Riverdance

RIVERDANCE – THE 25^th ANNIVERSARY SHOW: LIVE IN DUBLIN

DVD review

 

Where were you on the night of 30 April 1994? Chances are, like millions of others, you were watching the Eurovision Song Contest live from Dublin. No one remembers the winning song;* everyone remembers the interval act, seven minutes of explosive Irish dance choreographed to an infectious score by composer Bill Whelan. Later expanded to a full-length show, ‘Riverdance’ was the start of an international phenomenon.

 

Twenty-five years on, it’s still packing them in. This DVD captures an anniversary performance in Dublin in 2020. The original principals – Michael Flatley and Jean Butler – have long moved on, but they find worthy successors in lead dancers Bobby Hodges and Amy-Mae Dolan. Although the core elements are the same, it’s a new treatment. As before, there’s a vague storyline drawing on Celtic mythology and the experience of Irish immigrants to the New World. However, the thematic connection is really in the feet. Irish traditional dance, flamenco, Russian Cossack, a balletic pas de deux, tap and breakdance: when you see these disparate styles juxtaposed, you realise they’re all dancing on common ground. A vaudevillian dance-off between the Irish settlers and three New York hipsters is a rare longueur in a show where the energy level never flags. 

 

Between the dance scenes are musical interludes of great sophistication, some choral, some featuring soloists. I was very taken by the shifting combinations of uilleann pipes, soprano sax, fiddle and bodhran. DVD extras include interviews with the show’s creators and behind-the-scenes footage.

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*Ireland won the contest for the third year in a row, represented by the song 'Rock'n'Roll Kids', written by Brendan Graham and performed by Paul Harrington and Charlie McGettigan. 

(First published in RnR magazine.)

Sondheim and Nyro: Putting It Together

(Photo by Stephen Paley)

Jamie Bernstein (b. 1952) is Leonard Bernstein’s eldest daughter. Nowadays she describes herself as an “author, narrator and filmmaker” but she started out with ambitions to be a singer-songwriter. It was an arduous choice for someone whose father was such a towering presence in American music. But Leonard was famously open to musical genres beyond the classical (even if the ‘rock’ elements he introduced into his 1971 Mass sound distinctly embarrassing now), so her path wasn’t the route of teenage rebellion that it might have been for others. More surprising is another ally she found in the older generation:

…I was so bossy, so excitable and loud. Still, I had my fans. Steve Sondheim was, incredibly, one of them. We obsessed together over the genius of singer-songwriter Laura Nyro. I learned so much about songwriting by listening to Steve describing what made Nyro’s songs so terrific: how she’d tweak a phrase so it was different the second time it came around; or how, in the closing section, just when you thought nothing new was going to happen, she’d suddenly shift to a new melody in a new key, and make you gasp as if you’d opened the door onto a bright windy day.

(This is from her 2018 memoir Famous Father Girl. She follows up with an anecdote about attending a recording session for Nyro’s New York Tendaberry album, which implies that we’re in autumn 1969 here, when Jamie was seventeen.)

 

Stephen Sondheim (1930-2021) and Laura Nyro (1947-1997) are two of my favourite American musical creators. They worked in very different genres, but I was always on the look-out for any connections between them. How satisfying that would be! And how frustratingly contradictory the evidence is when you put it together. I made a first attempt in my book on Laura Nyro, but here is a fuller picture…

 

These two musical giants only met on one occasion, in 1969, captured in memorable photos by Stephen Paley, a friend of Sondheim’s. Paley had arranged for Nyro to meet soul-gospel singer Lorraine Ellison. Nyro joined Paley while he photographed Ellison for an album cover in the garden of Sondheim’s Manhattan home. Speaking years later to Michele Kort for her Nyro biography, Paley looked back on that afternoon as “a big love fest”; Sondheim, as he recalls, admired ‘Stoned Soul Picnic’, one of Nyro’s best-known songs, particularly the “surry on down” part. 

 

William Kloman’s profile of Nyro in the New York Times (6 October 1968) had this line about ‘Stoned Soul Picnic’: “Stephen Sondheim says the song’s complexity, economy and spontaneity sum up for him what music is all about.” (This seems to be a reported remark; it is not in quotation marks in the original article.) “A genius, pure and simple, a genius,” Sondheim called her in an interview with the Boston Globe on 8 March 1970. Likewise, speaking to the Los Angeles Times on 10 October 1971, he opined: “Most rock I find boring: simple in the wrong way – meaning dull. I’ve enjoyed a lot of the Beatles’ stuff and some really brilliant things by Laura Nyro.” 

 

Sheila Weller’s study of Laura’s female songwriter contemporaries, Girls Like Us, includes another Sondheim quote about ‘Stoned Soul Picnic’ (unsourced, alas): “In economy, lyricism and melody, it is a masterpiece.” In 2015 I had an opportunity to ask the great man about Nyro: 

(ME) I’d like to ask you, please, about Laura Nyro, whom I believe you knew? You were once quoted as saying that her song ‘Stoned Soul Picnic’ is a “masterpiece”. What do you think is so special about her music? And what are your memories of her as a person?

(SONDHEIM) I never said any such thing. “Masterpiece” is a word I use very rarely. Where did you read that? As for knowing her, it was a very slight acquaintance: one afternoon and one dinner.

I detected a retreat from the enthusiasm he’d expressed 45 years earlier. 

 

On 2 May 1971 Sondheim was a guest speaker at the 92^nd Street Y in New York. His subject was ‘Lyrics and Lyricists’. After a rambling introduction by Lehman Engel, he began his talk by saying: “I mean, I would like to talk for two hours on Laura Nyro, but I can’t. This is all about theatre lyrics” (around 8m55s on the archived recording). What did he mean by this? That he could talk for two hours about her lyrics, and he’d like to, but his brief was to talk about theatre lyrics? Or that he wishes he was competent to talk about Nyro’s lyrics, but his specialism was theatre lyrics. Some Nyro fans like to think he meant the first; I’m strongly inclined to the second. David Benedict, who is working on a new biography of Sondheim, concurred with my opinion. This is from an email to me in March 2019:

I think you’re right about your interpretation of Sondheim’s remark at the 92nd Street Y as being closer to: “I’d like to be someone who could talk to you for two hours about Laura Nyro's lyrics, but that’s not my genre, and I can only talk about what I know about.” 

A year or so ago I asked him about Nyro but he said it was not really his field of interest. Obviously, he has always been aware of music that surrounded him, like the singer-songwriter movement of the 1960 and ‘70s, but he was and always has been a theatre writer. He’s really not interested in songs disconnected from drama. He listens to orchestral/classical music on a daily basis – the more arcane, the better since his knowledge of the standard classical repertoire is genuinely encyclopaedic – but next to no contemporary ‘pop’ (for want of a better term) music, unless occasionally persuaded by others.

In 2010-11 Sondheim published his collected lyrics in two volumes, with annotations and many fascinating sidelines on aspects of his craft and sharp observations on fellow practitioners of musical theatre. Sondheim-worshippers jokily refer to these volumes, the closest he came to writing an autobiography, as the ‘Old’ and ‘New’ Testaments. In neither testament does he express an opinion about Nyro, or indeed any other figure from rock or pop music. (A passing reference to The Beatles is actually in the context of music on film, where he praises Richard Lester’s editing skills on A Hard Day’s Night; a reference to Elvis Presley concerns the “faintly ridiculous” plots of his movies.)

 

In an essay I published on ‘Sondheim at 90’ I rationalised his preferences as follows:

Sondheim must be the only significant figure still active in musical theatre to have come of age before the rock’n’roll revolution. His musical sensibilities were formed in the late 1940s and early ‘50s. It was an age of professional songwriters and of performers beholden to them. In later decades these separate roles would fuse: artists, generally unversed in musical staff notation, would originate, record and perform their own material, often working it up in the studio (as The Beatles did after their retreat from public performance in 1966). These developments largely passed Sondheim by. Pop or rock has only ever featured in a ‘diegetic’ sense in his shows. For example, in ‘Unworthy of Your Love’ (from Assassins, 1990), he creates a soppy Carpenters-like ballad to characterize ‘Squeaky’ Fromme, would-be assassin of President Ford, because that’s the sort of music she would have listened to.   

The elderly titan may have downplayed his enthusiasm in retrospect but it’s clear that the young Sondheim responded to the inherent theatricality and inventiveness in Nyro’s work. It always seemed a surprising departure from his habitual line of interest – albeit a welcome one. In old age he seems to have erased all this from memory. I’m glad if we can set the record straight and put these two figures, Sondheim and Nyro, back together. 

 

Sources

 

Jamie Bernstein, Famous Father Girl: A Memoir of Growing Up Bernstein (2018)

Michele Kort, Soul Picnic: The Music and Passion of Laura Nyro (2002)

Stephen Sondheim, Finishing the Hat: Collected Lyrics 1954-1981… (2010) and Look, I Made a Hat: Collected Lyrics 1981-2011… (2011)

Philip Ward, On Track…Laura Nyro: Every Album, Every Song (2022)

Sheila Weller, Girls Like Us: Carole King, Joni Mitchell, Carly Simon - and the Journey of a Generation (2008)

‘Sondheim at 90’ in Philip Ward, Instead of a Critic: Essays Written and Unwritten (2022)

 

(with thanks to Stephen J Grilli for the Bernstein reference)

Yes

“Progressive music” we used to call it. There was even a society devoted to the genre at school. Nowadays I see it more often referred to as “prog rock”. “Pompous”, “overblown”, “pretentious” are the adjectives of choice. The standard narrative has it that such ego-fuelled noodling was killed off by the hawking and spitting punks of the late 1970s, just as the prog rockers had seen off the simpering Flower Power of the ‘60s. Revolutions are rarely so cut-and-dried, however. Returning in middle age to King Crimson, Genesis, Yes – the loves of my youth – I find continuity across the decades. As a pre-teen my first enthusiasm was Simon & Garfunkel. How delicious to read in biographies of Yes that what brought founder members Jon Anderson and Chris Squire together in 1968 and inspired the close harmonies that would be so characteristic of the band’s vocals was a love of that same clean-cut New York duo! (This found clearest expression in an extraordinary ten-minute reimagining of Paul Simon’s ‘America’, a bonus track on the Fragile CD.)

 

The Yes Album, released in February 1971, was my entry point. Perhaps not Yes’s greatest album. I’d award that honour to 1972’s Close To The Edge. With the elephantine three-disc set that was Tales From Topographic Oceans (1973) they began to lose the plot. A transitional album, then. Their two previous LPs had included cover versions. Now they wrote all their own material and presented it with new-won confidence. This was the age of “getting it together in the country”, so in the autumn of 1970 the band chilled out at a farm in North Devon to develop their ideas before moving to Advision Studios in London, where they worked with trusted engineer-producer Eddie Offord. 

 

The line-up was near perfect by this point, underpinned by a fabulous rhythm section: Bill Bruford’s resourceful drumming locked in with Chris Squire’s propulsive bass. In Steve Howe they’d now acquired a hugely inventive guitarist, versatile across a range of styles. Whether playing his Gibson semi-acoustic or his Martin acoustic, Howe never puts a finger wrong. As someone struggling to master a few chords myself, I was fascinated by ‘Clap’, his solo guitar contribution to the album. Recorded live at the Lyceum Theatre, London, this Chet Atkins-influenced number sits a little askew from the prog-rocking on either side of it, but like his relaxed, jazzy solo in ‘Perpetual Change’ it showcases what he – and the band – were now capable of. 

 

Tony Kaye is underestimated as a keyboard player and his Hammond organ is prominent throughout. He was no lover of the newly fashionable synthesiser. By the time of the next album he’d left, replaced by Rick Wakeman, the caped crusader who would happily play anything with a keyboard – usually three or four of the things at the same time. (Wakeman, I felt, was always better in the band than out of it. His later solo projects, like The Six Wives Of Henry VIII, prioritised fluency and virtuosity for the sheer hell of it.)

 

The frontman, though, in every sense, was vocalist and main lyricist Jon Anderson. Anderson’s enunciation was unusually good for a rock singer, and his purity of tone and distinctive Accrington accent set him apart. (In a video from the 1990s he actually drops into a parody at one point of George Formby, Lancashire’s foremost ukulele-botherer!)  So you heard the lyrics on a Yes album, although they weren’t printed on the sleeve or a separate lyrics sheet. I heard them, but I’m still not sure if I got them. On first exposure to ‘Yours Is No Disgrace’, I remember my teenage self thinking, “your what is no disgrace?” Years later I read in the burgeoning literature on the band that the song is “about the Vietnam War”, its lyrics contrasting the suffering of the soldiers in Indo-China with people partying in Las Vegas. I suppose the lines “Battleships confide in me” and “mutilated armies gather near” were a clue. Likewise, keen ears attuned to ‘I’ve Seen All Good People’, the opening track on Side Two, have spotted, about three minutes into the track and buried deep in the mix, a quote from John Lennon’s ‘Give Peace A Chance’. 

 

Do lyrics matter in this sort of music? These boys were not singer-songwriters in autobiographical vein, despite their early reverence for Paul Simon. Abstract word-painting, sci-fi metaphor, Humpty-Dumpty invitations to polysemy – these seemed, rather, to be their currency. Anderson was very into enlightenment and the search for God: I registered that. It was obvious enough on the ‘Life Seeker’ section of The Yes Album, and I knew he invoked Hermann Hesse on Close to the Edge and Autobiography of a Yogi by Paramahansa Yogananda on Topographic Oceans. But “about the Vietnam War”? Not in the sense that ‘We Shall Overcome’ is “about” the civil rights struggle, surely? 

 

Perhaps, because of Yes’s ambitions to be taken seriously, I imagined they aspired to the condition of “absolute” music. After all, what is a Beethoven string quartet “about”? We “progressive music” fans thought we were a cut above because we knew Brahms and Liszt weren’t just Cockney rhyming slang. A schoolfriend with more classical training and analytic skills than I could muster pointed me to the subtle use of “polymetre” in ‘Perpetual Change’, the album’s final track, where a riff in one time signature is superimposed over a bass pattern in other metres. Clever. 

The record isn’t without blemish. The curiously titled ‘Würm’, which builds repetitively over a three-chord vamp, is a bit tedious. The use of stereo panning now seems gimmicky. Yet, for an album recorded over fifty years ago, it still sounds fresh and creative. I’m not embarrassed to revisit my younger self when I listen to it anew.

[First published in RnR magazine].

Ted Hughes and Shakespeare

In a little humoresque on Shakespeare in my volume Instead of a Critic, I made passing reference to Ted Hughes’s monumental study Shakespeare and the Goddess of Complete Being. It wasn’t a flattering reference and I omitted to mention that I never made it past the ‘Introduction’. However, when a friendly reader asked me what I thought of the tome, it prompted me to take Hughes’s doorstop of a book off the shelf and look at it again. I still get no further than page 43. But I admire Hughes as a poet, so he must be saying something worth hearing. No?

 

The book certainly divided opinion when first published in 1992. ‘Exit, pursued by a boar’ was the Observer’s headline above Anthony Burgess’s mystified review. The Independent declared the book to be ‘egregious twaddle’. For John Carey of the Sunday Times it was ‘appalling nonsense… tedious mythical mumbo-jumbo’. But it found supporters – rather fewer of them – in Tom Paulin, Michael Hoffman and Marina Warner.

 

The idea goes something like this. Shakespeare’s work is bound together as an organic unity by a single mythic-symbolic structure which Hughes calls the ‘Tragic Myth’. Shakespeare’s early poems Venus and Adonis and The Rape of Lucrece embody two great myths of the archaic world, that of the hero who rejects the love of the Goddess and is killed in revenge by a boar; and that of the king, or god, whose crime is rape and whose punishment is banishment. These themes are then followed through in the subsequent plays and in some way correspond to the conflict in Elizabethan society between the Old Religion, Catholicism, and the emergent challenge of Protestantism, especially in its most extreme – and theatre-hostile form – Puritanism. By tapping into the energy of these myths Shakespeare was able to revivify his imagination (and, we might add – though Hughes doesn’t – by uncovering this formula Hughes was able to reconcile himself to the suicides of two women in his life, Sylvia Plath and Assia Wevil.)

 

At once I see a couple of approaches that on the face of it are contradictory. One is Hughes’s experience of practical theatre work with Peter Brook and Donya Feuer. With Brook he worked as an ‘ideas man’, first at the National Theatre, later at the Centre for Theatre Research in Paris, providing suggestive dramatic situation for the actors to explore. Feuer’s notion, inspired by Hughes, was to shuffle extracts from the plays into what they called a perpetuum mobile performance, one passage merging into another to bring out their commonality: the evolution of one of the Myth’s figures from play to play. 

 

The other approach, its opposite, is an armchair reading of the Collected Works as plays for the page, not the stage – what the Germans would call ‘Lesedramen’– excerpting them and mingling lyric poems with dramatic speeches. This approach has its origins in Hughes’s Selection of Shakespeare’s Verse, which was first published twenty years earlier.

 

What unites the approaches is a habit of selective quotation: ripping from context, treating Shakespeare as a ‘single titanic work, like an Indian epic’ (p43). The justification lies in the epigraph from Yeats – ‘the fancy that there is some one myth for every man, which, if we but knew it, would make us understand all he did and thought’. Hughes tell us he’s in search of Shakespeare’s myth, but really he’s in search of his own. Which is acceptable, if he were more honest about it. For those of us who use literature to navigate our lives it’s instructive to watch Hughes, a keen intellect and gifted wordsmith, on the job. Just as a stopped clock will show the right time twice a day, so a totalising vision may occasionally bring particular objects into focus. 

 

So what is this loose baggy monster? Is it literary criticism? If one penetrates that far, there are probably flashes of insight, discussions of individual passages that might illuminate the text in the way a good literary commentary does. But the wise commentator, his contribution complete, has the good grace to withdraw and leave the reader alone with the text. Hughes cannot do that, because nothing is so specific, so local; everything must be subsumed to his overarching theory of the ‘Tragic Equation’.

 

If not literary criticism, then what is it? ‘Poetic criticism’? Mythopoeia? The bastard offspring of Robert Graves and C.G. Jung? The response of one creative artist to another? The book is full of fine phrases that might qualify as prose poems: even John Carey, in a scathing review, was taken by a footnote on page 11 about the sow, her ‘elephantine lolling mouth under great ear flaps, like a Breughelesque nightmare vagina, baggy with over-production’. Flicking through later pages, I noticed many a felicitous turn of phrase – the sonnets as ‘the vestibule to the bloody temple of the tragedies’, for example (p64), or Shakespeare’s language as ‘a kind of prodigiously virtuoso pidgin’ (p152). 

 

Yet I sense dishonesty, subterfuge, the ripple effect of obsession. He deploys the tools of evidence-based scholarship, but craftily.[1] The procedure is to decide what you’re looking for, to ‘look’ for it, and to ‘find’ it. QED. In the opening pages, where the Myth is already established as a given, we are told that Shakespeare ‘strips the myth of all identifiably mythic features and secretes his mechanism within his plot’ (p2). Thus we have a sort of conspiracy theory: it’s there but it’s hidden; reminiscent of the way that anti-Stratfordians (those who deny that the man from Stratford wrote ‘Shakespeare’) claim that Francis Bacon or the Earl of Oxford hid coded messages about authorial identity in the First Folio. Then, finding the characters of Helena in All’s Well That Ends Well and Isabella in Measure for Measure unsatisfactory, Hughes has his explanation: it is because these ‘secularised’ characters are ‘inadequately insulated from their mythic roles’ (p3) – mythic roles that he has assigned to them. QED.

 

Shakespeare is ideal for such approaches because the work is so polymorphous, so open to interpretation that you can assert what you damn well like. The biographical details are so scant as to undermine a biographical reading of the work: not that that has stopped legions from doing so, probing the identity of the Dark Lady, or positing hidden sources of inspiration as Oscar Wilde did – playfully – in ‘The Portrait of Mr W.H.’ (My own capriccio was supposed to be a variation on the latter.)

 

That said, some context is recoverable. Hughes fails to take account of how the plays were written, at great speed, often collaboratively, mostly reworking existing material (either old plays or stories Shakespeare found in books). They were also responses to contemporary taste – revenge drama, the indoor performance conditions of Jacobean theatre, the availability of stage effects (think of Hermione’s statue coming to life in The Winter’s Tale).

 

‘That’s not how it looked on the ground’ would be my verdict. Hughes views Shakespeare from a great height and with retrospect of the Bard’s entire career before him. Even here his sight is faulty. He assumes an order of the thirty-seven plays starting from All’s Well and leading to the great tragedies (pp98-9). The developmental sequence is dubious. In the ‘Conjectural Chronology’ in the front of the New Cambridge Companion to Shakespeare (2010), All’s Well That Ends Well is placed after Hamlet, Troilus and Cressida, Measure for Measure and Othello, not before it.

 

‘The ideal reader would regard my idea as a sort of musical adaptation, a song’, we read on page 43 – this has to be Hughes pitching for my sympathy and urging me to saddle up for the next 474 pages. A Ring cycle projected over thirty-seven nights, not just four! As cookshop owner Maria says to Sportin’ Life in Porgy and Bess when he tries to peddle his happy dust, ‘I fears I mus' decline.’

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[1] One consequence of reading history alongside literature as an undergraduate over forty years ago was to sensitise me to the need for ‘evidence’. See the divagation on literary biography in my book Encounters with Michael Arlen (2023).

 

SoundCloud

You'll find a few of my compositions up on SoundCloud. Be sure to pay a visit and let me know what you think. I've also dabbled in video-making:

Nancy Mitford

‘I suspect there was a neurotic dichotomy between Nancy’s barbed pen and her warm heart.’ Thus wrote Harold Acton in a memoir of his friend Nancy Mitford. The eldest of the famous Mitford sisters, she didn’t hesitate to apply her barbed pen to satirical purposes, often using her own family as raw material. 

It would be instructive to look at Mitford’s comic fictionalisation of three deeply serious episodes in the history of the 1930s to ask how much lies beneath the surface frivolity. Was she actuated primarily by a ‘talent to annoy’ or by an underlying compassion?

Wigs on the Green (1935) satirises the British Union of Fascists in a farcical plot turning on the conflict between ‘Union Jackshirts’ and pacifists in a sleepy English village. Although Mitford toned down some elements before publication, the book offended her sisters Unity and Diana, notorious for their fascist leanings, and she resisted its republication later.

Pigeon Pie, written in the autumn of 1939, presents the ‘phoney war’ as if it were a children’s game in which warring nations must pick teams. By the time of publication in mid-1940, hostilities had begun in earnest and Mitford’s playfulness seemed out of step. In private life she threw herself into the war effort on the home front. 

In The Pursuit of Love (1945) she drew on her own experiences of working in a refugee camp at the end of the Spanish Civil War. Her heroine’s laughable incompetence at the tasks required of her mirrors Mitford’s own incapacity in such an unfamiliar situation.

In each example I see a determination to ‘tease’, a childish temptation to shock, a high-spirited disregard for consequences – evidence, certainly, of ‘neurotic dichotomy’ but also of a defensive armour she created to protect a sensibility attuned both to political realities and to individual suffering.

[My photo, taken in 2017, shows Heywood Hill bookshop, where Nancy Mitford worked during the Second World War – note the blue plaque on the wall.] 

Instead of a Critic

This is my new volume of essays. 

From the cover blurb:

"Instead of a Critic brings together pieces written over twenty years or so in search of whatever links them. The topics range from Anglo-German cultural relations and the refugee flight from Nazi Europe to myth, pictorial art and the ‘Two Cultures’ question. It touches on performance, whether in cinema, dance, ‘straight’ theatre or the American Musical. Above all, it expresses an enthusiasm for literature and what literature can do."

Instead of a Critic: Essays Written and Unwritten (Minos Press, 2022).

ISBN-13: ‎978-1739632205

Available from Amazon UK, Amazon US and other retailers. 

Table of Contents:

Introduction                                                             

Aldous Huxley: Between Art and Science              

Rupert Brooke                                                        

Bloomsbury                                                            

Rosamond Lehmann                                              

Katherine Mansfield and Germany                      

Kafka: The Significance of Clothes                        

Franziska zu Reventlow                                        

Rilke and Cézanne                                                 

On Translating Poetry                                           

Three Poems by Hofmannsthal                             

Hofmannsthals in Exile                                         

Egon Wellesz                                                         

The Gender of Mr W. S.                                          

Nancy Cunard Sees Josephine Baker                  

Hedy Lamarr                                                       

Louise Brooks                                                      

Wedekind in English                                           

Sondheim at 90                                                    

Mitford Connections                                           

Myth: Its Manufacture and Recovery                  

Blood for the Ghosts                                            

Newton and Supermac                                        

The Two Cultures

About the Author

Lola Kirke

Lola Kirke was weathering the perils of touring when I caught up with her on a Zoom call to Seattle. She’d just checked into – and quickly out of – the “world’s scariest hotel” and her original tour manager had gone down with Covid. But she was delighted to be out again post-pandemic and promoting a new album, Lady For Sale, her second release following her 2018 debut, Heart Head West. The sound is alt-Country meets 80s/90s disco and rock. It’s a big production. Locked down with producer Austin Jenkins, she had “nothing to do except obsess over music,” she explains: “We demo’d the shit out of those songs!” Despite some upbeat grooves, “it’s actually kind of a sad album. It’s dealing with a lot of doubt and pain and longing. But the narrative of the record does become triumphant.” “Triumphant” surely describes the video accompanying the lead single, ‘Better Than Any Drug’, which finds Lola cavorting around the house as if drunk on a new love.

Though born to a musical family – her English father, Simon Kirke, was drummer with fabled bands Free and Bad Company – Lola is perhaps better known as an actress than a singer-songwriter, having notched up the lead in hit Amazon series Mozart in the Jungle and several acclaimed movie roles. How does she compare the two activities? “At the level I’m at you make no money as a musician – but it feels a lot more creative.” She gets a buzz from making music videos: “I haven’t felt that way on a film set in a really long time!” And then there’s the thrilling realisation when she hits the stage with a live band that “we’re all making sounds at the same time, and they work!”

 

Early reference points for her music included Bob Dylan, Joni Mitchell and Alice Coltrane, but a recent move to Nashville introduced her to another cultural world. “I was inspired in a different way,” she reflects. She’d always listened to classics like Loretta Lynn and Tammy Wynette, but Tanya Tucker emerged as a big influence for her recently, alongside younger discoveries like Miranda Lambert. New genres can require using your vocal capacities in new ways. She tells a scary story about acting a film scene with her sister Jemima (also an actress). The script required her to scream at her sister. She “went for it, but not in a healthful way” and burst a blood vessel on her vocal cord. Specialists advised surgery but Lola was too busy with work at the time. Happily, there was no lasting damage to that already smoky voice.   

 

The title track of the new album, ‘Lady For Sale’, distils a theme she returns to several times in our conversation, the need to sell her work – sell herself – in the marketplace. “I didn’t feel I was being validated. I’ve spent my whole life wanting to connect with others and ultimately that’s not going to be possible unless I really try to sell myself.” She’s on a “roller-coaster of self-worth” at the moment, buoyed up by fans’ compliments, buffeted by online abuse about her appearance. She sounds envious of the simpler world her father grew up in, before Twitter, before Instagram: “I don’t know what it was like to live in a world where you weren’t always interfacing with your own press.” Lola’s solution is to “create, like, another self that you’re OK with sharing with others.” She admires Billie Eilish in this regard: “she’s still selling, but there’s something really potent about what she’s selling.”

 

Lola Kirke plays London's Moth Club on September 13th. 

(First published in RnR magazine.)