FEATURE: Spotlight: Revisited: Joy Crookes

FEATURE:

Spotlight: Revisited

Joy Crookes

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HERE is an artist…

who I spotlighted in 2020. Joy Crookes’s new album, Juniper, is released on 26th September. It is one that I would urge people to pre-order. One of out very best artists, she is someone I have been a fan of for years now. Having recently played Glastonbury, Crookes has a string of tour dates later in the year. It is an exciting time for her. I wanted to revisit her music, as she is someone who has been on my mind since I spotlighted her five years ago. An amazing talent that is going to be releasing music for many years to come, I will bring in some interviews with Joy Crookes. Her debut album, Skin, was released in 2021. It is one that I remember very fondly. I am looking forward to seeing what Crookes gives us with Juniper. I want to start with some extracts from a 2023 interview with Culted. The interview was not in promotion of her music as such: “Joy has recently been named an Original as part of adidas’ latest campaign, celebrating the Samba, Superstar and Gazelle”:

“I know you’re working on the second album, can you talk me through a typical day working on the project?

I wake up, I feel like I’m on top of the world. By three o’clock, I haven’t eaten, and I’m having an existential crisis. By four o’clock, I’m doing the best backing vocals that I’ve ever done. By five o’clock, I want to redo the lead vocal. By six o’clock, I wonder if it is going to be any good overall and by seven o’clock my stomach is rumbling and my mum’s called me three times and I’ve missed every single call, and I want to go home and cry. By eight o’clock I’m like, “this is f*cking fire.”

You’ve said in previous interviews that you’re an overthinker. How does Joy Crookes switch off?

I switch off by going to the pub. I switch off by engaging in very intense situations like watching football or supporting Arsenal, which is a great way to switch off from music. I also disengage by weirdly just listening to music for no other purpose than just enjoying it.

I also switch off by sleeping… sometimes. Sometimes, everything follows me into my dreams.

You’ve previously said that your favourite subject at school was history. What is a bit of history that you think the world should know more about and why?

I think people should know more about colonisation. There was a survey, and I think a really large percentage of people thought that colonisation was a positive thing because they had obviously been ill-educated. I actually don’t think ignorance is necessarily an evil thing if you live in a country where the curriculum doesn’t necessarily tell you all of the details.

British colonial history and imperial history is probably something that [people need to know more about], as someone who grew up in Britain and is from two immigrant backgrounds that have been colonised or have been the product of decolonisation, I would probably say that. And also, it is really important to understand how decolonisation then played a huge part in subculture.

It’s horrible and tragic and deeply gory, and there are always going to be beautiful things that are born from places of pain. You can take British history and relate it to some of the more positive moments in British culture and be the influence that the Windrush generation had on Britain, or be the influence that South Asian people had on Britain, Tower Hamlets – like it just contextualises the melting pot that is London I think.

Does history inspire you musically?

Definitely, history also inspires my style, I think I’ve always been super obsessed with subculture.

I had a vintage dress phase and learnt about Kate Nash when I was 12, and the Northern Soul big dress type of thing.

I really got into the French Liberation phase when I was 16 and moved out. I just wanted to be in trousers and loafers and be a very serious and very 1950s French woman but Brown type beat.

And then the beauty and world around Audrey Hepburn, the pathetic fallacy of Hollywood and then Mod culture and the way that girls would dress during that period of time. And then Caribbean women in the 1970s.

I’ve always associated fashion with culture and history, and I don’t think people remember that history is such a huge part of the reason why people dress the way they do. That’s probably why I like Wales Bonner and adidas because it feels really reminiscent of a time and culture in Britain.

Now, just some quickfire ones. What is your top song to Lime Bike through London to?

I do love “Mercy Mercy Me” by Marvin Gaye, when the sun comes down, that’s such a good song to Lime Bike to. But also “Loving You” by Kiki Gyan.

Go to food when working long hours recording?

My Mum’s house.

Finally – what does the future look like for Joy Crookes?

I’d like to make music less sh*t. That’s it. There’s no explanation. That’s all I can give you right now”.

I will actually end with a live review. There are not a lot of particularly recent interviews with Joy Crookes. There will be more closer to the release of Juniper in September. I want to bring in an interview from May from GLAMOUR. They spoke to Joy Crookes as part of their Sound of Summer issue. An artist fighting for authenticity who unapologetically and unashamedly wants to be herself, it is an interesting interview. The South London artist explains how why there has been a fairly long gap between albums:

“So where has one of Britain’s rising stars been for the last four years? “I wasn’t very well,” she says. “I basically had a mental health crisis between albums.” While we are waiting for staff to deliver us some cigarettes to compliment the cocktails, I ask her about some lyrics that hit me particularly hard: “‘Who am I when I’m out of your sight? I want to see how we look apart” on Somebody to You. “It’s such an important question for women trying to define their full adult selves outside of relationships that no longer serve them,” I say. Though the lyrics sound like they could be spoken by someone after a bad romantic break-up (“that’s intentional”, she says) it actually hints at a familial relationship that had broken down in the interim and caused Joy to rethink what her life looks like without her reliance on that relative. In that vacuum, she did a lot of soul searching. “It’s funny you picked that line out of all of the lines on the album, because it’s kind of what the whole thing is about,” she explains.

From the first track on her sophomore album, Juniper [released on September 26th] it’s evident that her four-year hiatus has been about self-growth. It shows on the record: how she chronicles the uncertainty and chaos of her mid-twenties; the vulnerability and soulful inflections betraying the depth of pain she’s experienced from one album to the other. Brave hits you in the chest, as she stretches her range to a falsetto at its crescendo to announce her step towards a new horizon: “I’m so sick, I’m so tired I can’t keep losing my mind / I want to be brave, I want to be in love / It’s time I stopped running away. I should stay.” Any avoidantly attached listener will resonate with the track’s sentiment. “It’s about being so scared of love and truly being seen and knowing you have to do it anyway,” she says. “I reached flow state and wrote that in one day, and it was recorded in basically one take with a handheld mic on a sofa. It’s a song where I feel like I am transported back in time”.

While Skin was a tour through the cultures and spaces Joy inhabits, her new album is fittingly named to exhibit Joy’s introspection and personal metamorphosis. Even though this album is a chronicle of her lowest points, she’s emerged out of that dark period wise enough to help others navigate the industry. “I want to start an agency for the protection of musical artists. Something that feels like it gives guidance, or is almost a union, because I spend a lot of my time on the phone to people in crisis because of the way this industry really plays with you,” she says. Over the years, she’s found her peers – from Miso Extra to Holly Harby Dweller – to be an invaluable resource for uplift and support. “Me and Jai Paul will just sit in my car talking about how weird the world is right now and eating McFlurries,” she laughs.

And so Joy begins to gear up for a summer preparing for the release of her sophomore album in September, which is the sum of her artistic and personal growth. She will be able to start touring her new material in the summer – notably at Glastonbury, which, in her opinion, is “the best festival in the world” because “it makes you feel like a community of people who are all free, just for a few days”. And therein lies Joy’s mission statement for her next album, and likely for the remainder of her twenties: freedom: “The most important messaging for this era for me musically is that I just want to be me. More comfortable with myself, unapologetic, and unashamed”.

I am going to end with a reviews from The Guardian from earlier in the year. One of the things that annoy me when people talking about artists is the word ‘comeback’ or ‘return’. Like they have been in the wilderness lost for decades! In many cases, the artist has been working on new material or taking time off. It seems somewhat judgemental to say they have returned. Like this is a big comeback. That pressure that artists have to produce material and tour all the time and, if they do not do that, when they do release music then it is this dramatic return from the darkness. Joy Crookes has always been present and out there. The fact is that she needed a bit of time to put together her second album:

“These songs, which largely fit the mould of the tracks on Skin with a little added pop oomph (sturdier and simpler beats, big choruses), are frequently about top-of-mind topics for young people: anxiety, beauty ideals, toxic exes, reliable besties. I sometimes found myself wishing for more bullish defiance or abject sadness, coming from a voice so brassy and rich, but there is no denying that Crookes can write a killer hook. Never more so, perhaps, than on the as-yet-untitled song whose hook goes “You’re a killer”, a bouncy, surely viral-ready track that Crookes introduces as one of her favourites of the new batch. Slick and energetic, it’s a highlight of the evening.

Another new song, Crookes explains, is about “unrealistic beauty standards, and how they’re kicking all our arses”. The track centres on a fictional character called Carmen, who represents an impossible ideal; with its halting piano intro, it brings to mind Frank Ocean’s Super Rich Kids and the opening bars of Bennie and the Jets. Later, she plays a song about anxiety and the queasy feeling of adrenaline, inspired in part by the scene in Pulp Fiction when Uma Thurman’s character is given an injection to the heart. (“This song is a fuck off to mental health issues,” she quips.) Although Crookes warns the crowd early in the night that she has “bubble guts” because she hasn’t performed for so long, her voice sounds pitch-perfect, resonant and full in a room that – likely not built for pop concerts – doesn’t always sound particularly great. She’s backed by a crack four-piece band whose deft, warm style is far more appealing than that of the unsubtle hired hands usually drafted in to perform with rising stars like her.

The most poignant moment comes when, bathed in blue light, she addresses the reasons behind tonight’s show. “I really wish we weren’t raising money for children that are in conflict and wars,” she tells the audience. As she dedicates a new piano ballad, Forever, to just such children, it feels like a perfect combination of pop and politics”.

With Juniper out in September, there will be a lot more eyes and ears on Joy Crookes. A truly magnificent artist that everyone needs to follow, it has been great revisiting her music. I am excited to see where she goes from here. There is no doubt that Joy Crookes is going to…