FEATURE: Spotlight: LoneLady — Music Musings & Such

FEATURE:

Spotlight

PHOTO CREDIT: Alex Hurst

LoneLady

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WHILST it is important to feature…

a mixture of brand-new artists and those who warrant further attention in Spotlight, I feel it is also key to emphasise artists who are coming back into focus or are launching a new album. The wonderful LoneLady (Julie Campbell) is releasing an album a new album next month. LoneLady is a superb and original artist. The Manchester artist started out being influenced by the Post-Punk era, later integrating Dance and Funk influences. She began making music on a 4-track cassette recorder in her flat in Manchester while completing a Fine Art degree. I will bring in a couple of interviews and a review for her last album, Hinterland (2015). Before then, as The Line of Best Fit report, there will be a third studio album from LoneLady very soon:

“After releasing her first single of the year "(There Is) No Logic" back in March, LoneLady has announced her first album in six years, Former Things, and has shared a second track titled "Fear Colours", which LoneLady describes as "an electroscape of funk, crunch and vocoder-ed fear!"

Former Things is entirely written performed and recorded by LoneLady at Somerset House Studios' Rifle Range, and will follow her 2015 album Hinterland.

LoneLady says of the album, "I was hungry for a change of scene. Born and bred in Manchester, my home city is like walking around a giant living diary, an archeology of myself, layered with memories. Following meetings with Somerset House Studios Director Marie McPartlin, in June 2016 I moved from Manchester to London to become a Studio member. I set up a new studio in The Rifle Range, an 18th-Century Naval shooting gallery. In this long, narrow concrete room I set up my studio to be part art-installation, part nightclub where I could turn the volume up loud and project Cabaret Voltaire super-8 videos and Ingmar Bergman films across the stone walls. I was located at the dramatic heart of it all, not far from Trafalgar Square and Buckingham Palace - quite a change from my previous studios nestled in the crumbling darklands of Manchester’s outskirts."

Tracklist:

The Catcher

(There Is) No Logic

Former Things

Time Time Time

Threats

Fear Colours

Treasure

Terminal Ground”.

Do can go and pre-order Former Things here. It is good to have a new album from LoneLady. I want to bring in a few interviews. We get to look back at 2015 when she was promoting Hinterland. What is noticeable about the interviews is location and setting. Campbell, in 2015, was based in Manchester, but she then moved to London. She is now back in Manchester – though I think she can see herself being back in London soon. In 2015, The Quietus spoke with LoneLady about Hinterland. There are some interesting passages that grabbed me:

“The tower block where Julie Campbell - aka Lonelady - lives and starts her daily walks from is also where she recorded her excellent new album Hinterland. She hasn’t been idle since her debut LP Nerve Up came out on WARP in 2009. For starters, she’s spent some of the time making Concrete Retreat - her home studio.

It’s no Rockfield though; no Electrical Audio; no Abbey Road, as she’s quick to point out: “I think some people would look at it and laugh that I would even call it a studio. Really it’s just an assembly of odds and scraps that I built up over the years. But really that’s what I make the music with.

“During the writing phase I thought I was just building up information to take to a studio when it was ready but the more I worked on the songs the more I realised they had an atmosphere that came from the tower block. The studio is in the same place as my bed. I get up and it’s there. Everything’s very compact. And that’s how it went for days, weeks, months. I will work at something again and again and again until it’s perfect. I won’t think anything of singing a line thirty times just to get the exactly right little inflection I want there. You can’t do that in a studio really. You don’t have the money and other people don’t have the patience. Working alone like that, I just gradually built up these songs, finessing them more and more and more until it was apparent that they were actually finished.”

When I mention the fact that her tower block overlooks a busy motorway flyover, that leads to nowhere, Julie anticipates what I’m going to say and replies: “J.G. Ballard? It’s a bit too Ballardian because over the road is also a centre for disease research as well. So I think I’m doing pretty well on the J.G.Ballard scale.”

It seems almost redundant to ask her if architecture influences what she does. Looking around the landscape she inhabits, it’s hard to see how it couldn’t. She adds: “Architecture has become a really huge part of what I do. While I was writing in the tower block I started reading Bunker Archeology by the cultural theorist Paul Virilio - a guide to abandoned German command posts, fortifications and pill boxes from World War II. I really related to it because even though the text was about military installations, it felt like he could have been talking about my tower block. One quote said, ‘Here bespeaks incredible pressures’, referring to the thickness of the concrete in the structures. But it could easily have been about a high rise building.

“I can feel all of these cubes replicated above me and all around me and I can feel all of these other people and presences pressing in on me and I think over the years the tower block has unfortunately become an oppressive space. But I’ve tried to work with that and use it to do something creative.”

With typical German etymological efficiency, the word Hinterland means simply the land behind. It has come to mean, territory slightly inland from the coast, the rural area surrounding a town or a port, a remote or undeveloped region, while also figuratively referring to anything that is ill-defined or not fully explored. Used as a title here it also suggests the quest to find a different landscape under the one that’s visible; an attempt to scratch away at the palimpsest of Manchester, to uncover a different truth, just hidden from view.

Julie says: “I love the word hinterland because it seems to encapsulate so many things. To me, Miles Platting, Ancoats and all of these outskirt places that I’m just drawn to day after day are the hinterlands. The city centre doesn’t offer anything to me - it’s corporate and shiny. I’m still drawn to these places that offer free rein to your imagination, the ruined buildings which you can reimagine and repurpose.

“Hinterland is also the landscape of your mind, your inner landscape. When I was writing this album, I was going through very long periods of being very withdrawn actually to a very extreme degree. And it’s very interesting what happens during those periods to be honest when you retreat inside a landscape of your own imaginings. There are at least two songs on the album that deal directly with withdrawing into this interior landscape”.

I think it is worth introducing a review for Hinterland. Those who are new to LoneLady should check out her previous albums. One can make their own mind up about an album like Hinterland. That said, it is an album that resonated with critics heavily. In their review, AllMusic said the following:

“During the five years between Nerve Up and Hinterland, Lonelady's Julie Campbell built a home studio, released the 2011 album Psychic Life with Jah Wobble and Keith Levene, and then withdrew into a period of introspection. After exploring and holing up in Manchester's decaying outskirts, she returns with some of her biggest-sounding and most kinetic music. While Nerve Up was a rough gem full of angular punk-funk and brisk acoustic pop made all the more striking in its juxtapositions, the way Campbell brings these sounds together on Hinterland is just as compelling. It's also more immediate, as though her isolation concentrated her music into even more artfully chiseled melodies, rhythms, and imagery. Propelled by beats ranging from slinky to funky, these songs are even more structurally sound than before: Hinterland's undulating groove and pristine cello sounds like Rufus and Arthur Russell crossing paths, while Campbell's guitar work -- which spans harmonics and riffs that sparkle and slice like a knife's edge -- serves as a reminder that she's as distinctive and formidable a player as St. Vincent.

Meanwhile, "Groove It Out" feels like the culmination of all her projects to date, fusing the irresistible beat of Nerve Up's title track -- which feels like a blueprint for much of Hinterland -- and Psychic Life's taut post-pop as it moves from driven to joyful and reaffirms that dancing and thinking aren't such strange bedfellows. Indeed, there's a remarkable playfulness and sensuality to many of these songs, given the circumstances that inspired them. "I don't want the factual life...take me deeper," Campbell sings on "Into the Cave," an invitation she follows with the literally underground anthem "Bunkerpop," where, beneath the surface, she longs for connection with a mixture of hunger and defiance. On each song, she makes lost and abandoned spaces (physical and otherwise) sound vital and personal, using phrases like "rubble" and "corrugated iron" with the ease and frequency that other artists use "love" and "baby." Whether she's alone but not lonely on "Silvering" or truly isolated on the desolate ballad "Flee!," Hinterland's tough, hard-won beauty reveals Campbell coming into her own”.

Hinterland is a fantastic album! I think that Former Things will inherit shades of that album - though we will see something new and some progressions. There is a lot of excitement in the air following the news that LoneLady is bringing us her third studio album.

Before coming up-to-date with a recent interview, I want to head back to 2018. CLASH spoke with her about new music. In the interview, LoneLady intimated that a new album would be along fairly soon:

“The long-time Manchester resident decided to relocate last year, occupying a studio in Somerset House. Largely left to her own devises, she’s turned this one-time colonial outcrop into a hub for her post-industrial sounds, using lengthy walks, incessant meandering around the capital’s frayed East End environs as a means to progress past the success of her 2015 record ‘Hinterland’.

“I think getting out of Manchester was a personal thing for me,” she tells Clash. “I needed to grow, and to feel like I had found a way forward rather than being surrounded by over-familiarity, really. So being in London has enabled me to do that and explore pastures new. And just psychologically do different things.”

“I wouldn’t describe the new album as a ‘London album’ it’s just the sheer fact of uprooting myself and being in a new space is all part of the process, in a positive way. Wherever I am, I’m Northern.”

It’s a big step, though. For any person, moving to London can be overwhelming, the city’s sheer speed and endless complexities offering a very unusual sense of psych-drama. For an artist, we imagine, it must be doubly so. “I think to be honest it just takes time,” she admits. “I moved into Somerset House and got an arts council grant to improve my studio set up. That was the starting point. I made both albums on a really lo-fi studio set up… which is great. And I’m still a big fan of using minimal tools, but I needed to move on and expand.”

“I got this funding, and basically expanded the set up. Got a proper mixing desk, got a midi analogue sequencer as the heart of the new system, and really just expanded and reconfigured my entire studio set up. And that was the starting point.”

This is just her base, however. Julie has long been a fan of getting away from the studio and simply walking, a kind of post-industrial flaneur meandering through abandoned factories, and buildings marked for demolition. It was a recurring feature of ‘Hinterland’, and she has enjoyed applying this technique to increasingly difficult to find areas of East London.

“I do tend to like the river,” she says. “All the quaysides, wharfs, dockside architecture. I’ve been out round Greenwich and the Isle of Dogs; out East, really, quite a lot. There’s a helluva a lot of new terrain to explore, which I’ve been doing.”

London has its own branch of post-industrial environs, Clash offers.

I’m drawn to the dockside industrial remnants,” she says, before adding with a chuckle: “Unsurprisingly! I love it out there, it’s an alien landscape. I enjoy going out there to explore.”

But we haven’t called her up to compare walking routes. LoneLady is approaching the end of her next album, with work almost – but not quite – complete. “I don’t want to give too much away, but I think the new analogue set up has informed the record,” she says. “Particularly with regards to rhythm. It’s all I really want to give away – it’s very rhythm-oriented. I see songs in colours, and tonalities, and I viewed ‘Hinterland’ as quite a multi-coloured, primary-coloured album”.

Now that we know Former Things is out next month, I bet LoneLady will want venues to reopen and get her music out there. From the two singles we have heard from the album, it is sounding like the most compelling and rich album from her yet. NME caught up with her last week when she released the single, Fear Colours:

“LoneLady has shared new new single ‘Fear Colours’, along with details of new album ‘Former Things’ and an extensive UK and European tour. Check them all out below, along with our interview with Julie Campbell.

Coming in June on Warp Records, the Manchester guitar pioneer and singer-songwriter’s third album has so far been teased with the single ‘(There Is) No Logic‘ and now ‘Fear Colours’, which she described as “an electro-scape of funk, crunch and vocoder-ed fear!” – and a fitting evolution from her previous work.

Speaking to NME over video call from her flat in Manchester, the bleak, industrial landscape which inspired Campbell’s debut ‘Nerve Up’ and follow up, ‘Hinterland’ surround her home: crumbling mills, run-down factories and the juxtaposition of the old and new: 60s tower blocks next to modern, luxury apartments.

Many have noted how Campbell’s work to date has felt like an extension of Manchester itself with so much does the city radiating from her sound. Her first two albums were recorded partly in her home-built studio, partly in an abandoned factory. Recording in the ruins wasn’t ideal, but it worked for practical reasons: studio time was expensive, so too were properties in the city centre. “Manchester really trumpets about its musical history,” Campbell told NME, “but it needs to supports grassroots premises and communities so that there’s going to be great new music tomorrow.”

Her “LoneLady” first persona came about through a love of creating in isolation, but she told us that this time she was desperate for the opposite. “I could just step out into the hustle-and-bustle of London, which was so stimulating and fantastic,” she explained. “I had all these art galleries on my doorstep too. I get just as much inspiration from going to art galleries as I do from listening to other music.”

Campbell explains how ‘Former Things’ started out as a techno record, before she put her Telecaster aside and instead added layers of synthesisers and drum machines until she had an ’80s electro-pop record that sits somewhere between New Order’s ‘Movement’ and Cabaret Voltaire’s ‘Drinking Gasoline’. At its poppiest, like on first single ‘(There Is) No Logic’ and latest dancefloor-ready new single ‘Fear Colours’, the album channels the likes of La Roux and Neenah Cherry.

“I’ve always loved early-to-mid 80’s electronic music,” Campbell said. “I love where the technology was up to at that point. I was really leaning into that whole electro world with this new album.”

Explaining how she gathered lots of vintage equipment to help her achieve this sound, including an old Yamaha keyboard she’s had since she was 10-years-old, she said: “It’s probably only worth about £30, but it’s my favourite bit of gear. It’s the sound of my childhood so I’ll always keep it, it will always be there, playing with the big boys – the ARP and the Korg.”

Back in Manchester, Campbell told NME of wanting to return to her London space: “If money wasn’t an object, I’d be quite happy in my bunker in the basement of Somerset House for the future,” she admitted, explaining how she’s trying to find a better balance between what she wants to achieve artistically and what she can achieve practically.

“I’m trying to rein in my romanticism a bit,” she added. “It’s so impractical and I would like to have more albums out than I do. I will happily be the caretaker of an authentic, crumbling industrial mill. It so important to retain a link to the past, to us, to our youth, because that’s the story of us, and…I guess, me”.

I am going to wrap things up there. It is exciting to hear new LoneLady music. Go and pre-order Former Things and check her out on social media. In Julie Campbell, we have an incredibly arresting, inventive and fascinating artist who is among the best out there. I wanted to bring her into my Spotlight feature, both to make people aware of her new album, but to look back and prove why she is such a compelling artist that warrants closer investigation. Former Things is out next moth and it will be truly…