional experience.

But it’s quite important to me that I actually heard this at college, rather than on the telly or at a mate’s house. And I’ve got the record now.

JUSTIN LEWIS:

Which version is this, because there are several?

EMMA ANDERSON:

The other side is ‘The Sinking of the Titanic’.

JUSTIN LEWIS:

Ah, the original record, that came out in the 70s.

EMMA ANDERSON:

And I noticed, when I knew I was going to do this interview, that Tom Waits has also appeared on a recording. Which makes total sense. And Audrey Riley who I mentioned earlier – she’s played with Gavin Bryars as well, she knows him quite well. So I’m not an afficionado of modern classical music or whatever, but this has meant a lot to me and made me see things in a different way. And it was interesting working in Lush with Audrey on string arrangements… I mean, when I was a child, I really wanted to learn music, the piano specifically. I begged and begged to have piano lessons, but I wasn’t allowed, basically. So I do sometimes wonder, had I had piano lessons and got into that world, my life might have been a bit different.

JUSTIN LEWIS:

That’s a real shame you never got that opportunity then. Is ‘Jesus’ Blood’ classical music or not, then, I wonder? Because it lies somewhere between lots of things. I have a feeling I first heard this in the early 1990s, because incredibly, this was on the Mercury Prize nominations list [the 1993 list, and a three-minute edit of the Tom Waits recording which you mentioned was included on a Mercury sampler album alongside PJ Harvey, Suede, Apache Indian and the Stereo MCs]. They used to put out a sampler every year of the Mercury nominations, not sure they do this anymore, but at the end there’d always be the token classical record, which would never win, and you wish it would sometimes.

But the thing about an extract of something like this – it doesn’t really work. You have to have the whole thing. [EA agrees] Because it takes about five minutes for the strings even to start.

EMMA ANDERSON:

It’s very gradual which adds to the emotional weight of it.

JUSTIN LEWIS:

And then the effect of having the strings start to drown out the man’s voice – and at times, you only hear the man’s voice whenever the strings pause, before starting again. I have to ration it because it’s one of those pieces I wouldn’t want to get too used to. It’s a record that’ll stay with me for ever.

This is the kind of record I was thinking of, with wildcard choices for this textcast. I couldn’t get my head round repetition when I was very young, and what shook me out of that was firstly modern classical music, and then also dance music. Because that was also about minimalism and loops. I suddenly realised I’d have to listen to music differently. Because I was 17, 18 when acid house came in.

EMMA ANDERSON:

I was actually really into dance music – I used to go clubbing quite a lot in the late 80s/early 90s and I’ve got a few records from that period.

JUSTIN LEWIS:

What would be an example of an acid house ‘anthem’ that would evoke that time for you?

EMMA ANDERSON:

‘Strings of Life’ by Rhythm is Rhythm… I loved that. ‘The Real Life’ by Corporation of One, which has got samples from Simple Minds’ ‘Theme from Great Cities’ and then it cuts in with Queen’s ‘Bohemian Rhapsody’. What else? ‘Where Love Lives’ by Alison Limerick was always a favourite. ‘Sweet Harmony’ by Liquid. Sometimes I’d hear things at the time but wouldn’t know what they were. But I was quite into this stuff, because I worked for Jeff and there was that whole club scene… I went to the Hacienda a few times, Shoom, Milk Bar with Danny Rampling…

I expect people maybe assume I must only be into My Bloody Valentine and Cocteau Twins… but I’ve got quite a broad taste (I like to think so anyway!).

—-

Lush’s Gala compilation was reissued on 4AD on 14 November 2025, marking its 35^th anniversary, and completing the label’s reissues of the group’s back catalogue. More information here: https://4ad.com/news/22/9/2025/35thanniversaryeditionofgala

Phil King’s film, Lush: A Far from Home Movie, can now be seen in full on 4AD’s YouTube channel: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ow3jEIV0s74&list=RDow3jEIV0s74&start_radio=1

Emma Anderson’s 2023 solo album Pearlies is out on Sonic Cathedral Records, as is its 2024 remixed version Spiralée (Pearlies Rearranged). Further information at her Bandcamp page: https://emmaanderson.bandcamp.com/music

You can follow Emma on Bluesky at @emmaandersonmusic.bsky.social, and on Instagram and Facebook at @emmaandersonmusic.

—–

FLA Playlist 34

Emma Anderson

Thanks to Tune My Music, you can also transfer this playlist to the platform or site of your choice by using this link: https://www.tunemymusic.com/share/4z65FUBy0X

Track 1:

LA BELLE EPOQUE: ‘Black is Black’:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=v3nf4UsEdlA&list=RDv3nf4UsEdlA&start_radio=1

Track 2:

EDITH PIAF: ‘Je ne regrette rien’:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=4r454dad7tc&list=RD4r454dad7tc&start_radio=1

Track 3:

RENAISSANCE: ‘Northern Lights’:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=HKBJqHvQvjg&list=RDHKBJqHvQvjg&start_radio=1

Track 4:

CABARET VOLTAIRE: ‘Nag, Nag, Nag’:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=pWGZWYrR5Nw&list=RDpWGZWYrR5Nw&start_radio=1

Track 5:

THE UNDERTONES: ‘It’s Going to Happen!’:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=aQtaqgW6MXg&list=RDaQtaqgW6MXg&start_radio=1

Track 6:

THE TEARDROP EXPLODES: ‘Treason’:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=rV8cEIsFX-A&list=RDrV8cEIsFX-A&start_radio=1

Track 7:

ABC: ‘Date Stamp’:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=434lTbIZsJ0&list=RD434lTbIZsJ0&start_radio=1

Track 8:

NEW ORDER: ‘Everything’s Gone Green’:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=4v5ivB7bM1k&list=RD4v5ivB7bM1k&start_radio=1

Track 9:

JAPAN: ‘Gentlemen Take Polaroids’:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=SlyI2isjAas&list=RDSlyI2isjAas&start_radio=1

Track 10:

LUSH: ‘Thoughtforms’ (2^nd version):

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=gWYXR78pf7k&list=RDgWYXR78pf7k&start_radio=1

Track 11:

LUSH: ‘Last Night’:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=bHngGUzLkD4&list=RDbHngGUzLkD4&start_radio=1

Track 12:

TAYLOR SWIFT: ‘The Fate of Ophelia’:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ko70cExuzZM&list=RDko70cExuzZM&start_radio=1

Track 13:

SING-SING: ‘Far Away from Love’:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=_cuOr2TCcQw&list=RD_cuOr2TCcQw&start_radio=1

Track 14:

SING-SING: ‘I’ll Be’:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=rLhsWXlCmUo&list=RDrLhsWXlCmUo&start_radio=1

Track 15:

DURAN DURAN: ‘Someone Else Not Me’:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=RyThuzD1vUo&list=RDRyThuzD1vUo&start_radio=1

Track 16:

EMMA ANDERSON: ‘The Presence’:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=rCyo6Dq6Dvg&list=RDrCyo6Dq6Dvg&start_radio=1

Track 17:

EMMA ANDERSON: ‘Inter Light’ (MEMORIALS Mix):

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=x3At7nRpepY&list=RDx3At7nRpepY&start_radio=1

Track 18:

GAVIN BRYARS: ‘Jesus’ Blood Never Failed Me Yet’ [1975 original]:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=rfJXXOFLzfQ&list=RDrfJXXOFLzfQ&start_radio=1&t=82s

Track 19:

CORPORATION OF ONE: ‘The Real Life’:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=9AEp9-BOGOw&list=RD9AEp9-BOGOw&start_radio=1

Track 20:

RHYTHM IS RHYTHM: ‘Strings of Life’:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=vGFw2qeUp0s&list=RDvGFw2qeUp0s&start_radio=1

Track 21:

ALISON LIMERICK: ‘Where Love Lives’:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=wGYdeSnux68&list=RDwGYdeSnux68&start_radio=1

FLA 33: Mark Watson (16/11/2025)

November 16, 2025 / whenisbins / Leave a comment

For over twenty years now, the writer-performer Mark Watson has sustained two parallel careers. In one of them, he has pursued stand-up comedy to great acclaim, both in live settings and via broadcast vehicles like BBC Radio 4’s Mark Watson Makes the World Substantially Better, BBC4’s We Need Answers and Mark Watson Talks a Bit About Life, a third series of which premiered on Radio 4 in 2025. Simultaneously, he has written a total of eight novels (including 2020’s Contacts, and 2025’s One Minute Away), plus a non-fiction book, a graphic novel, and a memoir published in 2023 called Mortification.

Mark was kind enough a while back to tell me how much he had enjoyed reading various instalments of First Last Anything, and so – as I am an admirer of his work – it seemed logical to ask if he’d be interested in taking part himself. To my delight, he agreed. We spoke over Zoom for 90 minutes or so, one day in late October 2025, and I was particularly interested to find out how his enthusiasm for music helped to shape and inform his own attitudes to performing and writing. We hope you enjoy our chat.

—–

JUSTIN LEWIS:

So what records did you have in your house growing up before you started buying your own, before you started making your own choices?

MARK WATSON:

My mum didn’t particularly listen to music around the house, but my dad was quite a serious music fan, a serious pop music fan, at least – he wasn’t what you’d now call a muso. We’d watch Top of the Pops, we’d listen to the charts on a Sunday, that top 40 countdown with Bruno Brookes was quite a big ritual. And my dad would buy records – singles and LPs – fairly often. There are certain things that it’s pointless being nostalgic about, but the download era has unfortunately made the charts a meaningless exercise really. The idea of the nation holding its breath to see what’s come in at number one feels like a thing we won’t get again. I used to enjoy the suspense of that.

JUSTIN LEWIS:

The charts are for the music industry only now, I think.

MARK WATSON:

When I was very young, we lived in Canada for a year. In Alberta, in the middle of nowhere.

JUSTIN LEWIS:

Oh! I went there when I was about eleven, for about a month – our base was Calgary.

MARK WATSON:

We flew into Calgary, I believe. I’m too young to remember most of this, I was four, but my earliest childhood memories are from that period. My dad was a teacher and he did a job swap with a teacher over there, so slightly rashly, he took his young family to the rural wilds. And in that period, his brother, my uncle, used to tape the charts from the radio and send them on cassettes.

My dad also used to have, you probably had them yourself, the Guinness Hit Singles books.

JUSTIN LEWIS:

I very much did!

MARK WATSON:

If I saw an act on Top of the Pops, I was the sort of kid who would flick through that book to see a rundown of their hits. Nonetheless, I was still limited to what my dad had in his collection, which was extensive, but if you were that 10-year-old now, you could literally listen to any song in the world. There are many reasons to lament the way the digital age has impacted the way we buy music, but it’s also true that it’s a wonderland: everything that’s ever been recorded is pretty much freely available for anyone to explore.

I remember when someone showed me Napster, in my early twenties. I simply couldn’t believe it. I remember just typing all sorts of different songs in to test it, it just didn’t seem possible. Just as when Amazon launched, rather than a sort of sinister mega corporation, for a while it seemed like this magic machine where you could put in any book you’d ever read in your life, and it would just send it to you. An innocent age.

When I was thinking of the First, Last and Anything categories for this, it dawned on me that technically, the first record I bought was ‘Dancing in the Dark’ by Bruce Springsteen, because while we were in Canada, my dad took me to a record shop and I have an early memory of him lifting me up so I could hand the money over and buy this. And seeing the lyrics on the back of the sleeve.

So I could have gone for that, but it’s stretching a point to say that was my record purchase, really.

JUSTIN LEWIS:

So, instead, let’s talk about this…

—-

**FIRST: THE CRANBERRIES: Everybody Else is Doing It, So Why Can’t We? (Island Records, 1993)**

Extract: ‘Linger’

JUSTIN LEWIS:

I was working at HMV in Cardiff when this went really big in early 1994. Because it came out for a while in this country, before any of the tracks had been hit singles. Then they had a massive hit in America with ‘Linger’ and they deleted the album in the UK, you could only get it as a US import, which we were playing in the store every day, even then. And then once ‘Linger’ finally became a hit here, they reissued the album. So I heard this a lot at the time. But I don’t think I’d heard this in full since about 1995.

MARK WATSON:

Well – I revisited it yesterday because of this chat, and again, it was a long time since I listened to any of it apart from the famous songs. This was my first album purchase, and it was on cassette. It’s sort of arbitrary that it was the first, in a way, just to do with the timing of where I was in my life – I was, I suppose, second or third year of secondary school. It was the first time I had tiny bits of money, pocket money and this and that.

JUSTIN LEWIS:

How old would you have been? Thirteen, fourteen?

MARK WATSON:

Probably thirteen when it came out. I was just starting to listen to commercial radio off my own back, basically. We’d have GWR FM, the commercial station in Bristol, on the drive to school. My dad was a teacher, of course, so I had a lift, and in that 20-minute drive, you’d get maybe two songs around all of the chatter. But I’d be listening to other stuff on the same station when I’d be doing my homework, and I had no real idea how the station’s playlists worked or anything, so there’d be stuff I absolutely didn’t want to listen to at all, but occasionally you’d get a gem. And they played ‘Linger’ with, as far as I remember, no fanfare at all, but I just caught the band’s name.

I’d listened to a lot of R.E.M., my first proper band as a young teenager, so I liked that kind of folky pop sound, but I hadn’t really heard anything like this. Strings in pop songs would become ubiquitous later – The Verve, and Embrace and so on – and I’m still a real sucker for well-done strings in music, but there was a period in the 90s when you just couldn’t get away from it.

JUSTIN LEWIS:

And of course, Top of the Pops would have ‘the string section’ in the studio and you’d wonder, ‘Are they the string section on the record?’

MARK WATSON:

That’s right. It’d weird to look back on, but ‘string section’ was almost like a drum machine [setting] for a period – and I really took against ‘Bittersweet Symphony’ by The Verve later on…

JUSTIN LEWIS:

Although that one is a sample, isn’t it?

MARK WATSON:

That’s true actually – but also I think by the end of the 90s, that Irish folk tradition as pop music thing became slightly degraded by what I regard as lesser imitations of the Cranberries.

JUSTIN LEWIS:

When the Cranberries first emerged, they reminded me of the Cocteau Twins ‘but you could hear the words’, and I don’t mean they did that cynically. I’m trying not to use the word ‘ethereal’ but I just have.

MARK WATSON:

I had never heard anything quite like ‘Linger’ on first listen and, because of the way music was then, I remember wondering when I’d hear it again. There was no way of making it happen, necessarily. I didn’t know if it was even out. It’s very odd to look back on how random it was. Like, now, you can listen to any song that you want, any day, any moment, of your life. It’s funny to think of a time when you’d listen to the radio, wondering whether or not a song would come up.

JUSTIN LEWIS:

I used to listen to the Annie Nightingale Request Show on Radio 1 on Sunday nights in my teens, and that show was such a lifeline in terms of playing unexpected records. With request shows, now, people tend to request things that the station plays anyway, or the station chooses the requests that match what they already play. Or seems to, anyway. But on that show, it was completely up for grabs – you seemed to be allowed to choose anything, and that really freed things up.

MARK WATSON:

Yeah, I really like how BBC 6Music replicates the spirit of that by doing things like the People’s Playlist and the Cloudbusters. And I think Lauren Laverne is a sort of natural heir to Annie – among many other accolades I’d bestow on Laverne. But still, in the modern age, the request show is a strange concept because we all know there’s a much easier way to hear the song.

JUSTIN LEWIS:

True, although only if you know the song already. Annie’s way of doing it, which is fantastic, was apparently when people would send in lists of songs, she’d often investigate the ones she didn’t already know.

MARK WATSON:

That’s a bygone era in mainstream terms – even for 6Music, that would be pretty daring.

JUSTIN LEWIS:

Yeah, I really liked the idea that the audience could educate the broadcaster as well as vice versa.

MARK WATSON:

But because this was commercial radio, it was a case of waiting for ‘Linger’ to come along again. Once I’d heard it two or three times, I definitely felt I needed to know more about this band. I don’t think I’d quite started reading the NME or anything, I had no resources at all, so I just went to a music shop and see what was there. I went to Woolworths. I saw the album cover, I read the track listing, I saw ‘Linger’ was on it. I obviously didn’t know any of the other music on it, and I remember it felt like a substantial investment, £12.99 or whatever it would have been.

By that point, I had a little stereo of my own that I’d got as a birthday present and a pair of headphones, and so I was listening to music in quite a secretive, teenage kind of way. I still did listen to stuff with my dad, but I was also starting to get to that age where you wanted to discover stuff for yourself. I was aware of my taste starting to form separately. I remember around the same time hearing ‘Cornflake Girl’ by Tori Amos, one of the first moments of thinking, ‘I love this, but I don’t think my dad would be into this.’ Actually, in the end, he did quite like it, but then he did like Kate Bush, and I didn’t know about Kate Bush at the time, so I was wrong about that. But R.E.M. – albums like Out of Time and Automatic for the People – had come through him… and I knew he would like The Cranberries, but I also wanted to be the guy who discovered it.

JUSTIN LEWIS:

Oh, you’ve got to find this stuff for yourself, that’s how it works.

MARK WATSON:

Yeah, I remember listening to the album, thinking, ‘No-one knows about this yet. I’ve never heard anyone mention this band, apart from that time they got that fluke play on the radio.’ And then, not long after that, ‘Dreams’ was a very big radio hit. It would come on in the car [in the drive to school], and I would feel this pride that, for the first time in my life, I’d put my dad on to something musically. Before that, everything had come through him… or a couple of clued-up mates at school.

And it was a bonus that the Cranberries had such a distinctive female singer, Dolores O’Riordan. And then Stephen Street’s production – I found out years later (weirdly, after listening to the Smiths), I went back and realised it was the same guy who produced both, with that slick, jangly guitar sound.

JUSTIN LEWIS:

And straight after this Cranberries record, he went on to make Parklife with Blur.

MARK WATSON:

Yeah. I didn’t know his name, but I loved the sound of it. Even listening back yesterday, it’s very tightly produced, the drums sound great, and they’re very satisfying pop songs, but Dolores’ voice is the drawcard, obviously. She used to get compared to Sinead O’Connor, but I think that’s purely because it’s two fiery Irish women. There’s this lilting, hypnotic quality, but it can turn so quickly… there’s such melancholy in the voice in a song like ‘Linger’, but elsewhere the vocal is quite ferocious. And that in the end became the sound of ‘Zombie’, and when the sound got punkier, I started to part ways with the Cranberries. I think I had that classic teenage snob thing where once everyone at school knew ‘Zombie’, I was like, ‘Well, you guys don’t understand the Cranberries!’

JUSTIN LEWIS:

I must admit, when I heard the second album, I was thinking, ‘Yeah, I might be out, here’ – but I liked this first one a lot at the time.

MARK WATSON:

It did seem like diminishing returns.

JUSTIN LEWIS:

They were massive though. I note that on streaming, ‘Linger’ has passed one billion plays now. And ‘Dreams’ is not too far off that.

MARK WATSON:

Remarkable, yeah.

JUSTIN LEWIS:

But – I always find this kind of thing interesting – do you know who they supported live before they became big in their own right? Suede – not a massive surprise – but also Duran Duran on their US tour.

MARK WATSON:

That’s a strange partnership.

JUSTIN LEWIS:

And Dolores married Duran Duran’s tour manager, that’s how they met on that US tour. And I realised that’s partly how they got so big over there. Suede didn’t mean that much over there, but Duran Duran would have done.

MARK WATSON:

That’s fascinating – and also ‘Dreams’ became one of those songs that are in adverts. Like ‘Walk Away’ by Cast, which suddenly had a life of its own. And then there were songs that sound almost deliberately written like that, like ‘Going for Gold’ by Shed Seven. But in this case, with ‘Dreams’, it was just a fairly eccentric song tapping into the mainstream. Again, so much of it was her voice. Like there’s that weird wordless chorus where she’s just sort of howling, which is so different from the pop sensibility of something like ‘Linger’. You start to get a real palette, but also the songwriting and the melodies are so good. And I know that Dolores struggled with all sorts of aspects of being a globally famous pop star…

JUSTIN LEWIS:

Oh sure, I don’t think I could have coped with anything like that at all. That trajectory was dramatic, wasn’t it.

MARK WATSON:

Absolutely wild, but what’s nice – it’s still a very good listen, I think.

—-

JUSTIN LEWIS:

I’ve heard you mention in a few interviews how, perhaps unusually for a stand-up, you were driven more by music than comedy when you were in your teenage years. How did your music obsession grow, and how did you start to think you could do comedy? Was it becoming established as a performer?

MARK WATSON:

The pieces didn’t all fall together smoothly. I went to see a lot of bands live in my teens and well into my twenties. But the formative period for gig-going, in terms of my ambitions, was from about fourteen to twenty. Part of why I was much more into music than stand-up was there was nowhere near as much of a comedy scene in those days, or at least not one that anyone would know about. I would see the odd comedian at Bristol Hippodrome or the Old Vic. But even going to university, I could only have named about a dozen comedians, the same ones everyone knew – Victoria Wood, Lenny Henry, you know.

JUSTIN LEWIS:

And were you watching TV comedy at all?

MARK WATSON:

Yeah, although most of the comedy I watched was things like The Fast Show, The Simpsons, Harry Enfield… As with music, it was [an attempt to discover things] that my dad didn’t watch. The Fast Show was not something he’d have watched – that was my generation’s thing that we found for ourselves, I suppose.

JUSTIN LEWIS:

That was your Monty Python.

MARK WATSON:

That was our Monty Python, for sure. You’d go into school and recite the catchphrases… it was Friday nights and you’d look forward to it all day. But I had very little notion of what stand-ups were, I couldn’t picture in my head a comedy circuit, but then there was less of a circuit then. There were nowhere near as many touring comedians or clubs where I was – Bristol was quite well served for live entertainment, but I’d never seen someone just get up and do stand-up in a club environment, whereas I’d seen dozens of bands in these grungy rooms… I wasn’t musical myself – I played the drums a little bit, to no real avail, but something about watching the live music experience really did work for me. I couldn’t even drink legally when I was first going to gigs, but even though everywhere stank of smoke, I remember that environment really fondly. The anticipation building as the band’s arrival got closer… that feeling of the first song… and what used to be the stampede to the front when they played the big hit. I found all those things really intoxicating, not just the music but the whole live experience.

JUSTIN LEWIS:

Was there a particular group that you really associate with that formative time, that you’d have seen live around then?

MARK WATSON:

The Super Furry Animals were the big ones for me. My brother and I were big funs. I was fifteen or sixteen when Fuzzy Logic came out, and then Radiator, in fairly quick succession. We’d been into the early days of Britpop. Like we were not huge Oasis fans, liked Blur, liked Radiohead, Pulp, Pulp in particular. Like everyone who was fifteen at that point, though my brother was significantly younger, we were swept along by that Britpop wave.

But then Super Furry Animals just represented something different. The first time I came across them was when they were on Later with Jools Holland [BBC2, 01/06/1996]. They played ‘If You Don’t Want Me to Destroy You’ and I think ‘Hometown Unicorn’. I just remember I loved the band name, loved the names of the tracks, loved the look of Gruff Rhys and his air as a frontman. There was the fact that we had Welsh family and we grew up very near the Welsh border. We hadn’t seen a big Welsh band before… I mean, there’d been the Manics.

JUSTIN LEWIS:

When I was in my teens, it was a bit like that. The Alarm were quite big but they were from North Wales, the other end of the country from where I was. There seemed to be nobody from South Wales, and the ones who were from there, seemed to move away. Like Green Gartside – I didn’t know he was from Cardiff.

MARK WATSON:

I mean, the Manics went on to wear their Welshness quite proudly but it wasn’t what you thought of… you thought of them in army uniforms and stuff on Top of the Pops. I was basically quite scared of them, and of the people at school who were their fans. Whereas the Super Furries were in this perfect spot at that stage. It was just brilliant, hooky, catchy pop music – but also quite anarchic and strange.

JUSTIN LEWIS:

Yeah, I was from Wales already and there was a real mystery about them. I used to wonder, ‘Where’s this coming from?’

MARK WATSON:

There were lots of elements, not least the fact that I’ve read many interviews with Gruff. I remember him saying when they recorded Fuzzy Logic that he was basically singing in English almost for the first time. So a lot of how his vocal and his tone are so inimitable comes from the fact that it’s almost like someone’s singing in a foreign language or not quite singing in English or Welsh. And also the left-handed guitar, and the excesses of Dafydd the drummer, and it was like wild, druggy glam pop, but coming from guys from down the road.

JUSTIN LEWIS:

And to have a bilingual pop group in the first place – that had rarely happened before, really.

MARK WATSON:

It was exhilarating. Even by the second album, there were songs in Welsh. There were references in the album art, which contained references to photos of things like signs for Brains faggots, and stuff like that, and landmarks from Cardiff that we recognised living in Bristol. But at the same time, the songs were teeming with references to stuff that we didn’t have a fucking clue about. So they were just in that perfect space – it both spoke to me, and it was also from another planet.

But then, specifically, the reason they influenced me, and were so exciting live: they understood the show as a spectacle. They’d be in weird animal costumes, there’d be strange stuff on the stage, they experimented with surround sound and lights. And you went to see them lots and lots of times, every time, we’d travel all over the place to see them. You’d love the songs, but you always also felt it was going to be an hour and a half of absolute bedlam.

Fast-forwarding a bit, once I was at university, I still didn’t know anything about stand-up. I was just doing sketch comedy, I suppose trying to do the sort of stuff I’d seen in The Fast Show.

JUSTIN LEWIS:

Was this in Footlights?

MARK WATSON:

I was at Cambridge, but I was barely involved in Footlights because I was sort of intimidated by that heritage and mystique. I did some very small-scale stuff for Footlights, like the occasional one-off night they might put on, but I wasn’t part of the main body of it until right at the end. I had a mate, and we did sketches in college things, and we’d put informal nights on.

Gradually, I started to get interested in the idea of stand-up. The breakthrough for me, not professionally but mentally, was going to the Edinburgh Fringe in 2000, with a college society and a play that I’d written. Then in 2001, I went with the Footlights. And in both of those years, I went to see absolutely everything. I saw an enormous number of shows. It was a comedy education for me. Suddenly, I was seeing lots of stand-ups who were not yet household names, but in that Fringe way, a lot of them were quite heavily talked about.

JUSTIN LEWIS:

So in this period when you’re doing sketch comedy but also starting to write, you wrote a play with Tim Key which played in London, is that right?

MARK WATSON:

Yeah, it was 2002. It was called A Few Idiots Who Spoil it for Everyone Else. That was a two-hander. We were both getting into doing our own things. Tim went on to do all sorts of sketch stuff, but by now I had got a taste for stand-up, and I think sitting in those dark rooms in Edinburgh, there was that same feeling of anticipation, waiting for a comic to come onstage and being [positioned] so close to them. That shared live experience reminded me of the same thing I’d felt five years earlier when I first started going to see live music. And by now, I felt I was watching something which I could possibly aspire to do myself because I could talk.

So something happened in my brain around then, 2001, 2002. I liked the art form, I liked the idea of being able to do something unlike a sketch show – you could just pop up on stage and do exactly what came into your head. All that was attractive to me, but without a doubt, part of me was also thinking, ‘This is like a rock show in a way.’ Even now, I still get a kick out of it when I’m playing a venue which I remember being on a poster on my wall from the NME, like the Sheffield Leadmill, you know… there’s been a handful of venues I’ve played that once would have been on bands’ touring posters. That is nice.

JUSTIN LEWIS:

It’s striking to me how your first novel [Bullet Points] came out when you were 23, 24, the sort of age when a musician might release a debut album. Quite young, really.

MARK WATSON:

Yeah, and that’s because writing had been my real ambition – stand-up was something that kind of ambushed me. Writing books was what I wanted to do, even at university, I was quite serious about that. Again, I was influenced by musicians – as you say, I had an awareness that many musicians did bring out their work very early. Of course, it’s quite a different trajectory for a lot of authors; a lot of authors don’t peak till their sixties. ‘Enfant terrible’ is not quite the right phrase, but I wanted to be the equivalent of a band bringing out albums at 22. Some of the bands Britpop brought up were, with hindsight, unbelievably young. Supergrass were basically teenagers – and Ash of course. That’s funny, looking back, because that first Ash album [1977] was full of nostalgic songs about young love, like ‘Oh Yeah’ and ‘Goldfinger’… but they were only, like, eighteen themselves. From my vantage point of my mid-forties, it’s very funny to hear, and there are some really good songs on that first album, but it’s funny that they could barely have experienced any of that.

But yeah, I wanted to be, like, a young sensation. I don’t think I consciously framed the thought that way, but I wanted to be the next big thing. Which worked for me as a stand-up, but it worked against me as an author, a bit, because that first novel didn’t really do anything, and it wasn’t great. It had come a bit too early.

JUSTIN LEWIS:

Got some very good press at the time! I was really interested to revisit some of that.

MARK WATSON:

There was certainly quite a bit of hype but for whatever reason, it never really took off – and once you’ve had that kind of false start, it’s very difficult. You don’t get to be ‘the first novelist’ again, for sure. I always say to people when they’re struggling to get published and it feels impossible in a way, ‘Be careful what you wish for’, because being ‘the new thing’ can only happen once. At least with stand-up, I had a longer grace period because it just so happened that stand-up was becoming really vogueish at exactly the time that I was getting into it. It’s a bit of a crude parallel but being a stand-up in the 2000s was a bit like being Britpop in the nineties. Loads of press…

JUSTIN LEWIS:

Probably a comedy club in every town…

MARK WATSON:

There were clubs everywhere… Edinburgh Fringe felt a bit like a rock festival, so things really conspired in my favour, stand-up wise. But I came to realise over time that many artists I admire have had longevity rather than being hyped in their twenties. R.E.M. are not active anymore, but they produced a body of work over thirty years.

JUSTIN LEWIS:

And they’re still individually doing things, musical projects, not in a high-profile way, admittedly.

MARK WATSON:

Same with Gruff Rhys… still enormously productive, and the Super Furries are touring again next year to my disbelief. But what I didn’t appreciate in my early twenties, with that NME culture, and the hype around ‘the new thing’, both as a consumer of art and as someone trying to make stuff, you come to appreciate the long game.

JUSTIN LEWIS:

Another parallel with music, it occurred to me, are those 24-hour shows you used to do at Edinburgh. I think you even did a 36-hour one at one point. Is it about using that space, having that kind of atmosphere, creating a kind of event?

MARK WATSON:

I mean, when I did the first 24-hour show [2004], I had no profile as a comedian at all, not even in Edinburgh. So it was quite a hubristic thing to do. But I had been thinking, What can I make that would be a special experience for people? And I remember saying, ‘Why has no-one ever done a 24-hour long show?’ And of course, there’s loads of good reasons, but once you’ve thought of it, you sort of have to do it. But once it had become a talked-about thing, the ones I did in subsequent years, it was a bit more like being an indie sensation. I relished that people were, like, ‘Oh – is he going to do another long show? What’s it going to be like this time?’ Again, I suppose the more you mythologise yourself as a pop star, the easier, the more parallels you can find. But my career in Edinburgh, throughout the second half of my twenties was quite a lot like making a second, third, fourth album… your following’s growing, but you’re starting to be forced to put out more work than you can ensure the quality of. I was doing TV shows I didn’t necessarily feel comfortable in. I wasn’t Pulp suddenly finding themselves in front of 40,000 people at Glastonbury, but I did feel wildly excited by the upward trajectory, and at a certain point realising I wasn’t really in control of this. And the integrity I started out with was in danger of being lost, because I had ambitious management, I was saying yes to everything, out of curiosity as much as anything.

But what I really like about my career now is I only really do things that I believe in and want to do as projects. Twenty years in, and again, I’ve learned this largely from musicians: you still have to make a living, but you start to think, ‘I’m not around forever, what would I like my body of work to be?’

JUSTIN LEWIS:

Reading your memoir, Mortification, I was struck by how you’ve realised there’s no point comparing yourself to other people. Partly because they will often have a completely different agenda to you anyway.

MARK WATSON:

Yeah, you never know what’s going on with them. If you are relatively happy and content, then you are doing better than a lot of people, whether you think so or not.

—–

**LAST: JONATHAN RICHMAN & THE MODERN LOVERS: Jonathan Sings! (1983, Sire Records)**

Extract: ‘The Neighbors’

JUSTIN LEWIS:

Not something I would have expected as a recent record!

MARK WATSON:

Well, no. What happened was Jonathan Richman passed me by for most of my life, although I remember seeing him on Later with Jools Holland as well in the 90s. Jools was a real resource in those days – you could rely on seeing something nearly every week that you wanted to explore. The story with this is simply that I was in a venue earlier this year, and I heard ‘I Was Dancing in the Lesbian Bar’ [from I, Jonathan, 1992] – almost the only Jonathan Richman song I knew, I think. And I was reminded of how fun it is, what an exuberant, silly song it is. It put me in a very good mood, and in an idle moment, I thought I should really look into Jonathan Richman a bit more.

Like a lot of artists, he’d been on the periphery of my awareness… in the 90s I used to listen to a band called Hefner, and they covered the Jonathan Richman song ‘To Hide a Little Thought’. So every few years, his name somehow came up but I realised I’d never done any serious work on this guy, so I googled his body of work, looked at what were regarded as the essential albums (in fact I actually asked Darren Hayman from Hefner on Bluesky), and downloaded the Modern Lovers album, Jonathan Sings! – and straight away was hooked.

What I love about it is, this is music I could never have got into when it was first out – I’m a bit young for a start, but also I don’t know if I’d have gone near this kind of rock’n’roll sound in the 90s. There’s a lack of irony about it, a glee in the music.

JUSTIN LEWIS:

There’s an innocence to it.

MARK WATSON:

Yeah. I think I would have found it very uncool as a teenager. But the thing is, it is uncool – that’s the beauty. Even if I’d seen that now-famous clip of him playing ‘I Was Dancing in the Lesbian Bar’ on Late Night with Conan O’Brien… [NBC, 16/09/1993] in my twenties, it was very far from the sort of thig I liked. Now, I think it’s a perfect, pure example of performance. It’s just him and the audience – he’s just messing around, but like every clip I’ve ever seen of him, he just looks like he’s delighted to be on stage. And he’s always interjecting, interrupting his own songs, Mark E. Smith’s another one who did that. There’s a real freshness to it.

But on this particular album, Jonathan Sings!, there are two or three really silly songs, like playground anthems, and then the third track, ‘The Neighbors’, is a really funny, ambiguous example of something like ‘Baby It’s Cold Outside’, that sub-genre of songs about whether or not someone should stay the night. I love the way he keeps muttering ‘You see what I mean?’ – and ‘Of course not’. The song is almost a conversation, but it’s got these beautiful female vocal parts, the melody itself – across the album, there’s this goofy rock’n’roll but also these unexpectedly delicate arrangements.

JUSTIN LEWIS:

With all the interruptions he does to his own songs, he does remind me of a stand-up, funnily enough. I was thinking of someone like Emo Phillips.

MARK WATSON:

That’s quite a good comparison – maybe Emo Phillips was inspired by Jonathan Richman. Emo Phillips is someone I saw, early doors, at the Edinburgh Fringe, and as much as anyone inspired me to think, ‘Wow, so you can just do this, can you?’ I remember Jonathan Richman saying, ‘I don’t really write the songs, I kind of make things up.’ Even in that Conan clip, he prefaces it by saying, ‘I’m going to tell you a story which happened to me recently, and then just goes into the song. Performance-wise, it feels like where spoken word meets music. A lot of artists aspire to that sort of cosiness with the audience, but it’s quite hard to be as unaffected as he is.

But the more I delve into the back catalogue, as well as the whimsy, there’s also some really beautiful love songs. ‘Somebody To Hold Me’ on this album is quite naïve and borderline saccharine, but the music’s beautiful and the lyrics are full of unexpected reflections. It really lands in the sweet spot for me, between the kind of playfulness I like and these moments that pierce you when you’re not expecting it.

JUSTIN LEWIS:

He has said that he likes appealing to all ages. Though I don’t think he’s actually made a kids’ album like, say, They Might Be Giants did, he’s definitely got that sort of approach. I found a great quote – he got reviewed once with the words: ‘It’s great that Jonathan Richman wants to be rock’s great innocent, but does that mean he has to sound like he hasn’t been toilet-trained yet? Somebody point this guy towards Sesame Street!’ [MW laughs] Now, the thing is, he absolutely loved that review. When it was suggested, ‘But you’re not very mature’, he replied something like, ‘No, I’d prefer to be regarded as infantile in a way’ – I suppose because as a kid, you are liberated, you can make up your own stuff before you have to start to conform.

MARK WATSON:

Yeah, that’s right, a lot of his songs do sound like that. It can be too much at times, for example, the song on this album from the point of view of a three-year-old… that’s probably too much for me. It’s still quite a nice tune, it’s a clever conceit for a song, but I don’t really want to hear a grown man singing as a toddler. But I love that he’s still doing it, he put an album out this year, I think. By the look of it, he’s never stopped. He had that ‘young rocker’ era, the ‘weird cult figure’ audience.

JUSTIN LEWIS:

I think acquiring the There’s Something About Mary audience probably helped as well.

MARK WATSON:

I’m sure, yeah. So he’s lived a life, but there’s something really edifying about seeing a guy in his seventies still making a record every couple of years and touring America, purely because he wants to. But what’s rewarding for me with his stuff is, so much new music is coming at you the whole time, like you said earlier, and sometimes it feels impossible to keep pace with it… so now and again, it’s really refreshing to encounter something from the 70s or 80s which you also never knew. It just re-sets you, it reminds you that you can never be across all the music anyway.

—-

**ANYTHING: NEW PORNOGRAPHERS: Twin Cinema (2005, Mint/Matador Records)**

Extract: ‘The Bleeding Heart Show’

MARK WATSON:

This brings together some of the themes of this conversation. I discovered this band in my mid-twenties, when they were on this third album, Twin Cinema. It was another random recommendation, a ‘you might also like’ type of situation, because I was listening to some other power pop-style bands at the time, things like Death Cab for Cutie. There was a glowing review of this album in Pitchfork, and at that age, 26, 27, I had a very high regard for Pitchfork. I was exactly the sort of person who would only have listened to them at that stage of my life, I was thinking, ‘Well they were right about Grizzly Bear’.

So I downloaded this album, knowing nothing about the band, and almost instantly, I loved it. I went on to listen to the previous two albums, I became a huge fan, and I’ve listened to them a lot over the past 18 years or so. The music is exactly in my ideal zone – this sort of melodic pop sensibility, the craftsmanship of the music, the lyrics, all of it. And they are popular among a certain type of music fan, and are a well-respected name, but you don’t often meet many people who’ve listened to them.

Carl Newman – or AC Newman as he’s often known – talks really interestingly about some of the things we’ve been talking about. What it was like to be part of a wave of hype and popularity twenty years ago and how now… they’re still making records, he makes loads of music… by any measure, he’s a very successful musician with a devoted fanbase of people like me. But it’s a relatively niche form of famous, so I’ve learned a lot of lessons from that. There are times when I feel as if – as I talk about in Mortification – I’ve not made the impact that I would like, or I’ve put out a book that doesn’t sell many copies. And then I’ll think of a band like New Pornographers and think that often, to somebody like me, that’s their favourite work, the thing they get the most out of.

I mean, Super Furries were always sort of a niche concern, as well, I suppose, although by the time they called it a day, I was watching them in big spaces, they’d be headlining at festivals. I was a big Radiohead fan – I am a big Radiohead fan – I’ve watched them become global icons. I’ve followed Tame Impala from the fringy, Aussie weirdo days to a bizarre level of fame. But with New Pornographers, this is an example of a band that, in my head, have got bigger and bigger and bigger because with every album they’ve put out, I’ve loved them that bit more – although that isn’t matched by the real world, though they continue to be very critically successful and still tour the US and Canada extensively.

JUSTIN LEWIS:

And all the members seem to be in lots of side projects, don’t they?

MARK WATSON:

It’s another thing I find attractive about it. Most bands that I grew up listening were very much traditional four-piece outfit, but because New Pornographers originated as a so-called supergroup, they’ve always had a flexible line-up. So there are different songwriters, different vocalists, something else the Super Furries had. A lot of my favourite acts have had different voices in the mix. But this is an extreme example of that because you had Neko Case and Carl Newman, and then Dan Bejar, this kind of maverick who dives in when he feels like it. I couldn’t remember hearing an album like this before where you have three different vocalists.

Nowadays, it’s more Newman’s project, I suppose because he’s the consistent force, but even when they tour, you don’t know exactly which members will be there, which I suppose has its frustrations, but it’s part of the reason why the music’s so good because there’s a sort of egolessness to it. That said, there’ve been bands where the line-ups have changed so much that it’s a kind of Ship of Theseus situation where it doesn’t really mean anything anymore. But because you’ve always got Carl Newman, you’ve always got a frontman, and sometimes he’ll slot in a saxophonist, or on the album before last, a string quartet. It’s like the sound of the album is driven by what musicians are available to play at that moment.

JUSTIN LEWIS:

It’s interesting when you see people working in lots of different spaces and collaborating like that. Oddly, you get a lot of that at the most commercial end of pop now: Famous Artist teams up with Famous Artists, featuring Other Famous Artist for a new single. That seems to happen all the time. But it also made me think of a figure like Jenny Lewis – her discography is just bewildering because she seems to have done so many things. It’s like being an actor or something.

MARK WATSON:

Yeah, that’s right. A good example of that is how the first incarnation of Tame Impala I came across was this guy [Kevin Parker] fronting a psychedelic rock band, and that same guy is now the producer for people like Dua Lipa. It feels like we live in an age, including for lots of reasons to do with the Internet, where collaboration seems like a complete free for all. And going back to Carl Newman, like Gruff Rhys, Michael Stipe as well… I’ve always loved musicians who seem to tinker for the fun of it, who just put stuff out that you might not even notice. We lived through a period where bands would have enormous record deals and were under contract to make a certain number of albums. We don’t live in that landscape anymore.

That said, I have a lot of respect for people like Portishead, who I’m a big fan of, who take years to perfect a project, but I’ve always loved people who are just firing a lot of stuff out there, taking chances, making unexpected projects.

JUSTIN LEWIS:

There are some groups where it’s easier to be a completist.

MARK WATSON:

It’s fairly easy to be a Portishead completist.

JUSTIN LEWIS:

It’s pretty easy to be a Blue Nile completist. With other people, it’s harder.

MARK WATSON:

Because with the New Pornographers, you’ve got their eight or nine studio albums, but then Newman’s released three of his own, Neko Case has loads of her solo stuff, Dan Bejar’s main group is Destroyer and that’s a whole separate canon of work. This kind of thing is either a music junkie’s dream or it’s a nightmare because while it’s great to keep discovering new stuff, you simply cannot get on top of all of it. There’s only so much time in the day.

JUSTIN LEWIS:

Would Twin Cinema be a good starting point for New Pornographers newcomers?

MARK WATSON:

Yeah, it’s a brilliant, accessible pop album, drenched in hooks. The first album is often seen as the definitive one – the song ‘Letter from an Occupant’ was as close as they’ve come to a big hit – that and ‘Use It’ from this album. But for me, the whole body of work stands up fantastically which I’d recommend to anyone that likes guitar music, basically.

—

JUSTIN LEWIS:

I’ve been really enjoying your new novel, called One Minute Away, about a delivery rider in London and how he connects with one particular customer. The last novel you had out, Contacts, was about a desperate man messaging everyone in his contacts book and their various reactions. These are really interesting scenarios for stories, which a lot of people could relate to, but I’m struck by how they have a very different voice to your stand-up work. And I was wondering how you decide between whether something is a show or a routine, or whether it’s a long-form novel. Do you have false starts when you’re trying to decide that?

MARK WATSON:

Sometimes. In the end it works itself out because there can be territory that I try and explore on stage, and I just can’t work out how to make it funny, or it’s just too complex or dense. With One Minute Away, I’d been wanting write a novel about the gig economy and the food delivery business for years, because I had the odd joke about it, but I hadn’t been able to explore that before. The shortest explanation, probably, is that novels are what happens when there is something nagging away, and I can’t make it funny in a sustainable enough way. Or it gets into territory which is too dark for a stand-up show. As a stand-up, I do feel that responsibility to entertain all the way along.

It’s also quite important to me that the books do sound different from my stand-up – a lot of comedians write books which are more or less an extension of their stage work. But I see the two things as different disciplines, and I guess I want people to read the books without necessarily knowing that I’m a comedian. But the novel I’m working on at the moment is probably closer to my stand-up voice than anything I’ve done before.

JUSTIN LEWIS:

I discovered you did a daily show at the Edinburgh Festival in 2006 called Mark Watson and His Audience Write a Novel. Was it like a workshop?

MARK WATSON:

Yeah, that was an unworkable idea, but it was quite a fun show. We’d get together and brainstorm. We’d work together on it for an hour, then I’d go away, write the next chapter, come back to the next audience.

JUSTIN LEWIS:

It’s a bit like that game, Consequences, isn’t it?

MARK WATSON:

Yeah. I could just about keep up with the workload, and it worked quite well as a gimmick, but it’s not a recommended way of writing an actual good novel, obviously.

JUSTIN LEWIS:

And it’s a hell of a lot of work in between each show.

MARK WATSON:

It was. Twenty years ago, I had an absolutely unquenchable appetite for that sort of work. But the irregularities of the plot became impossible to tame because people were throwing in more elements which didn’t make sense. Because it was still me writing up every chapter, I could keep some sort of central narrative. But by about halfway through the run, I realised, This will never actually be a novel because this is not how you write a book.

JUSTIN LEWIS:

It’s interesting for the audience to have that insight into working methods, I would think. Although how would you deal with royalties, had it been finished and come out?

MARK WATSON:

Well, that’s the thing. There were lots of good reasons why it couldn’t have been a published novel. Among them: 500 people have collaborated on it.

JUSTIN LEWIS:

Who’s going to get the PLR royalties there?

MARK WATSON:

As we know, there’s barely enough to go round for one person.

—–

Mark Watson’s One Minute Away is out now, published by HarperCollins.

His latest live stand-up show, Mark Watson: Before It Overtakes Us, continues touring well into 2026, and you can find further details and ticket links on his website: https://www.markwatsonthecomedian.com

You can follow Mark on Bluesky at @watsoncomedian.bsky.social.

—–

FLA 33 PLAYLIST

Mark Watson

NB: Track 10: Hefner’s cover version of Jonathan Richman’s ‘To Hide a Little Thought’ is currently unavailable on streaming services, but will be added to the playlists should the situation change in the future. The YouTube link will be included in the list of tracks below.

Thanks to Tune My Music, you can also transfer this playlist to the platform or site of your choice by using this link: https://www.tunemymusic.com/share/wGiYXXFESQ

Track 1:

BRUCE SPRINGSTEEN: ‘Dancing in the Dark’:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=129kuDCQtHs&list=RD129kuDCQtHs&start_radio=1

Track 2:

THE CRANBERRIES: ‘Linger’:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=G6Kspj3OO0s&list=RDG6Kspj3OO0s&start_radio=1

Track 3:

THE CRANBERRIES: ‘Dreams’:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Yam5uK6e-bQ&list=RDYam5uK6e-bQ&start_radio=1

Track 4:

TORI AMOS: ‘Cornflake Girl’:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=tfC0-pVpQWw&list=RDtfC0-pVpQWw&start_radio=1

Track 5:

R.E.M.: ‘The Sidewinder Sleeps Tonite’:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=mgiCechWNCo&list=RDmgiCechWNCo&start_radio=1

Track 6:

SUPER FURRY ANIMALS: ‘Hometown Unicorn’:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=_zxXF0B_SyM&list=RD_zxXF0B_SyM&start_radio=1

Track 7:

ASH: ‘Goldfinger’:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=VEKp-nvVn6I&list=RDVEKp-nvVn6I&start_radio=1

Track 8:

JONATHAN RICHMAN: ‘I Was Dancing in the Lesbian Bar’:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=qTLsfZk-FpE&list=RDqTLsfZk-FpE&start_radio=1

Track 9:

JONATHAN RICHMAN & THE MODERN LOVERS: ‘The Neighbors’:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=IU7MkgF5IwU&list=RDIU7MkgF5IwU&start_radio=1

Track 10:

HEFNER: ‘To Hide a Little Thought’:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=mO7c6OphdnY&list=RDmO7c6OphdnY&start_radio=1

Track 11:

NEW PORNOGRAPHERS: ‘The Bleeding Heart Show’:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=yXi56azb6b4&list=RDyXi56azb6b4&start_radio=1

Track 12:

NEW PORNOGRAPHERS: ‘Letter from an Occupant’:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=wCc_8HuWlQo&list=RDwCc_8HuWlQo&start_radio=1

Track 13:

RADIOHEAD: ‘Airbag’:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=jNY_wLukVW0&list=RDjNY_wLukVW0&start_radio=1

Track 14:

TAME IMPALA: ‘Feels Like We Only Go Backwards’:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=wycjnCCgUes&list=RDwycjnCCgUes&start_radio=1

FLA 32: Joanna Wyld (09/11/2025)

November 9, 2025 / whenisbins / Leave a comment

Of all the guests I’ve had on First Last Anything so far, Kent-born Joanna Wyld might have worn the most musical hats. Writer, musician, composer, librettist, teacher and administrator, she’s played in orchestras, concert bands and pop groups, she has a passion for everything from bellringing to soul music, and has been a prolific writer of articles, liner notes and concert programme notes for many years. Her writing is always so perceptive, thoughtful, colourful, nuanced and (underrated quality, this) informative.

In conversation, Joanna is no different. What follows, the highlights from a couple of hours on Zoom one afternoon in October 2025, could easily have run twice as long. I love it when a conversation with a guest introduces me to many new pieces, and this is certainly one of those occasions. We both hope you enjoy reading it, and sampling Joanna’s wide-ranging listening choices – not only her First, Last and wildcard selections, but all her other suggestions too.

—-

JUSTIN LEWIS:

So to begin with, what music do you first remember hearing in your home? Because I know you have a very eclectic taste – was that always there?

JOANNA WYLD:

Yes, I think ‘eclectic’ is a really good reflection of my home growing up. I didn’t grow up in what you would describe as a musical household. Everyone loved music, but my parents weren’t classically trained – my dad can’t read music but loves it, my mum can read music, and plays the piano and the organ.

We were never told that a particular genre was better than others. We had a good eclectic range of records that we enjoyed playing. I think the first record I learned to put on the record player independently was The Beatles’ ‘I Want to Hold Your Hand’. And there were quite a few Beatles singles, but also my brothers and I would use music to capture our imaginations a bit. Because we’d hear ‘Oxygene’ by Jean-Michel Jarre when we’d go to the London Planetarium, it would be on if you were waiting to go in. So [at home] we’d use those kinds of experiences – we’d use a reel-to-reel tape recorder, and – I mean, we were very little, it was very silly – we’d write a type of sci-fi script with ‘Oxygene’ playing in the background as our soundtrack.

My relationship with sound was affected by certain things growing up. My grandad and my dad were – and my dad still is – bellringers, which I think is a hugely underrated discipline. We rightly praise the Aurora Orchestra playing things by heart – I went to see them do The Rite of Spring by heart [at Saffron Hall in 2023] and it was absolutely mindblowing, they deserve all the credit for that – but bellringers do that every weekend, three hours or more of memorised mathematical permutations while handling these unwieldly bells. If we’re going to be patriotic about something, I feel like that’s something to be proud about, because it’s unusual and it’s such a skill.

With bellringing, there are these interesting patterns, but also these slight irregularities because it’s not mechanised – there are people doing this, and there are also these spatial qualities of sound that you get when you hear it resonating in a ringing chamber. With the tunings, you get these harmonics, these overtones, and sometimes they seem to vibrate or clash.

JUSTIN LEWIS:

There’s that way that bells can sound slightly off-key, which you sometimes get with distance and echo. Do you have perfect pitch, then?

JOANNA WYLD:

No, and actually, I suspect my relationship with tuning is a little bit strange because I grew up with this sense of music being a little more fluid, not necessarily fitting within these strict parameters we’re used to thinking about in terms of pitch. And I suspect that then influenced my love for composition and contemporary and 20^th century music later, made me open to it, because I’d grown up with this variety of sounds, without that sense of hierarchy about it.

JUSTIN LEWIS:

And did you do some bellringing yourself?

JOANNA WYLD:

I did learn for a short while, but then I had an experience where a rope hit me – it is quite dangerous. My dad was there, and he grabbed it and it was fine… but I was a bit put off by that. Also, I don’t think I’ve got the mathematical brain to do all the actual methods, but I love the sound of it. It could almost be rebranded as mindfulness. If you listen, it’s got enough patterns to keep your brain interested – but it’s also quite mesmerising. I think, I hope, there is a new generation of people coming through who can do it. It’s in the category of things like dry-stone walling… almost like folk traditions. These things deserve to be continued in the least jingoistic way, just because they are interesting and skilful.

I have a CD called Church Bells of England, which is an incredibly sexy thing to own, and it has all these examples of ringing in various places. None of them are perfect in terms of the ringing or the sound quality, but they give a sense of what’s hypnotic about it. The example from St Giles, Cripplegate launches straight into these complex patterns, it’s so absorbing. And then you have composers who’ve drawn on this, from William Byrd’s emulation of change-ringing in keyboard music, to Jonathan Harvey’s wonderful Mortuous Plango, Vivos Voco, which samples the tenor bell at Winchester Cathedral. I heard it played during a London Sinfonietta concert and you felt like you were surrounded by the recording of the bell, it was a visceral experience.

——

JOANNA WYLD:

Classical music came in when we were in the car, we’d put cassettes on, and I did discover then that I really loved this music. This would have been from the age of about eight onwards… that’s when I started to play the flute.

JUSTIN LEWIS:

The exact age I started too, actually. Why did you pick the flute, then?

JOANNA WYLD:

Well, it was slightly by default, because in my primary school, which was very tiny, you could learn the piano, the violin or the flute. There were three teachers who came in, and I had more of a yearning to learn the clarinet, but it wasn’t really possible. It just wasn’t very practical – this is before we got our piano. My older brother had been learning to play the violin, so I kind of ended up on the flute because that was what was available. I mean, it took ages to get a note out of it, but it wasn’t a burning ambition to learn that particular instrument.

JUSTIN LEWIS:

Yeah, I think I wanted to play the violin, but I have a feeling my parents couldn’t have coped with the idea there’d be at least three years of scraping. I seem to remember we were watching something on TV, there was someone playing the violin absolutely brilliantly, and I recall saying something like, ‘Oh I’d love to be able to do that’, and it all went very quiet in the room. So maybe that was a clue. I think with the flute, I think I liked it as a colour in an ensemble, rather than as a solo instrument. I did enjoy playing but I found solo playing quite stressful – and also I felt a bit alienated in my teens because I did want to be in bands, but I had no idea how you went about that. I learned the saxophone for a while, and that got me into bands a bit. But I told this story on a podcast recently – when I got into university, I did a music degree for a year, but obviously in the college orchestra you could only really have three flautists in there. You couldn’t really have fifteen.

JOANNA WYLD:

Yes, if you’ve got too many flutes, what do you do? I was really lucky because I grew up near the Bromley Youth Music Trust, a music hub that offers affordable music ensembles, so I grew up in a concert band system, and that’s how they deal with instruments where there are too many for a standard orchestra. That was quite a discipline in terms of ensemble playing. And so I ended up in this concert band where we’d tour and do competitions and it was quite high level, but it was a brilliant exercise in eclectic music, because in concerts you’d have stuff written for it specifically, often quite contemporary and imaginative. And then you’ve got arrangements of pop, film and classical – so a lovely kind of cross section. Music for concert band and brass band is another genre that’s oddly underrated I think. I love the ‘Overture’ from Björk’s Selma Songs (don’t watch Dancer in the Dark, it’s traumatising, but listen to the soundtrack), it’s a lovely example of rich brass writing. And the song that pairs with it, ‘New World’, is gorgeous, very powerful.

And then in the sixth form, I got into the BYMT symphony orchestra having sort of worked my way through. That was a huge experience, and I was just so lucky, because we were playing quite high-level repertoire: Britten’s ‘Four Sea Interludes’, and Bernstein’s ‘On the Waterfront’, and Dvořák symphonies, Sibelius symphonies… We played Mahler, you know! I became immersed in all this. And our teachers were phenomenal because they expected these really high standards of us, and we were living up to them. This was a lot of state-school educated people, and we were so lucky to have this affordable opportunity to make music like that. Then at university, I was exposed to more 20^th century and contemporary and started to play things like the Berio ‘Sequenza’ and Messiaen’s ‘Le merle noir’, stuff which uses more kind of percussive and unusual sounds on the flute.

JUSTIN LEWIS:

Tell me about Richard Strauss, who you mentioned to me was a particularly important composer you heard at a formative age.

JOANNA WYLD:

It’s his ‘Four Last Songs’ [composed in 1948] in particular. I think, for GCSE or A level music, I had heard his ‘Morgen!’ [‘Tomorrow!’]. Back in the day, CDs were quite expensive and I wasn’t buying them lots. My birthday or Christmas was coming up and so I asked my parents for Strauss’s ‘Morgen!’. They couldn’t find that on record in our local record shop so they gave me this instead – a happy accident.

I love all of the music on that record for different reasons – you’ve also got ‘Death and Transfiguration’, [a tone poem written in 1888–89] when Strauss was quite a young man, and which in many ways is not really about death but is more life-affirming, though it’s dramatic. Whereas with the ‘Four Last Songs’ everything’s stripped back, because he did tend towards bombast and vulgarity at times, and these were written when he was really facing death. They’re just four of the most beautiful things ever written. The third one in particular [‘When Falling Asleep’] just has this incredible climactic moment and wonderful violin solo. And in the final song [‘At Sunset’], you get this pair of piccolos which are the birds representing the two souls of him and his wife, off into the ether – it’s just so beautiful.

JUSTIN LEWIS:

And ‘At Sunset’ quotes a little motif from ‘Death and Transfiguration’, doesn’t it, at one point?

JOANNA WYLD:

Yes, and there’s a horn solo at the end of [the second song] ‘September’ – his father was a very celebrated horn player. And through him, he’d been to hear lots of premieres of Wagner operas because his father was playing in them, and his father tried to discourage his interest in Wagner! [laughs] Anyway, so you feel as though that horn solo might have been just a nice little valedictory kind of farewell to that memory of his father as well.

JUSTIN LEWIS:

I know you particularly love this specific recording of the ‘Four Last Songs’, with Gundula Janowitz singing and Herbert von Karajan conducting [first released in 1974], but I take it you know who else was a fan of it as well?

JOANNA WYLD:

David Bowie [which inspired him to write four songs for his Heathen album]. Yes, I love this fact. I’m kind of thrilled that it’s that specific recording, with Janowitz – because people are divided as to which is the best. Strauss is one of those people, like Mahler, where I have different recordings of their works because I do think people can bring something different in. But yeah, I just love the fact that Bowie loved the same recording as I do!

JUSTIN LEWIS:

Bowie’s influences just seem to come from so many places. We’re back to eclectic again, as with you.

JOANNA WYLD:

I think I’m discerning about quality, but there isn’t a hierarchy of genres. Obviously, classical is my speciality, and I’m passionate about it, but it’s all there to be enjoyed, we’re complex human beings, and Bowie obviously recognised that. I understand why people specialise, but I love to embrace variety.

——

FIRST: QUEEN: ‘Bohemian Rhapsody’/ ‘These Are the Days of Our Lives’ (EMI Records, cassette single, 1991)

JUSTIN LEWIS:

‘Bohemian Rhapsody’ was first released in 1975 when I was five, and I vividly remember the video on Top of the Pops. It’s hard to remember what the world was like before this record, because it is one of the first that’s seared into my mind.

JOANNA WYLD:

And this reissue was the first record that I can remember wanting to buy. I was eleven. I heard it on the radio. It was just unlike anything else I’d ever heard. But it’s got that context of originally coming out in the mid-seventies when there was the mainstream three-minute pop song and at the same time there was prog: people yodelling or a synth solo, sometimes quite self-indulgent. But here you’ve got something that’s both: it’s mainstream adjacent and also proggy – it’s an extended idea and a concept. I just thought it was really fun, kind of dramatic and extraordinary. And that appealed.

It wasn’t that long afterwards that Wayne’s World (1992) cemented it as well. But for me it also represents a couple of things I generally find interesting about music. One: it’s the victim of its own success – as you said, you can’t imagine it not being there. Even those who don’t like it, couldn’t imagine it not being there. That’s an extraordinary achievement. And that can lead to it becoming ubiquitous and taken for granted, almost an irritant.

A parallel for me would be Holst’s Planets suite. I fell into the same trap with that – I’d just heard it so many times. And then at university, I finally got to play in it. And I realised: this is so well written, so well orchestrated, and this would have been incredibly original at the time. And it has been emulated a lot since, but I hadn’t given it enough credit for what it was, when it was written.

The other aspect of ‘Bohemian Rhapsody’ I find interesting: it’s so of the person who wrote it. Some composers have that instantly recognisable fingerprint. Holst is one, Messiaen, Stravinsky, Copland, more recently Louis Cole and Genevieve Artadi, both separately and together as Knower, – and I think Freddie Mercury is another, in this song. It’s him, just going, ‘I’m not going to worry about what anyone else thinks, I’m not going to draw on lots of other influences, this is what I want to write.’ I admire anyone who can do that.

JUSTIN LEWIS:

There are aspects of it that remain mysterious, like nobody has ever quite nailed what it is really about. Brilliantly, someone has put up clips of Kenny Everett actually playing ‘Bohemian Rhapsody’ for the first time, on his weekend lunchtime show on Capital Radio in 1975 – have you heard this?

JOANNA WYLD:

No, but he championed it, didn’t he? I haven’t done a deep dive, I have to admit.

JUSTIN LEWIS:

I only found it the other day. Seems he had been playing extracts from it, and then he plays the whole thing.

Kenny Everett, Capital Radio, c. October 1975

We had this song in our house because it’s on their album A Night at the Opera, which has this ambitious mix of quite whimsical, almost music-hall songs, and then out-and-out rock tracks. I still think it’s probably their best record. I like to hear it as part of the album. As you just said with The Planets, it’s good to go back and play it in context.

But even with Kenny Everett’s support, it’s still really weird they put this out as the single, in a way. And obviously, you bought this re-release after Freddie Mercury had just died [24 November 1991]. How aware were you of that event?

JOANNA WYLD:

I think this was the first experience I had of a celebrity death having an impact, and of feeling incredibly sad. The AA side, ‘These Are the Days of Our Lives’, is just incredibly poignant. I can’t watch the video where he sort of says ‘I love you’ at the end. It’s just so, so heartbreaking. I think for a lot of people, it really brought home the reality of the HIV and AIDS pandemic. That this wonderful larger-than-life figure, famous and well-off and all the rest of it, had been hit by it. I don’t remember the extent to which I understood everything at that point in my life, but it definitely stayed with me. It felt like such a horrible shock and a horrible loss.

JUSTIN LEWIS:

Until I was doing the research for this, I’d forgotten it was a charity single, for the Terrence Higgins Trust. Since when it’s been in so many other things – Wayne’s World as you mentioned, but just this summer, in September, at the Last Night of the Proms.

JOANNA WYLD:

The Prom was a lot of fun. I know it divided opinion a little bit, but it’s nice to celebrate people while they’re alive. I think Brian May and Roger Taylor deserve that moment. While I’m not the biggest Queen fan, and I don’t listen to the music loads, they do all seem fundamentally decent, and those remaining members have really championed Freddie’s memory and always mention him. There’s something quite loving there.

——

JUSTIN LEWIS:

I wanted to talk to you about writing liner notes for CD releases and programme notes for concerts, because that’s something you’ve been doing for many years. How did you first get into this sort of work?

JOANNA WYLD:

The first clue lies back in my childhood. We’d play classical music in the car, and one cassette we had was Saint-Saëns’ Carnival of the Animals suite [composed 1886, but only published posthumously in 1922], featuring lots of quite kid-friendly stuff. And when I went to secondary school, my first music assignment was to write the description of a piece of music. I remember spending ages on this, being so enthused by it. I went home, read the sleevenotes of Carnival of the Animals, got my little dictionary of music, did a bit of research and wrote it up. It was like a prototype for what I’d do later. It was just a Year 7 essay, I was about eleven, it wasn’t hugely in-depth, but it’s interesting that’s stuck with me as a memory – an early enjoyment of writing about music showed up.

But how I got into it professionally… I was working at a record company, originally called ASV, which also had some peripheral labels: Gaudeamus was an early music label, Black Box was a contemporary music label, everything on White Line was sort of middle of the road, like light music, and then Living Era was the nostalgia label. This was my first job after university, and I was the editorial assistant.

For Living Era, we used to get these liner notes written on a typewriter by these lovely old gents who were jazz experts, some of them virtually contemporary with the songs they were writing about! They were delightful to work with, but one day we were missing a liner note, and my boss said, ‘This person just forgot to file this copy and we really need it now. Can you cobble something together?’ And this was in the days before there was a huge amount on the Internet about these things. I think I used early Wikipedia. But because I’d edited and proofread so many of these notes already, I knew the style. So I was able to emulate that slightly chatty nostalgic style, as well as getting the information in. I knocked this out quite quickly and my boss was quite impressed, which was nice, and then asked me to do more and more bits of writing.

And then ASV got bought out by Sanctuary Records, which had all these associated metal artists – so you’d go into the canteen and Bruce Dickinson of Iron Maiden would be there, and they’d have Kerrang! TV on. We had a meeting interrupted because Robert Plant was in reception. It was very glamorous, quite fun – I loved it, and I got to meet some really interesting people.

But all this meant that later, still in the heyday of CD production, particularly in classical music, I was hired to do a lot of freelance writing. There was a lot of repackaging – essentially getting older recordings and repackaging them as ‘The Best of Poulenc’ or whoever it was – and new labels were being set up. So I was asked to churn out quite a lot of essays for them, and quite quickly built up a body of work. The hardest commission was when my daughter was only a couple of months old, when I was asked to do 17 liner notes in two and a half weeks, so I was a machine for that period. It was something like one essay a day. And obviously I was looking after a small child!

Then I started to get emails from various people – the BBC, Royal Liverpool Philharmonic, and others: ‘We’ve noticed your writing, we like it, would you like to send me some examples.’ And it’s slowly built from there.

I would say I’m a generalist. I’m not someone who’s done a PhD in a specific area, I always treat myself as someone who’s not really an expert, but I will do the research when I’m writing a programme note, as thoroughly as possible, as is relevant for that programme note, but I’m always kind of standing on the shoulders of people who’ve done that in-depth research. But equally, I’m trying to bring my perspective, and the way I hear it and write about it, hopefully I can bring some joy to people’s listening experience.

JUSTIN LEWIS:

And you got to write about new commissions as well, is that right?

JOANNA WYLD:

One that was really nice – it was a premiere performance – was Mark-Anthony Turnage’s ‘Owl Songs’ as a tribute to Oliver Knussen (1952–2018). It was a real privilege to write about that because I’d met Oliver Knussen a couple of times, an absolute gem of a man and composer. His music is just these crystalline jewels of orchestral beauty, and I’d recommend something like ‘Flourish with Fireworks’ (1988) to anyone who thinks contemporary music’s a bit alienating. So he mentored Mark-Anthony Turnage who I’ve also since interviewed, and Olly was known affectionately as Big Owl – particularly Mark referred to him in that affectionate way. So the Owl Songs are these wonderful tributes.

JUSTIN LEWIS:

Are you adhering to house style with these things, or do they tend to leave you alone?

JOANNA WYLD:

There’s very little editorial interference, actually, which is lovely. And I’ve built up trust with a number of commissioners, which is great. What has changed in the style of writing for these sorts of things is it used to be much more academic, much closer to my university essays. The expectation would be that your audience would be aficionados – but it was a lot drier. Actually it’s much more fun now, because the emphasis is on something more inviting and accessible that could be read by anyone, and if you do something more technical, you just explain it in passing. You try and make it as enjoyable as possible to read and that has been fun because I can bring out my own personality a bit more, and feel freer to illuminate what’s exciting about the music.

I feel very strongly that we tend to present classical music as very polite, elegant and smooth, and it can be all of those things, but it can also be… terrifying, for example. Like with Stravinsky’s Rite of Spring, I get palpitations – it’s visceral, it’s filthy. Or Richard Strauss, which can be, to be blunt, very sexual – and I think people almost need permission to hear it in that way because they think classical is ‘all very nice’, and actually… he was a bit of a perv, you know? And if that sort of thing’s there, it’s pointless to not draw people towards that way of listening or bringing out the enjoyment of it.

JUSTIN LEWIS:

Why do you think then that happened to classical music, that the politeness of it became paramount? Is it because of how it was taught, or presented?

JOANNA WYLD:

Every possible experience you have had is all there in classical music somewhere. These are very complex people writing it, and often that’s what I enjoy exploring – their personality, their quirks, their flaws, and the rest of it.

I mean, this is a huge topic – people have done PhDs on this – but in terms of how we receive it… the Victorians have a fair bit to answer for. You know, the idea of the Opera House: people had previously been there as an everyday experience, and then it became this hierarchy of ‘who sits where’, and then obviously with different genres, you have this shift – music that was contemporary becoming historical, and then becoming classical, so it’s no longer immediate. Whereas pop music is obviously reflecting people now. So with anything historical, you can end up with this sheen of respectability and this sense of it being a museum piece, something that you have to treat with reverence.

It’s really complicated but yes, definitely the way it’s taught, even the way it’s marketed… the way even people who love classical music sometimes talk about it… it can be quite reverential, and there are bits of it that are of course sublime. But there’s plenty else in there, and it’s almost just encouraging people to go and hear it.

JUSTIN LEWIS:

So how do you strike a balance between musicology and biography when you’re writing these?

JOANNA WYLD:

There used to be more of an emphasis on musicology – perhaps the structure of a piece of music could go into a bit of detail – whereas now I tend to start with biography and history and set the scene. I try and give a bit of historical context and wherever possible bring out the interesting details about that composer that are relevant to that piece. And if possible, quotes – direct quotes are really interesting. If I can find them, if they’re reliable, just from letters or whatever, because that just tells you so much about them.

We were told at university: You mustn’t let the biography of a composer influence the way the music is interpreted too heavily. I think that’s fair, particularly from an academic perspective – that you are not there to try and tell a story through every single score. And if you’re trying to look at it on its own terms, musically, you do need to separate the two, but for a concert-going or a CD-listening experience, it brings the music to life, stops it being a museum piece. Because you realise these human beings were just as complicated as we are, and often just funny, or grumpy or whatever. Then I might go into some musical detail, and if I’ve got space, try and do a bit of a listening guide, try and draw out some highlights, some things to listen out for.

Occasionally I’ll do a deep dive, find something that isn’t widely known, or almost gives people permission to think of those composers in a slightly different way. For example, JS Bach’s ‘Musical Offering’ (1747). With Bach, he’s so revered we tend to deify him, and talk about him in reverential tones. But the story behind that piece is so fascinating. I did a lot of research from a non-classical perspective, like reading a bit of Gödel, Escher, Bach [by the US scientist Douglas Hofstadter, published 1979], and stuff about mathematical patterns. But with that piece, you also had family dynamics going on – his son [CPE Bach] was working for Frederick [the Great, King Frederick II of Prussia] who commissioned this piece, but they laid down the gauntlet in the most provocative way by saying, ‘Oh, improvise a fugue in six parts’ and no-one had ever really done that. He managed a three-part improvisation and then went away – and it was as though he had a fit of pique, producing this ridiculously vast response to this challenge, creating something out of this deliberately difficult and angular theme. And none of this that I included was new, but it was quite nice to bring out those aspects. Especially with someone like Bach who obviously had great faith and appears to be very holy… that composition came from a bit of anger and irritation.

JUSTIN LEWIS:

Yes, bringing composers to life as human beings without overemphasising to the detriment of the work. I’m sure it’s changed in school-teaching now, back stories are brought up more. I had good music teachers at school, but I don’t ever remember being taught about these composers’ lives, which now feels really weird. Or even the wider history of the time.

JOANNA WYLD:

It’s like Beethoven was a young carer, effectively. His dad descended into alcoholism after his mother’s death, so he was caring for his siblings, which prevented him from staying in Vienna to study with Mozart, which he really wanted to do. Information like that is really humanising, especially as Beethoven was perhaps the first in the 19^th century to be regarded as ‘in touch with the divine’, and really cast that long shadow.

I would probably say I’m not a musicologist like, say, Leah Broad [FLA 28], but I’d call myself a music historian. The history of it is fascinating, and it helps people to get closer to the music because they realise these were normal people who might have been incredibly gifted but also worked really hard. Again, Bach was one of those people, who said, Anyone who works as hard as me can do the same thing. Which is not entirely true, but nor was he sitting there on a cloud, you know, being a genius.

JUSTIN LEWIS:

I mentioned this in the Leah Broad chat, about hearing Radio 3 say in passing about how Felix Mendelssohn essentially revived JS Bach’s music around 1830 – it had hardly been played for about eighty years after Bach’s death.

JOANNA WYLD:

It had really gone out of fashion, it’s sort of staggering. Although Mozart and Beethoven had studied Bach, and actually the sort of contrapuntal depth they learnt from him is one thing that elevates their music above the more lightweight stuff of the time. So his influence was still there at key moments, although in terms of performance it wasn’t until Mendelssohn revived it.

——

JUSTIN LEWIS:

Something else I discovered from your website: you’ve been a librettist. Can you tell me about your work with Robert Hugill?

JOANNA WYLD:

That was a wonderful opportunity. A friend put us in touch. It was called ‘The Gardeners’. Robert had read this article about a family of gardeners in the Middle East, tending war graves, and it was intergenerational. So he had this idea, it was his conception, of how the generations relate to each other, and the old man of the three generations could hear the dead. So there was that metaphysical aspect to it, and so we had a chorus of the dead, and the youngest is quite a rebellious character. All of this was fictionalised – this isn’t based on the article – and it was a chamber opera, so it’s not huge scale, but it unfolded as a sort of family drama. Ultimately, the old man dies, whereupon the youngest man inherits his ability to hear the dead. Meantime, you’ve got the women of the family trying to keep the peace. So it’s a family drama with a metaphysical aspect. We performed it a couple of times, which was amazing, firstly at the Conway Hall and then at the Garden Museum with a wonderful cast.

JUSTIN LEWIS:

Is it about trying to find words that sound good as well as have meaning? When you’re writing something like that, does it become clear what doesn’t belong? Do you have a working method for something like that?

JOANNA WYLD:

I definitely think it helps that my Masters was in Composition. And I’ve set a lot of words myself. So I know the kind of thing I would set, and it’s not always the choice you might expect. It has to be something where the words lend themselves to musical treatment. Which often means there’s a rhythmic lilt to them – you’re thinking of the words rhythmically, but also making sure they don’t obstruct the music. So if it’s really overly polysyllabic and flowery, that’s going to get in the way, and it becomes about the words, not the music. But there’s also how the words sit next to each other – I remember reading a wonderful letter from Ted Hughes to Sylvia Plath about the choice of two words in one of her poems. It was two quite punchy words next to each other, and I think he suggested weighting them differently but also talking about them as if they were physical objects. I relate to that. So when I’m writing something like that, and I’m not saying it’s on that level, I try and think in terms of the weight of the words, and how they’ll then sit in someone’s mouth.

JUSTIN LEWIS:

Because just as there’s a musicality in music itself, there’s a musicality in words too, so you’ve got to match the two up. Do you still write music yourself, as well?

JOANNA WYLD:

I’ve written a couple of songs with bands I’ve been in, I enjoyed that. I had a really lovely teacher at university, Robert Saxton, but you really have to pursue it, you have to be so obsessed with it, and I also realised I’m probably better at writing about music than writing music.

JUSTIN LEWIS:

What sort of music were you writing for the bands you’ve been in?

JOANNA WYLD:

One song started out as a sort of Hot Chip parody really, almost like a joke – and then I added some influences from LCD Soundsystem; it’s quite a fun track, which we once played at a wedding, and a conga formed, which was one of the biggest compliments.

JUSTIN LEWIS:

That’s brilliant.

JOANNA WYLD:

And then I’ve written a sort of cathartic song called ‘Prufrock’, where I drew on TS Eliot’s ‘Love Song of J. Alfred Prufrock’.

JUSTIN LEWIS:

So you were singing these?

JOANNA WYLD:

Yeah. Another one was called ‘The Air’ which was my attempt at layering stuff together in a sort of Brian Wilson fashion.

JUSTIN LEWIS:

And what were your bands called? Were you gigging?

JOANNA WYLD:

One was called Fake Teak, and we recorded ‘Prufrock’. It’s my brother’s band, named after the equipment that our dad had when we were growing up. That’s now evolved into something called Music Research Unit, which is a similar line-up, but more fluid and with new songs. We had our first rehearsal just yesterday! Then I’m in another band called Dawn of the Squid, and I don’t write for them, and they’re hard to describe, but they’re kind of… indie-folk, and there’s comedy in there.

JUSTIN LEWIS:

Is this out there to hear?

JOANNA WYLD:

There’s a new Dawn of the Squid album, which I didn’t play on, I can’t take any credit, but that’s out. There’s quite a bit of Fake Teak on Spotify. I play synthesisers and flute in these groups, and to go back to what we were discussing earlier – about sounds not being strictly in tune – what I find lovely about some synthesisers is they feel much closer to acoustic instruments; they can go out of tune, and you can make unpleasant as well as pleasant noises on them. I play this instrument sometimes called an ARP Odyssey [analogue synthesiser introduced in 1972] and it can go out of tune on stage, it’s a real rarity, and it’s been used in loads of pop like Ultravox. But I have had gigs where it’s gone a bit out of tune, and in a weird way I kind of enjoyed that more than digital instruments where it’s got presets and everything’s tidy, because it feels much closer to my experience of other instruments.

—–

**LAST: THE UNTHANKS: Diversions, Vol. 4: The Songs and Poems of Molly Drake (2017, RabbleRouser Music)**

Extract: ‘What Can a Song Do to You?’

JOANNA WYLD:

I’m not a folk expert, I’m getting into it more, but like a lot of people, I came to this because I heard Unthanks do the ‘Magpie’ song on Detectorists. Then I went to a concert, locally, on the strength of that, and that’s where they performed some of these Molly Drake songs. I loved the whole concert – one of my prevailing memories of it is my crying my contact lens out during one of the Molly Drake songs, and just having to sit there with it in my palm, kind of half-blind.

JUSTIN LEWIS:

These songs are amazing to hear because we know so much, or at least we think we do, about Nick Drake’s life, but obviously the Molly Drake archive hasn’t been pored over by scholars too much. I think most of these songs are from the Fifties, and the Unthanks have covered them, apparently, because they wanted to make better quality recordings. And the Molly Drake versions are out there too. But there’s something about these songs that are both public creativity – as in the Drake family being aware of these songs – and private creativity too as it wasn’t out in the public domain for years. And you keep having to remind yourself that these songs were written before Nick Drake got into music himself, not afterwards.

JOANNA WYLD:

Yes, so many women composers are talked of in relation to their male relative, but you’re right that she was doing this first. It clearly influenced Nick Drake, and the almost painful shyness is a clear link, so it illuminates his music, which I also love, but I think on its own terms Molly’s music is phenomenal and yet, incredible that she was so shy that I think her husband bought her a reel-to-reel and set her up in a room on her own with it. He recognised her talent so there was this idea of ‘Let’s get this down for posterity’, but there was no concept in her mind that anyone would ever hear it, which seems really alien to us now, but there’s a real beauty to that.

JUSTIN LEWIS:

I think there can be a pressure when you’re writing something that you know is going to be for public consumption in some way. But I found a great Rachel Unthank quote:

‘Her work shares her son’s dark introspection, but in Molly we get a clearer sense of how those who understand depths of despair can do so only by understanding happiness and joy too. Through Molly’s work, we see the soulful, enigmatic lonesomeness as a person who is also a member of a loving and fun-loving family.’

I think that’s really important because Nick Drake – and his work – tends to be defined by what happened to him, and not all of him and his work is like that. I mean, the Molly song that feels like it could have been written in response to his early death – ‘Do You Ever Remember?’ – was written much earlier.

JOANNA WYLD:

You mentioned family, but obviously on the Unthanks recording, you’ve also got Gabrielle Drake reciting the poetry. I went to the Nick Drake Prom, with the Unthanks performing with Gabrielle Drake, which was phenomenally moving – and brave of her as well, I thought. And it’s a rich combination to listen to – you’ve got the sugared almond sound of the Unthanks’ voices, and the woodier timbre of her delivery. The whole thing really cuts to your heart, similar to Nick Drake, but it’s even less crowded in metaphor, it cuts to the heart with a deceptive simplicity. The first track, ‘What Can a Song Do to You?’, has one of those melodies that feels like it’s always existed, and then this tremendous bit of poetry. I really admire people who can pick and use very few words to convey something. I was lucky enough to interview Michael Morpurgo many years ago, and he blew my mind in terms of how to write. He used to say, ‘We don’t need to teach kids lots of florid words, but to be direct.’ That lyrical and nuanced but straightforward vocabulary can be more powerful and it’s something I aspire to, [but] I don’t always find it easy.

JUSTIN LEWIS:

I feel the same way. As an editor and sometime writer, I find that writing a simple sentence is actually quite hard.

JOANNA WYLD:

The poem I was going to mention at the end of ‘What Can a Song Do to You?’: ‘Does it remind you of a time when you were sad? (So in other words, why? Why is this person crying?) Does it remind you of the time when you were sad? Ah, no. But it reminds me of a time when I could be. It reminds me of a time when I could be…

And I sort of think that’s… mindblowing.

JUSTIN LEWIS:

That particular song has been going around my head for the last few days. Going back to what you were saying with Detectorists making you aware of Unthanks, film and TV does seem to be a major way for people to connect with people now. I sometimes look at the streaming stats for tracks at random, wonder how that’s become the biggest thing, and it’s nearly always some film or TV programme I wasn’t aware of.

JOANNA WYLD:

I guess it’s a route in. I recognise this with classical music as well – I’m lucky enough to have grown up with enough that I’ve absorbed bits and learned about it, done my degrees in it. If I hadn’t done that, that might be my way in as well. And as I don’t have that background with folk song – I like the genre in a broad sense, but I wouldn’t know where to start looking. There’s too much out there, and there are playlists but they can be a bit too rambling.

——

**ANYTHING: THE CARDINALL’S MUSICK / ANDREW CARWOOD / DAVID SKINNER: Cornysh, Turges, Prentes: Latin Church Music (1997, Gaudeamus/ASV Records)**

Extract: William Cornysh: ‘Salve Regina’

JOANNA WYLD:

This ties a few things together. This is the William Cornysh recording of ‘Salve Regina’, which is my favourite work on that album, but it’s on the Gaudeamus label which I mentioned earlier. I worked with some of the people on that label, but I also know about this repertoire because I was lucky enough at university to study early music with David Skinner, who’s one of the two founders of The Cardinall’s Musick [the other being Andrew Carwood]. They’ve since gone in different directions and David now conducts [a consort] called Alamire. So this is going back a bit, but it was through that university experience that I got to hear this. It’s funny – we were talking about church music earlier but this is English Catholic music of the Tudor era and it’s sad to me that the Catholic Church in this country doesn’t have that kind of choral tradition because we’ve got these riches but for some reason it’s not performed in that church context very often, but nor is it often sung in the concert hall either. Slightly later you get Thomas Tallis and William Byrd, in the Elizbaethan era, that gets mentioned a bit more. But for some reason the Eton Choir Book doesn’t get as much attention and I think it deserves it, so I thought it might be quite fun to bring that in. Because particularly with the Cornysh ‘Salve Regina’, it’s incredible.

JUSTIN LEWIS:

In fact, I’ve got a quote from David Skinner here, from the 1990s: Henry VIII had destroyed most of the musical manuscripts and he says ‘there are literally only two of the choir books I worked from when originally there would have been hundreds.’

JOANNA WYLD:

Yes, Lambeth is the other one, I think?

JUSTIN LEWIS:

He mentions the Eton Choir Book, and the other was Caius?

JOANNA WYLD:

I will have to check my facts because the history of this area is so complex!

JUSTIN LEWIS:

I’m glad you said that! I merely skimmed this, and it felt quite complicated!

JOANNA WYLD:

Really complicated, and I’m sure some of the complexities of how it was written have gone out of the window for me… I learned them a long time ago. I do, very geekily, have a facsimile copy of the Eton Choir Book. I occasionally try and follow along, and it’s quite tricky to follow because instead of it being arranged in score, you’ve got the four parts written separately.

But when I heard the ‘Salve Regina’ at university, it stuck out for me. It’s incredibly beautiful, it takes a bit of time to get into the language and it’s interesting to me that a lot of people who love early music and love contemporary music overlap because early music predates a lot of ‘the rules’ that dominate so much of Western music. With this piece, it’s like you’re walking through a cathedral, meandering, just wandering, but then you get these cadences or these chords, very vivid moments, that feel like light coming through stained glass. And it’s quite a long piece, but right at the end, it just builds and builds up to that high note, which then drops down, and then you have these glorious last two chords. At that point, it’s almost like you’re at the rose window… Even if you’re not religious, music does reflect every facet of who we are, and spirituality is one facet of who we are as human beings. So it’s powerful even if we don’t specifically believe in something. It’s a sense of time travel. It takes you out of yourself and takes you back, but it also kind of elevates as well.

———–

JOANNA WYLD:

At school, I don’t recall learning much pop at all. It wasn’t that I wasn’t exposed to it, but in terms of my actual education, the emphasis was on the history of Western music, classical and symphonic music and so on. My daughter did have to analyse pop – I remember Fleetwood Mac’s ‘The Chain’ being one example. I’ve been a primary school teacher, and I do remember teaching some Stevie Wonder because any excuse, I absolutely love Stevie Wonder, but it was Black History Month and so I brought in his songs about social history, and they all knew ‘Happy Birthday’ but we could talk about how that brought in Martin Luther King Day, which was a lovely way of giving the pupils a sense of the impact music can have.

JUSTIN LEWIS:

Interesting that they knew the song, it’s not one of his you hear that often now.

JOANNA WYLD:

They all knew the chorus, when I sang that bit, they knew that, but they didn’t know the verses or the lyrics so they just thought of it as generic. It’s not my favourite Stevie song – I’ve got so many – but it’s an example of how powerful music can be.

———

You can find out more about Joanna, and her work, at her website, Notes Upon Notes: https://www.notes-upon-notes.com

You can follow her on Bluesky at @joannawyld.bsky.social.

Also, find out more about Dawn of the Squid at their website: https://dawnofthesquid.co.uk

—–

FLA PLAYLIST 32

Joanna Wyld

For the time being, this site and project uses Spotify for the conversation playlists, but obviously I disapprove that Spotify doesn’t pay artists and composers properly, and other streaming platforms are available, as are sites to buy downloads and buy recordings. For consistency, you can also listen to the selections via YouTube (where available), and links are provided in each case, below.)

Thanks to Tune My Music, you can also transfer this playlist to the platform or site of your choice by using this link: https://www.tunemymusic.com/share/QWjXV28T8E

Track 1:

THE BEATLES: ‘I Want to Hold Your Hand’:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=XT4pwRi2JmY&list=RDXT4pwRi2JmY&start_radio=1

Track 2:

JEAN-MICHEL JARRE: ‘Oxygène, Part IV’:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=_PycXs9LpEM&list=RD_PycXs9LpEM&start_radio=1

Track 3:

ST GILES, CRIPPLEGATE BELL RINGING TEAM: ‘Cambridge Surprise Maximus’: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=o8rwhJHt9Ds&list=RDo8rwhJHt9Ds&start_radio=1

Track 4:

JONATHAN HARVEY: ‘Mortuos Plango, Vivos Voco’:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=0T-H-fVlHE0&list=RD0T-H-fVlHE0&start_radio=1

Track 5:

BJÖRK: ‘Overture’:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=6k4xT0qjUW4&list=RD6k4xT0qjUW4&start_radio=1

Track 6:

BJÖRK: ‘New World’:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=eNma-h_urvs&list=RDeNma-h_urvs&start_radio=1

Track 7:

LEONARD BERNSTEIN: ‘On the Waterfront Suite’

Bournemouth Symphony Orchestra, Marin Alsop:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=t4isx_tGYwM&list=RDt4isx_tGYwM&start_radio=1

Track 8:

OLIVIER MESSIAEN: ‘Le merle noir’:

Emmanuel Pahud, Eric Le Sage:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=hT8MQpg7oTo&list=RDhT8MQpg7oTo&start_radio=1

Track 9:

RICHARD STRAUSS: ‘4 Letzte Lieder [Four Last Songs], TrV 296: No. 3: Beim Schlafengehen’:

Gundula Janowitz, Berliner Philharmoniker, Herbert von Karajan:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=t5n0DqFlpMY&list=RDt5n0DqFlpMY&start_radio=1

Track 10:

QUEEN: ‘Bohemian Rhapsody’:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=xG16sdjLtc0&list=RDxG16sdjLtc0&start_radio=1

Track 11:

LOUIS COLE, METROPOLE ORKEST, JULES BUCKLEY: ‘Shallow Laughter: Bitches – orchestral version’: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=bEmMAG4C1BE&list=RDbEmMAG4C1BE&start_radio=1

Track 12:

AARON COPLAND: ’12 Poems of Emily Dickinson: No. 10: I’ve Heard An Organ Talk Sometimes’:

Susan Chilcott, Iain Burnside:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=SvKLlCf2TWE&list=RDSvKLlCf2TWE&start_radio=1

Track 13:

OLIVER KNUSSEN: ‘Flourish with Fireworks, op. 22: Tempo giusto e vigoroso – Molto vivace’:

London Sinfonietta:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=wLkTfXPC-TU&list=RDwLkTfXPC-TU&start_radio=1

Track 14:

IGOR STRAVINSKY: ‘The Rite of Spring, Part 1: V. Games of the Rival Tribes’:

Seiji Ozawa, Chicago Symphony Orchestra:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=XiAr76Qs8WY&list=RDXiAr76Qs8WY&start_radio=1

Track 15:

IGOR STRAVINSKY: ‘The Rite of Spring, Part 1: VI. Procession of the Sage’:

Seiji Ozawa, Chicago Symphony Orchestra:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=nvBog5Tej2I&list=PL-XNw6p4EDBv7-H-z2Vo_c3sB3rvIxt7-&index=6

Track 16:

JOHANN SEBASTIAN BACH: ‘Musical Offering, BWV 1079: Ricercar a 6 – Clavecin’:

Pierre Hantaï:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=5K07rF5xOvQ

Track 17:

FAKE TEAK: ‘Prufrock’:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=L5-1prkhHjU&list=RDL5-1prkhHjU&start_radio=1

Track 18:

THE UNTHANKS: ‘What Can A Song Do to You?’

[Poem read by Gabrielle Drake]:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Jzqb_78LUkI&list=RDJzqb_78LUkI&start_radio=1

Track 19:

WILLIAM CORNYSH: ‘Salve Regina’:

The Cardinall’s Musick, Andrew Carwood, David Skinner:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=pQprxgtbk4E&list=RDpQprxgtbk4E&start_radio=1

Track 20:

STEVIE WONDER: ‘Happier Than the Morning Sun’:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=S4PcSOLtf-U&list=RDS4PcSOLtf-U&start_radio=1

FLA 2: Suzy Norman (05/06/2022)

May 15, 2025June 2, 2025 / whenisbins / Leave a comment

Painting, photography, acting, poetry, novel writing and singing – Suzy Norman does the lot. We first encountered each other online nearly 15 years ago when both of us had other blogs (don’t look for them, they’re not there anymore), and whenever we meet or talk, we regularly find ourselves discussing music, writing and general creativity.

In April and May 2022, we had a couple of conversations, encompassing not just her First/Last/Anything selections, but also the sound of silence in the big city, the physicality of music, and getting into trouble in GCSE music class. Suzy has an excellent singing voice, and often cannot help bursting into a song at the mention of its title. Maybe this should have been a podcast after all.

——

SUZY NORMAN

I’m interested in how what you’re into develops. At any age. When I was younger, before the age of twelve – I was really into anyone female: Clare Grogan, Toyah, I loved Hazel O’Connor… And then I really, really liked boys, so… Duran Duran, Adam Ant, the handsome ones.. And then, I was just going all over the place, really. Tina Turner and Taylor Dayne, I really loved Cher – ‘Gypsies, Tramps and Thieves’…

JUSTIN LEWIS

The belters.

SUZY NORMAN

Yeah. I liked a lot of joyful stuff. But in tandem, I loved REM and even started listening to things like Mudhoney. Mudhoney and Taylor Dayne!

JUSTIN LEWIS

If you like leftfield stuff but you like chart stuff as well, you can never get bored. I’ve never understood why people take musical tribalism into adulthood… And I didn’t even really understand it at school. The peer pressure thing – never quite got it.

SUZY NORMAN

My older brother’s always had quite a forceful personality, so he’s always influenced me more than my sister – but did he influence me, or is it just that I had to listen to a lot of his stuff? The Jam. Or Madness. The ‘boys’ stuff. Which I still don’t particularly like, to this day – but you just heard it a lot, didn’t you?

JUSTIN LEWIS

I’ve come round to The Jam a bit more, I can separate it now, but the people who liked The Jam at school were the ones telling you they were always better than the pop music you were listening to.

SUZY NORMAN

Ye-e-es. I loved the Police, though.

JUSTIN LEWIS

I quite liked The Jam, but I liked lots of other groups too. And people were the same with The Smiths for a bit, weren’t they? ‘This is the only group that matters.’ One aim of this series is to remove the remnants of shame of music.

FIRST: RACEY: ‘Some Girls’ (RAK Records, Single, 1979)

JUSTIN LEWIS

In terms of age, your first record purchase is going to be hard to beat for future guests. Short of them being a baby! You were, what… four?

SUZY NORMAN

This is the weirdest thing. I have corroborated this with my mum and dad, that I couldn’t have been four, and yet I remember buying it, but then I think, do I misremember buying it? But I did buy it. That’s how early I was into music. At that age, you’re not influenced by anyone – it’s just the cheesy stuff that you like. Like Racey.

JUSTIN LEWIS

So you went out and bought that yourself? Can you remember where you got it from?

SUZY NORMAN

Woolworths, Chepstow High Street. My dad took me. I had money left over from Christmas, I suppose.

JUSTIN LEWIS

Have you heard it recently?

SUZY NORMAN

Yes, I listened to it again last week. It’s alright! [Starts singing chorus] I mean it sounds dead old-fashioned, like the fifties.

JUSTIN LEWIS

Do you know who covered ‘Some Girls’ a couple of years later? Barry Manilow.

SUZY NORMAN

Good old Bazza.

JUSTIN LEWIS

Sounds like the same backing track!

SUZY NORMAN

I was also three years old when ‘Mull of Kintyre’ came out, ‘77. And I adored it. My auntie bought it for me, actually, as a little single – I literally wore a hole in it. I remember getting the record, and being excited because it was my first record. My mum says that I was just obsessed with it. I used to be in love with Paul McCartney, when I was about seven, I had delusions I was going to marry him.

JUSTIN LEWIS

This is the reason I’ve gone with first last anything rather than favourite record. The trouble with favourite record is it pressurises people to think what sums them up. But if you say, What’s your first record, people could fib about it, but on this, I’m not judging anyone’s choices, because it makes for a more interesting chat.

SUZY NORMAN

I’ve always liked a lot of old shit! [Laughs]

JUSTIN LEWIS

So have I. I think there’s a lot of truth in that Noel Coward quote, ‘the potency of cheap music’. The things that make memories flood back to you are often quite disposable. ‘Give It Up’ by KC and the Sunshine Band, there’s almost nothing to it, about twenty words in the whole song. But that’s the sound of a holiday I had when I was about thirteen. When you look back on days gone by, sometimes what you remember are records you hated at the time. That mindset of, I like this record, or, I hate this record, gets less simple as you get older.

SUZY NORMAN

I think holidays are important to the memory because they’re so visceral. The first time we went abroad, we went camping in the south of France in 1982. And that was when ‘Come on Eileen’ was around – so that song, for my entire family, represents France. Also, ‘Tainted Love’. And the Minipops, which was a single on the jukebox on the campsite.

**LAST: KATE BUSH: Aerial (EMI Records, CD, 2005, remastered 2018)**

Extract: ‘Aerial’

SUZY NORMAN

I just think she’s a genius! And the older I get, the more I think there’s no-one else like her, and there never will be. I love the fact she does kooky stuff. But I wasn’t really into her until I got married, I think Phil, my husband, probably got me into her. We had the Hounds of Love album, with ‘Cloudbusting’ on it, and I think we’ve got another earlier album – Lionheart. I really liked those two, and then it was announced that she had a new album out.

JUSTIN LEWIS

It was her first new one for twelve years. The structure of Aerial is quite similar to Hounds of Love – the 24-hour cycle. I thought of you, when I was preparing for this, because in terms of subject matter and vocabulary, Kate Bush takes all these little bits of inspiration from literature and art and history and music itself. On Aerial alone, there’s references to songs like ‘Little Brown Jug’, ‘Autumn Leaves’ – there’s even a bit of the title track where the laughter echoes ‘The Laughing Policeman’.

SUZY NORMAN

I love that laughter and I love the birdsong. And being a visual person, I love the videos, they date brilliantly. They’re fascinating to watch – she’s really interested in dance and choreography.

JUSTIN LEWIS

I get the impression she never wanted to be famous, she just wanted to get to a point where she had a studio to make new music. ‘I don’t have to tour, I can just put out a record whenever I’m ready to, and make sure it’s as good as I can possibly make it.’

SUZY NORMAN

I think, on a personal level, she’s enigmatic, and I like that. I’m really intrigued by people who keep themselves to themselves – like Julie Christie does. I just love people where you don’t know what they do. Do they even do anything?

JUSTIN LEWIS

Supposedly the first disc of Aerial – we should say it’s a double album – is a collection of unrelated songs, but I’m not quite so sure. A lot of it is about family – there’s a song about her son, one about the passing of her mother – but then there’s a song all about the decimal placings of pi. Can you just sing numbers? Can you sing the phone book? And ‘Mrs Bartolozzi’ – a song literally about doing the laundry. Making art out of something apparently mundane.

SUZY NORMAN

Can you imagine trying to write a song about our mostly banal days? I can’t. I was listening to Aerial a lot when I was recovering from an operation – and I couldn’t really get out of bed, I was almost paralysed – but I was thinking of movement: acrobats and people dancing and twirling. And I just couldn’t wait to put my leggings on and stretch because I do dance around quite a lot at home, and it’s an important part of my yoga practice as well – I just wanted to stretch, and that album sounds like stretching.

JUSTIN LEWIS

You don’t often hear Kate Bush’s music discussed that much in relation to the physicality of the music. But there’s a lot of rhythm in what she does, always.

SUZY NORMAN

I love her song ‘The Dreaming’, the one with the dijeridu on it. I wanted to call my second novel The Ground is Full of Holes ‘The Dreaming’. I was set on that for a couple of years, in fact. So I must have been thinking about her when I was writing that, in a way. But I decided not to do that because it wasn’t original enough. But that was the working title of it for about four years.

My first novel, Duff, was initially called ‘The Edge of Rain’, and it was shortlisted for quite a major prize, the Dundee International Book Prize. Which was very encouraging to me. But I went back over it a year later, and I changed a lot of it, made it a lot more light-hearted. The essence was the same, but it turned into a little bit of a romcom, a slightly episodic novel where a man is trying to get his wife back, and to do so, he suggests a road trip from Wales up to Scotland. So that’s the premise.

The Ground is Full of Holes is also about a marriage breaking down, but it has a mature theme, I feel it goes deeper. I find first-person writing much easier, much freer – which is how I wrote Duff – but I wanted to challenge myself so this one was third person, omnipresent, or third person close [ie concentrating on one character, but written in third person].

JUSTIN LEWIS

As we’re talking about music and sound, how do you approach those elements – and maybe even silence – in your writing?

SUZY NORMAN

I feel that my books are quite silent anyway. But I do put certain sound under a microscope. For example, there’s a scene in The Ground is Full of Holes when one of the key characters, who’s an anaesthetist, is sat in an adjoining room to the operating theatre and he’s listening to the sounds going on in there. I find that kind of thing really interesting, and I wanted to try and make that come alive on paper because it’s a nice contrast to his isolation. The cut and thrust of his responsibilities next door, which he’s actually ignoring at that point.

There’s some semi-autobiographical and musical references in that book, too. I chose The Sundays, ‘Here’s Where the Story Ends’, because it was very evocative of me being a teenager, and I was seeing this guy – and that was the song I remember playing on his radio in his room.

My books are very quiet, but I feel that’s intentionally so – because I live in quite a quiet world myself. I live in Central London, but I do my damnedest to make my life as simple and quiet as I possibly can.

JUSTIN LEWIS

What struck me, reading The Ground is Full of Holes, was the feeling of quiet in the big city. With a city like London, you think of bustle and traffic, and a lot of this felt like nocturnal silence.

SUZY NORMAN

I think that’s the kind of London I would like to live in. This is what I experienced in lockdown, a beautiful experience, you know. I wonder what it would be like for me to live somewhere quiet. I think I might find that very strange. I think I would rather create my own quiet in a noisy environment rather than the other way round.

JUSTIN LEWIS

It’s nice to be able to make that choice.

SUZY NORMAN

Yes. I feel I have control over how busy I want to be. If I want to step out of my flat into a busy street, then I can. I worry about that option not being available at all, and the feel of the city is very energising. And to take that away might feel a little glum – I’ve never done it as an adult, I’ve never lived outside of a city as an adult. So I feel that a lot of what I create is my own fantasy of silence.

JUSTIN LEWIS

The way that we use music now in the twenty-first century: if we want noise we can find it, but we don’t have to have it. That control of whether it’s on or off. Whereas, years and years ago, where music wasn’t a constant soundtrack – in fact, it was even quite hard to find sometimes. Sure, there was Radio 1 but that was all there was! And the idea of music or noise you wanted on tap. And now, it’s tempting to think, There’s too much noise – but you can choose now.

SUZY NORMAN

You can turn it off.

JUSTIN LEWIS

Just to go full circle with titles: you mentioned you originally titled the novel ‘The Dreaming’, linking back to Kate Bush. But where is the actual title The Ground is Full of Holes from?

SUZY NORMAN

It’s an Edna O’Brien quote. I say ‘quote’ – it’s in a novel of hers. Because Irish literature is my thing.

JUSTIN LEWIS

Would your passion for Irish literature extend to Irish music?

SUZY NORMAN

Very much so, yeah. I’m not an expert on it at all. But I listen to it rather a lot.

JUSTIN LEWIS

Irish rock, Irish folk?

SUZY NORMAN

Oh, definitely not rock, although I love Van Morrison. Yeah, folky stuff. I don’t admit to it, because it’s a bit naff (Laughs) but I love it. The Dubliners, The Chieftains. It’s all fiddle-dee-dee.

JUSTIN LEWIS

And you’ve been to Ireland a number of times?

SUZY NORMAN

Probably more than anywhere else.

JUSTIN LEWIS

Have you sat in pubs while this music was being performed live?

SUZY NORMAN

Yes, I have. In Dingle, and in Galway as well. I love the sound of the music. I love the drums. It’s a romantic thing. It’s an Ireland that doesn’t exist anymore, only exists in pubs. Even though I would never have experienced this Ireland even when it did exist, even if it existed ever. But that’s the power of music, isn’t it? You can imagine an Ireland that’s something else, I suppose. Rather than the reality. The history is another thing I’ve had to educate myself about, partly because we’re not taught about it in schools. It’s the whole picture. They’re highly intelligent, creative people. They have a lovely vocabulary, that we perhaps don’t have over here sometimes. And that might stem back to going to church… The Irish people I’ve met have quite a forcefulness to them, a confidence about the language they use, the diction they use, which is interesting to me.

ANYTHING: JESSYE NORMAN: Henry Purcell – Dido and Aeneas: ‘Dido’s Lament (When I Am Laid in Earth)’ (Philips, CD, 1986)

JUSTIN LEWIS

It sounds like this was the moment for you when you properly connected with classical music.

SUZY NORMAN

I can’t believe how old it is, basically! [It was composed in the 1680s.] But it has this slightly modern tint to it – Sinead O’Connor could record it. And I guess the lyrics are very clear and very raw. And I just thought, What a wonderful thing to have at your funeral. I just love it. Salome Haller’s version, I heard first of all, and I’ve heard many versions since – but Jessye Norman’s is best, for me. She’s incredible. I heard her before I saw her, and I was actually surprised to discover that she was Black. I had no idea.

JUSTIN LEWIS

She’s been quite a role model for many performers since, especially in the States.

SUZY NORMAN

I’d assumed it was mostly a white woman’s game.

JUSTIN LEWIS

I think it’s changed quite a bit, especially recently. Why classical music is still here at all is due to people looking forward. One reason it stalled in the public consciousness was that, unlike popular music, which had this linear progression, the popular perception of classical music was: you get to the twentieth century, and… then what? Whereas it’s living and breathing. But you would have to be listening to a fair bit of Radio 3 and attending concerts to know how much is there. If you said to a lot of people, Name ten composers, they might name one or two after 1900. But generally, they’re going to go, Bach, Beethoven, Mozart etc…

SUZY NORMAN

When I was writing every day, I listened to a lot of Radio 3. I discovered how much I loved opera! But my introduction to classical music is very often through TV drama as well. There’s this brilliant piece of music from The Crown – it’s when Princess Margaret gets married. ‘Dies irae’ by Zbigniew Preisner. That blew me away too. Again, it’s very slow, and very sad. Debbie Wiseman’s Wolf Hall soundtrack… is beautiful, and I listen to that quite regularly. So not so much radio now, but a hell of a lot of TV drama. I’ll hear something, look it up, find out more about that composer or whatever. That tends to be how I do it.

JUSTIN LEWIS

But that constant Radio 3 listening was from when you were writing pretty much every day.

SUZY NORMAN

Yeah.

JUSTIN LEWIS

And I think when you are doing anything like that, you’ve got a routine in place, you’ve got your writing head on. Radio 3 has this element of surprise about it, but not one that’s going to put you off your stride, when you’re working.

SUZY NORMAN

It’s lovely, it’s like going into a library, and you don’t know what you’re going to get, but something will be on display in the main entrance… that’s what the radio is. You don’t really get that with Spotify because you have to select what you want to listen to. Unless you listen to a playlist, but in general I wouldn’t trust anyone else’s playlists! (Laughs)

JUSTIN LEWIS

Just on that point of how much you like melancholy music… has that always been the way?

SUZY NORMAN

It depends on the mood I’m in. The last ten years, I’ve probably listened to more upbeat music, quite a lot of pop music, things like Justin Bieber. But before then, it was sad stuff… sad Bob Dylan and Neil Young. Maybe I was a bit sadder then. But now, maybe life’s a bit more to be celebrated, though that said, I am listening to more sad music once again – but because I find it very relaxing and beautiful, for no other reason than that.

JUSTIN LEWIS

Recently, I went to see a piano duet recital in Cardiff. They played Schubert’s Fantasie in F, devastating piece it was, almost the last thing he wrote, might have been the last thing he wrote actually. It’s got this finale of doom to it, but as with a lot of sad music, it is life affirming – ‘I am overjoyed to be here listening to this now’.

SUZY NORMAN

It’s: We’re all mortal. And we’re here to reflect on the sadness of life. To be a complete human being – it’s not all fun fun fun.

JUSTIN LEWIS

I wonder if that’s why classical music – particularly in the past – slightly failed with a lot of younger people because as you get older, you realise that a lot of this music is about being an adult. Which is not to say pop music can’t be about that.

SUZY NORMAN

You have to have experienced loss, you have to have experienced disappointment. Nick Cave – he’s had a lot of tragedy the past ten years. But it’s still great music. I wouldn’t say it’s better for it. But it’s good enough.

JUSTIN LEWIS

Yes, it’s what you can do with the material that life has given you. And if you’re a real artist, it’s about trying to reflect that as honestly and as imaginatively as possible.

—–

SUZY NORMAN

I grew up in south Wales, but for a while, I went to school in Princes Risborough [in Buckinghamshire] which is not far from London. So there were lots of wonderful experiences which I didn’t have in my Welsh school. Things like playing clarinet in the orchestra in the House of Lords, and seeing theatre in London… It wasn’t a great school but they did have a lot of extra-curricular stuff like that. And I really made the most of it, I think.

When I moved back to Wales, I dropped the clarinet… but I did choose GCSE Music – for only one year because I dropped out. It’s a shame that happened because I loved it, we studied The Beatles’ Help! as a form, we learned how to conduct a song, that’s when we learned about middle-eights, intros, all that. And I am a singer, so I was a confident singer.

JUSTIN LEWIS

Did you sing solo?

SUZY NORMAN

I did. I remember singing ‘That Ole Devil Called Love’ with the teacher on piano and me singing.

JUSTIN LEWIS

I’ve heard you sing that informally. But did you ever try songwriting?

SUZY NORMAN

I did actually write some songs in my mid-twenties. I’ve always been creative in that sense. I’d just got back from Australia, where I’d spent a year, and I was staying with my parents while I was saving up enough money to not live with them anymore. So I had a lot of quiet evenings when I just did that. I wrote about four, on guitar, and recorded them on a tape player. But god knows where they’ve gone. I didn’t notate them.

But here’s why I dropped GCSE Music after a year. We had a homework task, which was to compose a song, and even though I could play about ten chords on the guitar – which as we know is enough to write millions of songs – could I be bothered? No, I couldn’t. So I took this filler track from a Rick Astley album – one where I thought, ‘Well, no-one’s going to give me an A+ for this.’ It was called ‘The Love Has Gone’. I thought it would go under the radar. I went in and I sang it acapella, and the music teacher took me into a side room. And she said, ‘Suzy I’ve got to tell you – I’m really impressed with this, in fact I think it’s the best one in the class.’ And then she pressed ‘play’ on her tape player… and it was Rick Astley.

JUSTIN LEWIS

That is brutal.

SUZY NORMAN

It’s malicious! (Laughs) It’s a really sadistic way of doing it. I was mortified. So I never finished the course. My parents never noticed. I don’t think they even knew I’d been doing Music GCSE! So I didn’t have to explain myself.

JUSTIN LEWIS

Parents weren’t involved with their kids that much in those days, were they. They didn’t know what we were doing. Can I put that Rick Astley song on your First Last Anything playlist?

SUZY NORMAN

Definitely! It’s the story of my life in a playlist…

—–

Suzy Norman’s two novels, Duff and The Ground is Full of Holes, are published by Patrician Press. You can find them both here: Suzy Norman books and biography | Waterstones

You can follow Suzy on Twitter at @suzynorman.

—–

FLA Playlist 2

Suzy Norman

Track 1: TAYLOR DAYNE: Tell It to My Heart: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Ud6sU3AclT4

Track 2: CHER: Gypsies Tramps and Thieves: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=uuA_gCMiw0E

Track 3: RACEY: Some Girls: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=JY3pkagVP64

Track 4: KATE BUSH: Mrs Bartolozzi: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=tRiJ1xrZQ80

Track 5: KATE BUSH: Aerial: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=vCw796Qz4M0

Track 6: THE SUNDAYS: Here’s Where The Story Ends: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=slNYveNnQTg

Track 7: THE CHIEFTAINS & SINEAD O’CONNOR: The Foggy Dew: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=jrrO4I-E8oY

Track 8: HENRY PURCELL: Dido and Aeneas, Z 626: Act 3: ‘Thy hand, Belinda… When I Am Laid in Earth’

Jessye Norman, English Chamber Orchestra, Raymond Leppard: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=jOIAi2XwuWo

Track 9: ZBIGNIEW PREISNER: Dies irae: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=2ADFroKeDlw

Track 10: DEBBIE WISEMAN: Monstrous Servant: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=QHhzribmXoc

Track 11: RICK ASTLEY: The Love Has Gone: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=V8AvyCpCVJI

FLA 1: Lev Parikian (29/05/2022)

May 15, 2025May 21, 2025 / whenisbins / Leave a comment

It was such a privilege to have Lev Parikian as my first guest on this series of conversations. He is a birdwatcher, an author, a musician, and a conductor, as well as one of the finest, most dryly funny tweeters I know.

One morning, in April 2022, we talked about his musical background and career, and about his First/Last/Anything musical choices, which encompass: one of the best-loved pop groups; a formidable and imaginative soloist and collaborator; and a pioneering composer in the world of animation.

We also discussed some of his experiences as a conductor, but we began by talking about his father Manoug Parikian (1920–87), one of the most celebrated British classical musicians of his day.

—

LEV PARIKIAN

My dad was a violinist, so my early life was listening to him play the violin very, very well indeed. One of my memories is of sitting cross-legged on the floor of his music room, just listening to him practise. So that obviously goes in at a kind of deep level. There were times when he was away and not around, but at other times, he would be rehearsing with other very fine musicians, so there was music being made to a greater or lesser degree quite often.

And we had a record player, you know, so 33s and 45s and 78s, on which there would be things like Colin Davis Conducts the Highlights of The Marriage of Figaro, or Beethoven 9 conducted by… Karl Böhm, I think it was. But interestingly my dad wasn’t a recording fetishist; he made recordings, though not as many as he might have done, and he recorded quite a lot for BBC Radio 3, a lot of which has been deleted over the years. But when those were broadcast on the radio, he’d record them on reel-to-reel tapes. So, from the parental side of things, it was very much a classical upbringing.

But I was a child, this was the early 70s, and my brother is four years older than me, so I’d get influences from him, and we’d listen to Radio 1 and the Top 40 on Sunday afternoons. Later, by around 1977/78, my brother was very into new wave and punk, and played bass in a band, and I was twelve, thirteen, and had been listening to things like Genesis’s The Lamb Lies Down on Broadway. So suddenly I’m listening to Siouxsie and the Banshees and The Clash and the Ramones, and listening to John Peel at night, thinking, Okay, this is good music. And then my brother suddenly did a complete right turn, and started listening to funk and soul – and that has really stuck with me, I remain a big fan.

JUSTIN LEWIS

Were there crossovers between your parents’ taste in music and yours? Did your dad ever poke his head round the door, and go, That’s rather good?

LEV PARIKIAN

He never did that. I do remember that on Thursday evenings, he would sit down with us to watch Top of the Pops. He didn’t really go for it. And then, in my teens, I was getting into jazz. We had had these eight-track cartridges for car journeys – one by Louis Armstrong, and one by Herb Alpert and His Tijuana Brass – so I got it into my head: ‘Oh! He likes jazz.’ But I started getting into more outré, difficult jazz, and when Carla Bley (certainly more ‘difficult’ than Louis Armstrong!) was on the telly late one night on BBC2, I assumed because Dad listened to Louis Armstrong, he’d be well into Carla Bley. But he said, ‘I don’t really like it.’

Dad’s musical tastes really were straight classical. Mozart was revered above all else. But he was also a great champion of contemporary British classical composers.

JUSTIN LEWIS

So did he commission people with new works?

LEV PARIKIAN

He did – there were some commissions that were written with him in mind as a soloist: Sandy Goehr, Elizabeth Maconchy – and Hugh Wood (1932–2021), who died recently. Dad recorded his violin concerto in the early 70s, and while Hugh was writing it, he basically came on holiday with us! He was a bit Douglas Adams with deadlines. ‘If we spend two weeks with him, then he will have to [finish it].’

JUSTIN LEWIS

You didn’t have to lock him in his room, did you?

LEV PARIKIAN

No, we didn’t have to have a bodyguard for him, like Adams did! But I remember, much later on, ten, fifteen years later, Hugh wrote something for my dad’s piano trio, and that literally came page by page. Hugh was a lovely man. When I started conducting, with the Brent Symphony, our local amateur orchestra, he used to come to my concerts. This was at the church on the St John’s Wood roundabout, which was his local church. And after the first half he would come into the vestry, where I was changing, knock on the door, and say, ‘Very good, very very good…. So far…’ [Laughter] Puppy-like enthusiasm, but: ‘I’ve got my eye on you’. He became a friend of mine after Dad died. As I grew up, we kept in touch.

FIRST: ABBA: ‘Waterloo’ (Epic Records, Single, 1974)

JUSTIN LEWIS

So, where do ABBA fit into all this, then? How did you get to buy ‘Waterloo’ as your first record?

LEV PARIKIAN

1974, I was nine years old, and I had pocket money, and they had probably just won Eurovision, and it was being played everywhere, and I wanted to have my own record. We had some things knocking about that my parents had bought. But that’s not the same, you know.

JUSTIN LEWIS

It’s a decision you’ve made.

LEV PARIKIAN

‘This is my record.’ That ABBA choice has stuck with me, those early records of theirs I think of as my favourites. They can really divide people – I know people who say, ‘Oh god, they’re so tedious’ or ‘I hate that big sound’, but I always found them incredibly life-affirming and uplifting. I had no idea how they made that sound, and how they constructed their songs – but something about it definitely stuck.

JUSTIN LEWIS

Yes, the arrangements. I’ve come to realise that one of my obsessions is with arrangements, and yet it’s the aspect that is often overlooked. People tend to discuss lyrics, or the tune…

LEV PARIKIAN

Sometimes harmonies, ‘that’s a beautiful chord progression’, or the hook or ‘the middle eight’s brilliant’. For an obvious example with ABBA: ‘Dancing Queen’. The decisions that they make at every stage of recording that song, of how they’re going to build the sound. It’s multi-tracked, all sorts of things are producing that big, bright, completely infectious sound, and it’s quite hard work to build something like that. It’s not just going into the studio and playing and recording it and that’s what comes out. Instead, it’s voicing this, and doubling that line, even quadrupling it.

JUSTIN LEWIS

You know what one of the inspirations for ‘Dancing Queen’ was? It was that George McCrae record, ‘Rock Your Baby’.

LEV PARIKIAN

There’s nothing original under the sun, is there?! And around the same time as ‘Waterloo’, there was Cozy Powell. ‘Dance With the Devil’. And I just loved the rhythm of it, the drums.

JUSTIN LEWIS

Well, you became a percussionist…

LEV PARIKIAN

This is all foreshadowing! I was eight, so it obviously started somewhere. Because I was playing the piano a little bit, in a desultory kind of way. I started with the violin when I was four or five and that was a dead loss. Listening to my dad doing it, and thinking, Well I’m never going to be able to do that.

But with percussion, in the first instance, I think I got a term’s worth of free lessons because they were starting it up. I went to the local prep school in Oxford, I’d been singing in the choir, and they’d started teaching percussion lessons. I thought, A term of free lessons – great, and I get to hit things.

During my teens, I was dabbling with a drum kit – not well, but enjoying it – and I was playing timpani and percussion in orchestras. And then there was a sort of moment of revelation – I was about to do A levels, had been doing no work at all, was predicted really bad results. And I was playing in a concert, playing the timps and thought, Oh – this is good. I like doing this. I was already 17, 18. So I wanted to get into music college, but realised how good you have to be, to get in. So there was a period of hiatus, in between leaving school and going on to the Royal Academy. Playing in a jazz band with friends in Oxford where I lived – but also trying to get into music college to do classical percussion.

—

JUSTIN LEWIS

Let’s talk about conducting. How did you make the leap from being a musician to being a conductor?

LEV PARIKIAN

I was studying at the Royal Academy of Music, and I wanted to be a freelance orchestral timpanist, percussionist, whatever. They’d also just started a jazz course there, and I was dabbling in that, and playing in the big band, but when you’re playing timpani and percussion, especially in the classical repertoire, you’ve got a lot of bars’ rest, a lot of time sitting around. So you could either be pissing around, which I did a lot, or just gazing into the distance. Or observing the orchestra and the conductor, and I don’t think I did it consciously, but I think I must have noticed the difference that conductors make.

We played Mahler’s First Symphony, and Colin Davis came to conduct it, and we’d been playing other stuff – not just with student conductors, but with the regular conductors of the Academy. And you just suddenly go: This sounds like a different orchestra. They’re the same people that were playing last Tuesday but suddenly it sounds like a better orchestra. How did that happen? Because it’s just one person at the front. So there was an interest there.

But also, I remember an earlier conversation with my mum, when I was going through my terrible teen years of doing nothing at all. I wanted to give up playing piano – I wasn’t getting anywhere, wasn’t doing any practice, and [my parents] were paying for my lessons and it was just kind of pointless. And my mum said, ‘Well if you’re not enjoying it, then obviously you shouldn’t be doing it, but it’s a shame because I think it’ll come in useful – because I think you’re going to be a conductor.’ And this is when I was fourteen.

JUSTIN LEWIS

That’s fascinating.

LEV PARIKIAN

Yes, it is, but I don’t know whether that implanted the seed in my head or whether she had the foresight… Whether she turned me into a conductor via a time machine, you know?

JUSTIN LEWIS

Have you ever analysed what you had that turned you into a conductor? Did people ever say, or have you worked out what you had?

LEV PARIKIAN

I don’t know. They might have seen that I was not dedicated enough to really master an instrument [laughs]. I was dedicated to playing percussion in orchestras, which is a slightly different thing. I think, also at that time the idea of being a solo percussionist – multipercussion and marimba and so on – was very fledgling and niche. But I just think they probably they spotted some sort of musical curiosity.

Being a drummer in a band meant being the driver of things, and I suppose that links to conducting. And in the same way that a really good drummer drives without being obtrusive, then a really good conductor will do a similar sort of role.

I also remember when I was about sixteen, I became fascinated by Stravinsky’s Rite of Spring, by the sound of it, the size of it. My dad had a shelf full of miniature scores, and he had a score of that. I couldn’t read scores at all and a lot of it’s really complex, but there’s one bit which is just kind of repeated chords, changing a few notes at a time, and I just played that over and over again at the piano, reading the different staves. So it was clear that I was interested in orchestras and that was the direction that it could go.

JUSTIN LEWIS

Studying music at A level was the first time I’d ever really seen full scores of things, which you’d follow as you listened. Prior to that, as a soloist or an orchestral player, you’d mostly only see your own part. Obviously you were listening to what else was going on and you’re watching the conductor or whatever, but you never really saw or heard what the conductor sees or hears, which is basically everything. As a conductor, you’re a director, but it’s like being a film director.

LEV PARIKIAN

Yes. And part of the job, if you’re equating it to directing a film or theatre, is to tell the whole story. There are different techniques at your disposal. On a pragmatic level, you’re the one that’s best placed to hear everything, because you’re standing in a position where the musicians are around you, and you don’t have an instrument underneath your ear. So you’re in the position that’s closest to what the audience is hearing. Often the job is just to make sure that the balance is right – it’s a producer’s job.

JUSTIN LEWIS

With the baton, it’s like you’ve got this series of faders.

LEV PARIKIAN

And of course the better the orchestra, the better their ability to do that for themselves and so the better your ability has to be. Obviously there’s spotting mistakes and correcting rhythms and encouraging certain facets of the music by what you say and what you do. But a lot of it is boringly pragmatic, in a sense! [Laughter] It seems kind of unromantic to say it – it’s so easy to think of the conductor as some sort of magician, with the tailcoat and a wand. What we do is so intangible, people might think, Oh it’s some sort of magic.

There is obviously an element of inspiration, personality on the music. But if you take away a conductor from most orchestras, even amateur ones that I mostly work with, you’ll see they can play pretty well without a conductor. Especially if the music is familiar, and it doesn’t have complex tempo changes, they can play pretty well at least 85, 90 per cent of the time, without a conductor. But then your job is to know: What is that 10 per cent? How can you add to it?

JUSTIN LEWIS

With non-professional or amateur orchestras, by the way – do we say ‘amateur’?

LEV PARIKIAN

‘Non-professional’ can encompass students and youth orchestras and so on as well. ‘Amateur’ is fine – a good thing in my view because it comes from ‘to love’ in Latin. Although, also as an amateur cricketer myself, I understand the connotations of the word amateur!

—

LAST: FENELLA HUMPHREYS: Caprices (Rubicon CD, 2022)

(Extract: Niccolo Paganini: Caprice No. 24 in A Minor. Fenella Humphreys (violin))

JUSTIN LEWIS

This was one of my recent purchases too. It’s phenomenal, a collection of solo violin works, but I hadn’t realised it was crowdfunded.

LEV PARIKIAN

I was one of the crowdfunders. I have probably worked with Fenella more than any other soloist over the last ten years at least. So we’re friends, and we’ve always got on really well musically and socially – but I was thinking about what makes me want to keep working with her as an artist. She plays the violin brilliantly, that’s the first thing, but what makes her playing special is that blend of intellectual rigour and showpersonship – I don’t know if that’s really a word, and it’s clumsy, but you know what I mean – so she’s a performer.

There’s also that word ‘collegiate’, she’s a great collaborator. She gets the amateur orchestra ethos –she always plays with the musicians who happen to be in the room. She understands what we’re doing.

And Fenella is flexible and spontaneous, with strong musical ideas, and as a conductor and collaborator, I never worry, working with her, ‘Oh god, is this going to be okay? There are moments that in a spontaneous way can be quite exhilarating, but you just feel like you’re in safe hands and so you can just relax, and know that the musicians in the room play better as a result. And I think that’s quite a rare thing.

JUSTIN LEWIS

I first became aware of her when she was performing concerts from her home during lockdown. And then I discovered her recordings. I find it fascinating how some musicians just find a way to your heart. Because, obviously, there are loads of brilliant violinists but there are ones who you find really, really special, and you think, I really want to hear them play that concerto. And she’s one of them. (And that doesn’t mean the others aren’t good!) But I see the range and volume of repertoire she performs at concerts, and it’s completely different stuff at each one. Now, is that common? I don’t get the sense it is.

LEV PARIKIAN

Well, she’s pretty driven!

JUSTIN LEWIS

She must have the most incredible memory for a start.

LEV PARIKIAN

And it’s not that she’s taking these things on, and going to give them half measure. And my treat – and this applies to any concerto accompaniment – is I get to stand right next to it. There’s something quite special about standing next to a really good musician when they’re playing. And for me obviously the violin is extremely important because a good violin sound has been in my head for 50 years from my dad, so even though I don’t play myself, you know it when you hear it. And she’s got it in spades.

JUSTIN LEWIS

So with the Caprices album itself, I mean. What stands out for you? Can we discuss the sequencing? There’s so much variety.

LEV PARIKIAN

What’s great to see is so many young, contemporary, and living composers in there. It’s slightly disconcerting to see birthdates from the 1990s.

JUSTIN LEWIS

Yes, that keeps the ego in check. But with a number of names on that, I think, I must check more of their work out. And some surprising choices too. And Paganini himself, who I think sometimes gets a rough ride, gets dismissed as fluff.

LEV PARIKIAN

‘It’s all flashy.’

JUSTIN LEWIS

But I certainly don’t think that’s true of the 24 Caprices. I first properly heard them when I was about eighteen – I borrowed a CD out of the library, I think it was Michael Rabin’s version. First you hear the fireworks, and then…

LEV PARIKIAN

There is depth there, yes, and they are incredibly difficult and technical. They could just be this monumental technical exercise: ‘I can play these sixths, I can play the thirds, I can play the octaves…’ But to actually make a coherent musical piece, I think that’s an art as well. And that’s true of all 24 of them.

JUSTIN LEWIS

Fenella’s performance is just fearless. Completely liberated. And as well as the inclusion of the 24th Caprice, probably Paganini’s most famous piece of music, you get a sequence of brand new variations of that theme, each one contributed by a contemporary composer or artist. All extraordinary in their different ways. Rounding off with a gypsy jazz interpretation composed by Seonaid Aitken.

LEV PARIKIAN

Yes, the ordering on the disc is interesting. It’s great to see some people I know a little bit and have heard before and have followed their careers. It’s seeing her playing all this new music and just saying: this is great music and it all lives together. Like her Bach to the Future discs, this is innovative, interesting programming for a CD – it makes sense as an album. Listening through this with shuffle turned off is rewarding. It’s not just a case of: Here’s a nice one, and oh here’s another nice one.

ANYTHING: SCOTT BRADLEY: Tom and Jerry and Tex (Apple Music, digital download album, 2010)

Extract: ‘Tom and Jerry: Downbeat Bear’ (1956)

JUSTIN LEWIS

Obviously I’m familiar with the music of Tom and Jerry.

LEV PARIKIAN

If someone said, ‘Tom and Jerry music’, you can hear the shape of it, the feel of it, the character of it. In the 70s it felt like Tom and Jerry was on every afternoon. And the Christmas one, every year, and they were funny and brilliant, and fast and slapstick.

JUSTIN LEWIS

Did you know that before BBC1 started showing Tom and Jerry, April 1967, it had never been on television before, not in Britain anyway. Just cinema.

LEV PARIKIAN

Really? That’s fascinating. And because you watched the credits, you’d see Fred Quimby’s name, the producer, with that little flourish on the Y. And the name of Scott Bradley, who composed the music for all of them.

I don’t know a lot about composing music for cartoons, but what was brilliant about it, even at the time, was how the music fitted and dictated the action on the screen. You’d get BANG and what sounded like a swanee whistle but was actually two clarinets going up on a glissando, in semitones – or playing ‘the Petrushka chord’, I now understand! I was watching one of them earlier, ‘Putting on the Dog’, and there’s just a tiny little thing on the trombone when it goes boooeerrroom, and it’s the glissando bar from Stravinsky’s Firebird.

JUSTIN LEWIS

That’s a defining cartoon, ‘Putting on the Dog’. Certainly musically.

LEV PARIKIAN

He uses twelve-tone techniques in that as well. So he does Schoenberg – ‘here’s a bit of Schoenberg, but you don’t know it’s Schoenberg’ – and he’s got the Petrushka chord, twelve-tone stuff, and a bit of the Firebird, as well as these popular songs in great zippy arrangements.

JUSTIN LEWIS

You can hear ‘Old McDonald’ in there, and I noticed there was one Tom and Jerry cartoon called ‘Downbeat Bear’ from 1956, which seems to have not only a section of The Blue Danube in it, but also – fleetingly – ‘Rock Around the Clock’, which had just come out.

LEV PARIKIAN

And it all happens in two seconds, and it’s gone. And it’s all completely associated with the action on the screen, so it’s not him showing off, he’s demonstrating how to portray that moment of slapstick on the screen in music, which is all played with breathtaking brilliance by a group of twenty musicians. I know people who played in the John Wilson Orchestra who did that compilation at the Proms [2013]. And they said, ‘You have no idea how hard this is. This is the hardest music I’ve ever played in my life.’

JUSTIN LEWIS

I was watching the clip – rows of string players playing for their lives.

LEV PARIKIAN

And you don’t even realise it, because you’re watching Tom and Jerry. If I ever need to be cheered up, then that Proms clip is seven or eight minutes of pure joy.

JUSTIN LEWIS

I love that this music is so light on the face of it, and playful, but played seriously and absolutely straight. Have you ever had to conduct anything like cartoon music?

LEV PARIKIAN

For years, I had this idea we should play Tom and Jerry music live to the cartoon. But as far as I could find out there was no way to get hold of the musical materials – if they even existed at all. So the idea never came to fruition. But luckily John Wilson was rather more committed to the idea than me!

JUSTIN LEWIS

The Proms performance is a compilation, isn’t it. Helpfully itemised on YouTube.

LEV PARIKIAN

I’d still love to do it, but you need players of the highest calibre.

—-

JUSTIN LEWIS

As a conductor, what do you think is the biggest misconception about the profession?

LEV PARIKIAN

A lot of people simply don’t understand what a conductor does, why they exist, and what is difficult about it. And I include in that, not just non-musicians but also musicians – and also, dare I say it, some conductors. [Laughter] With a violinist, it’s obvious what the job is – you play the violin. With a writer, you write books, or plays, or sketches or whatever. But with a conductor, it’s not entirely clear what they’re doing and what would happen if you took the conductor away.

Do you remember the programme Maestro (2008)?

JUSTIN LEWIS

In which celebrities learned to conduct an orchestra.

LEV PARIKIAN

Yes, David Soul, and Goldie… and Sue Perkins won it, and they had the BBC Concert Orchestra playing. I know a few people who play in that orchestra, and one of them told me: ‘Obviously they’re making it for telly so it’s a broken-up process, but the one thing they never did at any stage was to just take all the conductors away and allow us musicians to play by ourselves without a conductor.’ Just to show people that this is what an orchestra can do – so the job of the conductor, especially as the playing level gets higher, becomes more about the ears, and is about how to get a group of people to play better – by whatever means that takes.

JUSTIN LEWIS

Reality TV covering music generally can be a problem, because it’s never about music, it’s about television. A completely different thing.

LEV PARIKIAN

They had quite a big audience on BBC2, and it was an opportunity to slightly demystify what the job is, but it didn’t seem to me that they really did that. And I can’t remember how many conductors they had on the panel, but they had orchestral musicians on the panel, so the focus was on the relationships between the mentors and the pupils, and the journey of the pupils. But it kind of underestimated its audience – it never actually addressed what they were doing and why. It never explained, ‘This is why this gesture doesn’t work, and why this gesture does work’, you know?

—–

JUSTIN LEWIS

We touched on this earlier, but in the 70s, you had pop over there, jazz over there, classical over there. They were like islands that weren’t connected. And now – they’ve almost connected round the back somewhere.

LEV PARIKIAN

I think this is a good thing, and speaking as a bloke in my mid-fifties, I’ve noticed that younger musicians in general I think are much more into cross fertilising in what they’re exposed to, the things they play, the things they listen to. That’s definitely changed since I was young.

At the Royal Academy in the early 80s, when I was studying timpani and percussion in orchestras, I was also interested in jazz. I was listening to quite a lot of funk and I remember listening to Level 42 quite a bit – partly because of Mark King’s bass playing. Their drummer, Phil Gould studied percussion at Royal Academy of Music a few years before me, and apparently, what happened – he’d put together a kit from a suspended cymbal and a snare drum and other bits, and started playing around, and the reaction was, ‘We don’t do that here.’

Meanwhile, this jazz course had been started by Graham Collier, who had also been instrumental in starting the [big band/orchestra] Loose Tubes. So that was a fledgling thing that I was well into, and I know several musicians, friends of mine who were also there as classical players, but were also in big bands and small bands. And nowadays I think it’s just taken for granted that classical musicians will not just be interested in Mozart and Beethoven.

JUSTIN LEWIS

When I used to go to concerts, when younger, I used to find it quite a difficult experience in that I didn’t feel like I belonged there. To go now, you feel much more welcome. There isn’t that formalised restriction anymore. Sometimes, the musicians now will talk to you, introduce the music they’re going to play.

LEV PARIKIAN

For some players that can be quite a daunting thing. I do talk to audiences at concerts, sometimes very briefly, but fairly recently, I did a film music concert, with nine big pieces of film music, each one of them benefiting from an introduction. And for the last two minutes of any piece I’m conducting, my mind is already thinking: Okay. What am I going to say about the next piece? I didn’t want to do that nine times, so I thought of Neil Brand, because we were doing [Bernard Herrmann’s] Vertigo suite, which is his favourite thing – he’s done a whole thing on his YouTube channel about it. I thought, What this needs is Neil Brand telling us what the music is doing before we play it. It was brilliant – it just took the pressure off me, and he was focused on communicating the music.

But yes, musicians talking to audiences, even if we just say, ‘Uh, hello, thanks for coming. It’s lovely to see you all. I hope you enjoy this. It’s eight minutes long.’ [Laughter]

—

Lev Parikian’s book, Light Rains Sometimes Fall, was published in paperback in 2022. His other books include Music to Eat Cake By, Into the Tangled Bank, and Why Do Birds Suddenly Disappear?

Since our conversation, Lev’s superb and highly acclaimed book Taking Flight was published by Elliott and Thompson in May 2023, and was shortlisted for the Royal Society Science Book Prize.

He also writes a lot about birds, and his regular Six Things round-up at his Substack: levparikian.substack.com

Much more at levparikian.com, and you can find him on Bluesky as @levparikian.bsky.social.

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FLA Playlist 1

Lev Parikian

Track 1: WOLFGANG AMADEUS MOZART: Violin Concerto No. 1 in B-Flat Major, K.207: I. Allegro moderato

Manoug Parikian, Orchestra Colonne, Walter Goehr: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=bgQHvH-cWMI

Track 2: HUGH WOOD: Violin Concerto No. 1, Op. 17: II

Manoug Parikian, Royal Liverpool Philharmonic Orchestra, David Atherton: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Kpmlo7D3uyY

Track 3: ABBA: Waterloo

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Sj_9CiNkkn4

Track 4: COZY POWELL: Dance with the Devil

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=7IpfZnBvBF0

Tracks 5, 6, 7: IGOR STRAVINSKY: Le Sacre du Printemps (1947):

Introduction / Adoration of the Earth / The Augurs of Spring / Dances of the Young Girls / Ritual of Abduction

Pierre Boulez, Cleveland Orchestra

(Track 5): https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=3gfnF6gdNi8

(Track 6): https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Pc1wX7MTRaI

(Track 7): https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=LvQ1aTlPqe8

Track 8: NICCOLO PAGANINI: Caprice No. 24 for Solo Violin

Fenella Humphreys: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=6Vx-jsXx4h4

Track 9: SEONAID AITKEN: Paganini Caprice No. 24 for Solo Violin Variation: Gypsy Jazz:

Fenella Humphreys: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=y11pZfeMdII

Track 10: SCOTT BRADLEY: Tom and Jerry: Downbeat Bear

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=rRBU0nS9W4A&t=58s

Track 11: SCOTT BRADLEY: Tom and Jerry at MGM

Performed live by the John Wilson Orchestra, BBC Proms, 26 Aug 2013

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=kYrUWfLlYI0

Track 12: BERNARD HERRMANN: Vertigo – Prelude and Rooftop

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=RPSZuzW5IG0

Track 13: STUART HANCOCK: Violin Concerto: I. Andante maestoso – Andante semplice:

Jack Liebeck, BBC Concert Orchestra, Lev Parikian

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=oireCP8yLrE