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