INTERVIEWS
Piers Edwards chats with the ex-Ash axe woman, solo artist and Bat For Lashes collaborator, Charlotte Hatherley.
No but when I was playing with Bat For Lashes a few months ago, we all had lunch here and everyone commented on how it was such a nice place. It has a great reputation around Manchester for giving a lot of new bands their first gigs. It is very cool. When you were playing with Bat For Lashes at Glastonbury I heard you would be doing a solo set as well, but I asked about and couldn’t find a listing or a time for it. Yeah, it was the first gig we did for this album, so it was on this weird little stage in this afternoon and nobody could find it. We just had a few very hung over, zombie type people there wandering in and out. It was sort of unannounced, in one of those open slots. We treated it as a warm up gig really and we did the same at Latitude. I played with Bat For Lashes and also did a little solo set as well. When you did your first solo album you were still with Ash and not too long after that you parted company with them. Did the response you got from your solo material give you the confidence to see yourself as a solo artist, rather than part of a band? Yeah I think so, I think I was quite naïve about a world without Ash. When I was with Ash I had access to their fan base so when I did my solo material I chucked it out quite quickly. Then there was quite a lot of downloads of the first single ‘Kim Wilde’ and I got loads of good reviews of the record so it did make me think, Oh maybe the thing I do for myself really is a valid thing to do. Sort of like testing the water? Yeah and I’m now on my 3rd album, which I can’t believe, and I feel like I’ve done quite a body of work over the last 10 years. And quite eclectic as well, the first one being more guitar based and the 2nd showing more experimentation. Yeah, I think this one is… I don’t want to get too bogged down in the whole 3rd album thing that can happen. I see myself doing many, many, many records; I think I got slightly obsessed with turning 30 and feeling like there was a certain pressure on time. Now I am 30, I think that it was ridiculous, but I wanted to get a certain amount done so I really rushed this record. I didn’t want to do another studio record that would take months so I set myself a target and limited myself. I wanted it to be exciting and it’s designed to be played live, because I really struggled to play ‘The Deep Blue’ live because it was so complicated. The new album definitely feels like the big sister of the first album, just done better. I’m still really proud of ‘The Deep Blue’ and when I listen to it now I’m really amazed that we did that. It was very different after the first album, it wasn’t what I expected. It’s almost like the new album should have been the second one and then I could have done something different. I wasn’t really concerned about what people were going to think until after it was released, because with ‘Grey Will Fade’ (Charlotte’s first solo album) I was still with Ash and had the security. With the second album I thought, woah this is me on my own. It kind of got overlooked that album and I wasn’t really in the mood to tour it and promote it. The new album is called ‘New Worlds’ but it was called ‘Cinnabar City’ at one point. Why the change and what do they both represent? Cinnabar City was a continuation of themes and I’d recently been listening to a lot of Paul Clay, Khandinski and lots of classical music. It kind of felt like I was moving in a different direction, maybe a bit more modern, but lyrically I thought it was very direct. I didn’t want it to be rhetorical or mysterious; I wanted it to be out in the open and didn’t want to have to explain it. The title came from the song ‘New Worlds’ on the record, which was originally titled ‘The Colour Of Soul’ but I wanted to move away from the colour theme and thought ‘New Worlds’ worked better. It was going to have really animated artwork and my face wasn’t going to be on it, then I changed it all. I didn’t really want people to… ..Do what I’m doing and ask questions about it? (laughs) well I didn’t want people to find it in a record store and not really know what it is. It just has my face on it and I think it’s really straightforward and that works for me. So back to the colour theme, the first single from the new album was ‘White,’ and for the video you had to learn the entire song backwards so it could be reversed. How difficult was that to do? I was rehearsing with Bat For Lashes at the time so I learnt the song backwards and had the time to do it. It was like learning the most alien language. There is a lot of repetition in the song so I had the basic stems, reversed it and learnt that. With the lyrics I wrote it out phonetically, reversed it and learnt it that way. The hardest thing with that was, you’re used to sort of gradually building up towards the end of the song, but I had to start off really hyper and then slow down. It was all done in one take, we did three takes and we used the last one. We had some financial restraints but I wanted it to be really striking. It was the same with the new single Alexander; we did the video in one day, really quickly with the same director. On a geeky, technical note, did you have to learn to put more emphasis on the upstrokes rather than the down strokes so it would look right when reversed? I sort of ignored all that, it was too much and I couldn’t really handle it (laughs). You mentioned playing with Bat For Lashes earlier, so how did that come about? Well she (Natasha Khan) has lots of instrumentalists in her band that play all kinds of things like harmoniums etc so she wanted someone who could play guitar but could also do keyboards and bass. It all worked really well musically so it was really great discovering a whole new group of people to play with and Alex who plays live with me now has played with Bat For Lashes before. It was really good for me because I sometimes felt a little bit out of the scene and I really wanted to get into that kind of thing. I feel like I played some stuff that shows what I can really do. Has that experience made you more inclined to follow what you said earlier, and try something a bit more alternative on your next album? Well yes because Bat For Lashes is different and it’s popular so it has encouraged me to try something a bit different in the future. I might need more of a deal with a record company to do something more ambitious because at the minute I’m on my own label. The industry has changed so it’s harder to make money out of what you’re doing now so working with Bat for Lashes was a really good way for me to make some money, to be honest. It was a very creative experience so I am thinking about the next one being a bit different. Obviously when you started out you were quite young, so other than music, did you have any ambitions? What do you think you would be doing if you weren’t a musician? It was pretty much music for me, that was what I wanted to do. It’s not an easy choice because it can be very frustrating being in a band but I think I was quite an angry kid so music tends to attract that type of person. Now I’ve turned 30 and I couldn’t even imagine doing anything else, I could never go back to finding another job. Have you ever considered covering anyone else’s songs? We used to do a lot of covers live, I used to do a cover of ‘The Name Of The Game’ by Abba and a song called ‘Kites’ by Simon Dupree and the Big Sound. Wasn’t there a gig that Ash did once that consisted of only Abba songs? Yeah, we did a gig at G.A.Y. (laughs) which was fun. Now I’m really sticking to just my own songs but I do like covers, ‘Pin Ups’ by Bowie is my favourite album. It’s a great album. I love that album. Bowie tended to have at least one cover on every album he did. (We discuss various Bowie albums and tracks and I mention ‘Loving the Alien’) I love that song (very excitedly) and I was actually going to do a cover of that but someone beat me to it. Maybe I will do that at some point though. (We discuss that fact Bowie released two albums in quick succession in 2002/2003 but we’ve had no new material since then, possible due to reported health issues) Let’s light a candle for David (laughing) Related to the issue of heroes, if you had to form your own supergroup, with you included, who would you have in your band? They have to be alive now, as well. (Thinks for a few moments) Ok, I’d have Captain Beefheart on the piano, Paul McCartney on bass, Rob Ellis on drums (Charlotte’s current live drummer) because he’s amazing, PJ Harvey on guitar and Mike Garson on.. Oh I’ve already said piano. Right that’s it, that’s all I need (laughs).
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