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Morrissey and the gang. Photo courtesy of Hector Hazard/Rough Trade
Morrissey and the gang. Photo courtesy of Hector Hazard/Rough Trade

FullscreenJune 8, 2017

Crashing down on a crossbar: The New Zealand man in a Smiths video

Morrissey and the gang. Photo courtesy of Hector Hazard/Rough Trade
Morrissey and the gang. Photo courtesy of Hector Hazard/Rough Trade

In 1987, at the tail-end of The Smiths’ five year lifespan, a call went out to fans: apply now to be featured in the music video with lead singer Morrissey. Among those chosen was Hector Hazard, who talks to Helen Lehndorf about his memories of the day, and shares some never before seen photos of the shoot.

Hector Hazard  – filmmaker, cycling enthusiast, raconteur – is possibly best-known in New Zealand for his stint running the iconic Chicks Hotel in Port Chalmers, near Dunedin, but that’s just one of the many interesting things about him. Thirty years ago he starred in The Smiths video ‘Stop Me If You Think You’ve Heard This One Before’. (Here’s the video, and that’s Hector in the red cardigan.)

I met Hector Hazard a while ago. We have a mutual friend who for years had been telling me “My friend Hector was in a Smiths video. You have to meet him one day.” I felt too awkward to make contact with him just on the basis of his association with Morrissey, but then my friend rang me. “Hector needs a place to stay in Palmerston North this weekend. If you let him crash in your sleep-out, he says you can interview him about the Smiths video.”

He turned up, a small satchel his only luggage. He was hitchhiking his way to the East Coast to finish a film assignment.

Hazard is from Leigh, Greater Manchester, and has a warm lilting northern accent. He’s a funny and affable guy, who tells a good tale and once we started the interview at my kitchen table we soon became immersed in mutual Smiths geekery. A couple of hours soon slipped by.

Hector Hazard, left, in a still from the video.

In 1987, when ‘Stop Me If You Think You’ve Heard This One Before’ came out  I was 15, living in a small town in Taranaki, where I’d discovered The Smiths a year earlier. I was heavily into punk music and assumed their album Meat is Murder would be hardcore punk, based on the title and cover. So when the stylus hit the vinyl, I was at first disappointed, then confused, then entranced, then in love…a love which has never ceased.

As for Hector, in 1987 he was 20 and living in Manchester…

Helen Lehndorf: When the ‘Stop Me…’ video came out I was in the peak of my Smiths obsession. I had a peroxide-blonde quiff and dressed like Morrissey, kind of asexually, so I obsessively watched that video – I feel like I know every frame – because I felt like I WAS one of the people in the video. I was trying to look like Morrissey and wanted to be totally immersed in his world. It was kind of… anthropological for me, visual evidence of the The Smiths tribe. It was also a close look at Manchester, the streets and the terrain the music had sprung from…

Hector Hazard: Interesting. I was never that impressed with the video itself…

Yeah, its not the most exciting video, but if you are a Smiths fan, it was a really close look at other fans. Tell me a bit about you around the time of the video.

I became a Smiths fan quite early on. It was a big deal that The Smiths were from Manchester. I knew Amanda Joyce at school, her uncle was Mike Joyce from The Smiths, the drummer. That was 1983; I was fifteen or so.

She said “Watch Top of the Pops, my uncle’s on it tonight.” So we all watched it and honestly I went “What the fuck?” I was shocked by Morrissey’s antics: the hearing aid, the gladioli… so I wasn’t impressed the first time, it was a little bit too much. I was at a Catholic school where the worst thing you could be called was a poof, so there was this kind of… expected masculinity, which Morrissey flew in the face of.

I got really into them around Meat is Murder, the terrific guitar-playing and the song structures. Morrissey was annoying to me at first, but that changed as I got familiar with the lyrics. He’s so funny! Laugh-out-loud stuff.

I liked Morrissey’s rebellious, smart-arsed, chisel-chinned vibe… his op-shop clothes – amazing! He was a breath of fresh air. Plus the lyrics all pertained to Manchester – aesthetics of cobbled streets and old black and white movies. I started going charity-shopping in central Manchester every weekend. There’s a place (it’s still there) called Affleck’s Palace which was an old mill turned into a gigantic market selling alternative records, clothes… good times. I’d spend all my money on records and clothes. I was into all the Manchester bands – Joy Division, New Order, Buzzcocks, The Fall.

Morrissey at the video shoot. Photo courtesy of Hector Hazard/Rough Trade

How did you come to be in the video?

I have one brother, Neil, he’s three years younger. It was 1987 by this stage, and I’d been a Smiths fan for a few years since ’84. My brother was following in my footsteps and really into The Smiths as well. He was part of a fan club called Smiths Indeed. They had a ‘zine – it was really good writing, the editor had talent. A few thousand people bought and contributed to it.

So the Rough Trade Records casting agent thought it would be a good idea to get Smiths Indeed to find the talent for the Smiths video. It was in the ‘zine: “If you want to be in celluloid history and be considered for a Smiths video, then send in a letter and a passport photo and Morrissey will pick ten of you.” My brother did it and then about two weeks later told me about it. His actual words were “Hey, I’m going to be in a Smiths video.”

I said “I’m going to enter too” and he said “No, it’s too late, the deadline was yesterday.” So the prick had purposefully not told me! But I checked and he’d got the date wrong so I still had two days! I sent in a letter and a photo in which I kinda looked like [Moors Murderer] Ian Brady with NHS glasses on.

At the time I had a shit job, my first job. I’d flunked my A-levels. I was working for the Keep Britain Tidy group as an accounts assistant. So the phone goes at work, its for me and it’s Jo from Rough Trade Records, all chirpy: “Hi! You’ve been chosen to be in The Smiths video! So if you could turn up next Sunday at the Britannia Hotel, Central Manchester, 9 o’clock. Bring a bicycle and wear a Smiths t-shirt and some jeans. We’ll send you a letter…congratulations!”

I was stunned. I put the phone down, gazed around the office at all the plebs and thought ‘FUCK YEAH!’

I went rushing home that night “Neil! Did you get a call today?” I just assumed he’d be called up too.

“No” he said.

I said “You’re not going to believe this, Neil…”

Has he ever forgiven you?

We’d fought like cat and mouse growing up, constant war, but even so this was… harsh. He just walked out of the room. It was dark and rainy day, as it always is in Manchester… and off he went. Just left and didn’t come back for hours.

What about now? Has he forgiven you now? Because I don’t think I would.

Yeah, of course he has. He’s all good now. He’s a brilliant artist. He’s never had to work for anyone else. He’s got his shit together. He overtook me in some ways.

So he’s OK. We don’t have to worry about him.

He’s fine. His life’s good. The Smiths thing? Who cares?

Morrissey at the video shoot. Photo courtesy of Hector Hazard/Rough Trade

So tell me about the day the video was made.

So we turned up. There were all these other Smiths fans, a mixed bag. Everybody had the Morrissey haircut. There was one guy who looked more like Morrissey than Morrissey did! They hadn’t gone for the most attractive, handsome, James Dean lookalikes – everyone had their own look. We actually had no idea that The Smiths had just broken up! This was October 18th – I remember because it was the day after my birthday – and Strangeways, Here We Come had just come out.

It’s funny that I was on a bicycle in the video because later I became a bicycle courier in London and Australia, for years! We bought our own bicycles along to the shoot.

It was a total Smiths day. A Sunday and an autumn day. We were all sat in this white van and then one of the film crew came up and chucked these jackets in. Three denim jackets and they were Morrissey’s! Recognisably Morrissey’s. One an American friend had given him, a Levis with a massive embroidery of Elvis…

I remember that from the video!

So that got chucked in, and a white one with the Hatful of Hollow cover…and there was a frenzy!

To get a jacket?

Everyone was like “OMIGOD! Check the pockets!!” and then I remember turning around and looking out of the van and there was Morrissey standing on the street!

Argh!

I had this little Olympus so I jumped out of the van and got a photo. Morrissey saw me and posed… and everyone was totally excited.

The whole day, we went from location to location. We started off in Moss Side. We were pretty separate from Morrissey for the shoot. He’d come cycling over occasionally… I remember when he came over the first tim everyone was not quite sure what to say, including him. He was just like… (pulls a pained face) “Hi.”

Later when I got home, the South Bank Show was about The Smiths that night, which was odd. So it was a totally immersive Smiths day for me.

I got home and put Strangeways… on and it had never sounded so good. My feet weren’t touching the ground. I had a signed t-shirt, the poster from off the fence in the video, other bits and pieces and I just felt so… like I wanted to share the love. Like, the experience was enough, and if I kept the t-shirt, I’d go to hell. It was almost too much. So… I had this French pen friend…

Are you telling me you didn’t give the t-shirt to your brother?

No. We were still at war.

I sent it to my French pen-friend who I didn’t even really know… I just thought it would be amazing for her. She was made-up. Back in the time when people still wrote letters…

Morrissey and the gang. Photo courtesy of Hector Hazard/Rough Trade

So did Morrissey talk to you during the filming at all?

He just turned up for his shots… and over the day, gradually, a kind of conversation started. He was a bit awkward.

Well, he is, isn’t he?

There was ten of us staring intensely at him… and he was just… pulling faces. He was a bit of a geek. I remember the conversations. The first one was, that for the new single there was an icon on the t-shirt. It’s a lady with a flowery hat on… and he said “Does anyone know who this is?” and no one did and we were all like “Damn! Damn!” (It’s actress Avril Angers on the cover of the single ‘I Started Something I Couldn’t Finish’.)

In his bike basket he had an Oscar Wilde book, we talked about that… so there was this slightly muted conversation going on.

At Strangeways Prison we got heckled by the prisoners. We could just see shadows moving behind the bars, that was interesting.

He would just hang around on the edges with… I don’t know if they were record executives? Jo from Rough Trade Records was there, and there was a hairdresser, so he’d be standing under an umbrella and someone would be playing with his hair.

We ended up at Salford Lads Club, there were rows of terraced houses all around, which are all gone now. One of the guys making the video had an odd bowl haircut, and looked quite androgynous. He turned out to be a guy who had worked with Derek Jarman a lot, as his cameraman. They had big film cameras, digital hadn’t happened yet.

Everyone was taking lots of photographs of Morrissey. He was looking really good at that time, I don’t think he ever looked better.

Yes, he is gorgeous in that video.

In those few years, he had gotten really cool. So during the day, I took some pictures. He was kind of taking me on. He’d be staring me down, pulling faces…

Hector Hazard, right, with Morrissey, left, and another star of the video outside the Salford Lads Club. Photo courtesy Hector Hazard/Rough Trade

Posing for you?

A little bit, yeah. And I got my picture taken with him, and with the guy who looked more like Morrissey than Morrissey. So in the picture we’re flanking him, and posing… and he’s giving good pose as well.

I stayed friends with that guy. Letter writing was still a thing then, so we exchanged letters for a while and went out to a gig together a bit later. He was a student at Manchester University and in the halls of residence. He showed me his room. It was plastered ceiling to floor with Smiths posters. People would come to be in his room because it was like a church of The Smiths. He was totally obsessed, and obsessed with looking like Morrissey, too.

When I got back to my Keep Britain Tidy job, I spent a week at work making a photo album with a Smiths lyric pertaining to each photo.

At the end of the shoot he was signing autographs for us all. He was like our mate by then. We were all gathered around, we all got given a t-shirt and he signed mine on the back and drew a picture of himself. And I gave it away to my French pen-friend. Gah!

Morrissey at the video shoot. Photo: Hector Hazard

What were the other fans in the video like? Were they cool?

Yeah, they were…for celibate vegetarians. At lunchtime the crew came back with a load of Wimpy Burgers, half meat and half vegetarian, but I was the only one who ate a meat one. I was a Smiths fan but I wasn’t you know… full nerd.

In the afternoon, we were travelling around in the white van and Morrissey was in the car in front. We had radio contact with the car, so we all sang ‘Girlfriend in a Coma’ to him through the radio. That was a cool – he loved it.

So in the video, which one is you?

I’ve got a bright red cardigan on, which I’d bought the day before on my birthday from Affleck’s. It was such a good decision because everyone else is wearing denim and I stick out. There are three or four shots that I’m in. If you blink you’ll miss it, so just look for the red cardigan.

How was it for you when it aired on TV?

The whole next few months were insanely exciting. I would go out into town with my red cardigan on, just in case – although I wouldn’t pair it with a Smiths t-shirt. It wasn’t necessary.

Morrissey cleaning his glasses at the video shoot, with Hector Hazard in the background. Photo courtesy of Hector Hazard/Rough Trade

So people recognised you?

Yeah. Yeah. Which was cool, being a little bit famous for a bit.

Was it good for getting girls?

Yeah, it was. My mates would take the piss. We’d be at a bar with a bunch of other people and one of them would pipe up, unprompted, “Just because you were in The Smiths video…” So there was all that piss-taking as well.

When it aired, it was a different song to the one we’d made the video to! We made it to ‘I Started Something I Couldn’t Finish’ but that got changed because there’s a lyric about a mass murder, and a mass murder had just happened in Hungerford. A guy went on a rampage and so they thought it was inappropriate timing so they quickly re-edited the footage to fit ‘Stop Me…’

Afterwards, Rough Trade sent us all some photographs from the shoot, group shots.

I do remember getting my own photographs developed and I was looking at them on the bus and just going ‘Oh my god, oh my god…that really happened.’

Morrissey and the gang, with Hector on the far left. Photo courtesy of Hector Hazard/Rough Trade

Can you remember anything Morrissey said to you or the others that day? Or was it all just awkward mumbling?

We communicated through cheeky face-pulling a lot, almost like The Two Ronnies or something.

Morrissey claimed to be celibate and assexual at the time. Did you get any sense on the day that he was flirting with anyone, or there was anything like that going on?

Other than me…not really.

You think he was flirting with you?

There was a kind of… he and I had the face-pulling thing going on. He wasn’t doing that with anyone else. He was awkward, but when he saw I had a camera he definitely struck poses for me. I don’t know…I thought he was handsome and he looked really good… his hair, his chiselled jaw…

Morrissey at the video shoot. Photo: Hector Hazard

How often do you watch the video now?

Well, I didn’t watch it for about ten years…maybe even fifteen?

So you wouldn’t do an annual watch, or whatever?

No. But when I re-opened Chicks in Port Chalmers, and got immersed in the music scene again we got bands from all over the world, which was remarkable considering it was a grotty old pub in the middle of nowhere. So there was this new generation of Smiths fans, for whom this anecdote was really impressive, especially for New Zealand people because it’s such a long way, and a long time ago. So there’s been a resurgence of interest lately.

I let it slip occasionally. Who would have thought that it would become more of thing now than it was at the time? I guess because they’ve become so iconic. At the time, Morrissey said “this is the end of pop music, now that The Smiths are gone” and I thought he was conceited to say that but he was totally spot-on. There hasn’t been a pop band anywhere near as original and cool, who’ve had that kind of impact since. There’s been no bands which have gotten into the top of the charts which are as interesting.

Did you go and see him when he last played Wellington (2012)? I did. It was cool how many Smiths songs he played, aye? I thought ‘even if he plays one Smiths song I’ll be beside myself’ but I think he played… five?

Yeah, I did. He came on to ‘Shoplifters of the World’.

I spent a lot of that gig in tears.

Yeah I know what you mean. It was emotional. I got a piece of his shirt! He threw his shirt in and it was a massive grab. I was on the fringe of it… there was a ripple effect and we all fell over. But the tussle over the shirt went on through the whole gig! These people pretty much missed the gig because they were scrapping! Then I saw one of them in Cuba Street the next day and I said “Did you get the shirt?” and he said “I ended up with a sleeve and one panel…” I said “Oh, so common-sense prevailed?” and he said “Yeah someone produced scissors and we cut in into four.” Then he offered me a swatch of it! So we went around the corner to his flat and he cut me off a piece!

Morrissey at the video shoot. Photo courtesy of Hector Hazard/Rough Trade

Do you ever miss living in Manchester?

I miss that time…being young, spending Saturdays in town going around buying records and clothes. I went back in the late 90s and lived there again for a while. It was still abandoned cotton mills and huge chimneys then, I could see them out my flat window. But they are all gone now, knocked down…

Manchester’s changed. Everything went a bit… damp. Grim. Cold. Lost the sense of something positive happening that it had in the 80s and early 90s.

Yeah, its hard going back to somewhere you once loved.

Photo: Hector Hazard
Hector Hazard today. Photo: Esta de Jong

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Aldous at the park-5443-2 copy FEATURE 2

FullscreenMay 19, 2017

‘What if birds aren’t singing, they’re screaming?’: Inside Aldous Harding’s head

Aldous at the park-5443-2 copy FEATURE 2

A couple of years ago Aldous Harding was just another New Zealand folk musician. Then she found a fierce voice, and started playing a string of mesmerising live performances which now have her on the cusp of international stardom. Henry Oliver sat down with her to try and find out what sparked her transformation.

Aldous Harding speaks with conviction about her uncertainty. “Let’s just get one thing straight – I don’t know anything,” she says firmly with unwavering eye contact, before repeating it at half-speed. “I. Don’t. Know. Anything.”

“The thing I want to say to most questions I’m asked is ‘I don’t know’. Because I think I know but then I get a little offshoot of something that might counteract that thought and then it just turns into this family tree of insufferable confrontations in my own head that I just get paralyzed and I just go…”

‘What if birds aren’t singing, they’re screaming?’

We’re sitting at a small French cafe in Sandringham, Auckland, a few days before she starts a tour that will have her on the road eleven of the next twelve months. She doesn’t really want to go into her history. Or her personal life. Or even her songs. She doesn’t want to over explain. She doesn’t want to ruin the mystery, but she doesn’t want to romanticise it either. She wants the music to stand on its own – to be enough. Which is not to say she doesn’t like talking about it per se. She’s just unsure about anything other than the music being crystallised and documented.

I’ve been listening to Harding’s second album Party (out today on Flying Nun and 4AD) since March, carrying it around with me like a secret. And for a few particularly stressful months, Party has provided an unexpected, non-literate comfort. It’s not the words themselves that she’s singing that I’ve found assuring, but the way those words sound when Harding sings them. And this has made me increasingly empathetic to her reticence.

Harding’s music is deep and weird and mythic. It exists in its own world and follows its own symbolic logic. She might not want to talk about her music because she doesn’t want to impose herself on your interpretation of her songs. She might not want to talk about her family and her relationships because her music evokes a world separate from biography, separate from fact.

But if facts are what you want, here they are: Her ‘real’ name is Hannah not Aldous. She was born in Auckland. She’s 26 years old. Her mother Lorina is an acclaimed folk singer. The two recorded a duet when Harding was 13. As a teenager, she became friends with Nadia Reid and the two started playing music together. She played in Lyttelton country band The Eastern for a couple of years. She was ‘discovered’ by Anika Moa who saw her busking in Geraldine but she had actually already been ‘discovered’ by Ben Edwards and Delaney Davidson. She’s had an on/off relationship with country singer Marlon Williams. Lorde is a fan. She drinks a lot of Red Bull.

Aldous Harding. Photo: Steven Acres

‘There is no end to the madness I feel’

Harding’s 2014 debut, Aldous Harding, was recorded in Lyttelton with Edwards and Williams. It sounds like one of those recently-rediscovered ‘60s/’70s folk records which already sounded ancient when they were made. Based around Harding’s voice and guitar, and supplemented by fiddle and the occasional percussion, Aldous Harding is striking not only for its sonic fidelity to those earlier, equally-mysterious musicians, but for its lyrical language – a kind of ancient English that, for all I know, maybe never existed except for on the tongues of folk-revivalists and period drama actors. Although, it’s not so much the words Harding uses, but the Chaucerian syntax and folkloric imagery: blood, betrayal, woods, fires, rivers, isolation, hardship, revenge, death.

“I had a bit of a nervous breakdown and I got really fixated on religion, so a lot of my themes were quite archaic,” she says. “I was honestly thinking in that language. I’m not kidding. Because I believed that somehow it gave weight to how I was feeling. Because it was older. A lot of musicians tend to do that, which I didn’t realise I was doing myself. It’s almost like plucking a bit of history and carrying it around with you somehow gives what you’re doing weight and meaning.

“In a way, I was slightly guilty of that at the start, but that was how I was actually thinking. I had this weird religious… I bought myself a fucking Saint Christopher. I used to stand at my boyfriend’s drum n bass gigs and grab onto it and just try and just blast the thoughts out of my head.

“It was just a bad time. I look back now and know that’s someone with anxiety that doesn’t know they have anxiety and they’re like everybody else and because I was creative I managed to turn into something far bigger than it was. But that’s the only reason I really started playing music, like properly, properly.”

Photo: Steven Acres

Aldous Harding was as much of a critical success as a pastoral folk album can have in New Zealand –  it was nominated for the Taite Music Prize, an award for the best New Zealand album of the year, its single ‘Hunter’ was nominated for a Silver Scroll, the songwriting equivalent of the Taite – and quickly Harding was playing shows all over the country, gaining a fervent following everywhere she went.

“When I first heard the recordings I was just absolutely floored and I hadn’t imagined that the live show could be any better,” recalls Matthew Crawley, an Auckland promoter and musician. “I just started seeing her play at various places and every single time it was a total revelation. You can be really impressed, you can be into a song, but it’s very rare that a performance can properly whisk me away these days. And the shows I’ve seen Hannah play have increasingly been just really gut-punching shows.”

To widen the scope of her live performance beyond her genre-faithful album, she would include other people’s songs in her set, songs like Kate Bush’s high-risk, high-reward ‘Wuthering Heights’, Roy Orbison’s classic ballad ‘Crying’, and Tennessee Ernie Ford’s coal-mining chart hit ‘Sixteen Tons’, each song offering Harding an opportunity to expand her dexterous voice in new and often confronting ways.

Both Crawley and Ben Howe, managing director of Flying Nun, tell me about the same moment they each released Harding might be operating on a different level even they, two ardent supporters, had realised: Harding singing Edith Piaf’s ‘Non, je ne regrette rien’ by herself, without a guitar. “It was possibly the most stirring thing I’d seen in years,” says Crawley. “It was one of those things where you thought, ‘fuck, this is actually for real’. And people rose to their feet in spontaneous applause. It was quite crazy. That was when she announced herself as a force.”

‘Here is your princess, and here is the horizon’

I missed all this. Harding’s announcement came in a period of my life when I didn’t go out much. I experienced music as recordings, at home, in private. So it wasn’t until her first single ‘Horizon’ was released in February that her force found me. The starkness of the three circular piano chords, ringing around and around as Harding circles with them, expelling scenes from a failing relationship from her chest with a possession and focus that was at first frightening and then freeing. The subtle shift from anxious minor key verses to open major key chorus. The tone of Harding’s voice as she comforts, confesses, and then implores. Her use of ‘babe’ as a recurring rhyme, taking it from affection to bitterness as it builds. And then, of course, the princess and the horizon, both given no obvious context in the lyrics, but so full of meaning with Harding’s vocal evocation and, when performed live or experienced as a music video, her physical enactment.

No mention of Harding fails to use the word ‘theatrical’. And while this can betray a denial of music’s inherent performativity, it’s on ‘Horizon’ where her physicality is most expressive. When she performs the song, her hands are anguished one moment and pointing to the audience with a preacher’s admonishment the next. Her neck lengthens and tightens. Her eyes widen. Her eyebrows arch. Her cheeks hollow. Her entire body distorts to produce the tones her song demands. And, when the chorus arrives, her arms lift. “Here is your princess,” she sings, raising her left hand, “and here is the horizon,” her right arm extending, her finger pointing towards some imagined sky.

“That was a hard one to record,” she says. “Because it’s a performance more than anything. Doing the whole [she raises her arms one after the other in affectionate self-parody] thing. People lap that up, they love it. I actually mean it though, when I do it. And now it’s become something that is actually a habit that I do because it feels like the most natural thing. To not do that, I would have to actually stop myself.”

Photo: Steven Acres

‘If there is a party, will you wait for me?’

‘Horizon’ is, despite its high drama and physicality, a minimal masterwork and serves as Party’s centrepiece. But those expecting to hear more songs like it will come up empty-handed. Throughout the album, Harding’s fingerpicked guitar remains the harmonic foundation for her singing, complemented rather than displaced by an array of sonic and instrumental additions, many care of John Parish, the Bristol-based producer best known for his work with PJ Harvey.

While more musically linked to Aldous Harding as the first singles suggest, Party serves as a significant evolution of Harding as a songwriter, a singer and as an artist. Her language is contemporary, her songwriting reduced to its most potent parts and her sonic spectrum widened. Party ticks and bounces and buzzes and drones. There are synths and choirs and programming and samples. It’s an album of soaring emotion and minute detail.

“A lot of the stuff on my first record was stream of consciousness and now that I’m calm and I feel like I’ve got room to be considered,” Harding says of her development as a songwriter over the last three years. “And I take pride in my songs in terms of really trying to put them together as a song rather than ‘I want to get out as much of this poetry as I can’. That’s fine, let that be your initial spark, then you pull things out and you start to realise that it’s not actually all about you all of the time.”

More than anything else, the album is full of voices. A choir, musician Perfume Genius, Parish himself, and, of course, Harding. She’s forceful and strong, she’s small and delicate, she’s low and guttural. She’s a folk singer, a jazz singer, a pop singer. She’s a shapeshifter. She’s everyone and she’s no one.

“People always love to mention that I have lots of different characters and lots of different personalities and lots of different voices when I’m on stage,” she says. “And, you know what? That’s absolutely fine. It’s not a misread, but I don’t see that as an issue. I just sing the song how I think it should sound as a song.”

“When I first started playing, my voice was so tiny and I didn’t know I could do all this other stuff with it. And now that I’ve figured out I can do that, I like to experiment with different things. Someone said to me once, ‘oh your real voice is just like your speaking voice, but you sing, and I was like, ‘what the fuck does that mean?’ What the fuck does that mean?”

Photo: Steven Acres

‘Take Mum to Paris, jump on the big beds’

With a multi-continent tour looming and a record on the way that will be reviewed in major publications around the world, I ask her how conscious she is that her life is about to change. She knows it’s a trap and tells me so.

“I know the ways it’s going to change and that’s stuff I can’t control,” she says, “but the stuff I can control, I’m really excited for because I know that I really want to do it and I really want to do it well. And I believe in it. And I can say that and mean it and that’s nice.

“I just forget to be grateful that things have gone well for something that I didn’t necessarily want, but that doesn’t mean that it’s not really wonderful. Because of what’s happened, I kind of need to stop and go, ‘OK, even though up until now, you didn’t really work that hard, you know that you’re going to have to work hard now’.

“Up until a year ago, I didn’t feel like I’d worked hard. The songs fell out because I was unstable and trying things… The first time I felt like I’d actually worked really hard was when I went on my second European tour and playing every night and I actually had to focus and it became a bit of an endurance thing, which I haven’t had to do before.”

With the opportunities she’s become more ambitious. She’s growing up, she says, getting more confident and finding ways to turn her anxiety into excitement, into a focus, into energy. “I’m a little unnerved at how keen I am to be touring again,” she says. “Like, I’m worried that I’m going to say things like ‘I’m just trying to stay on top I’m just trying to keep up’. Because that’s how I feel a little bit – like I gotta keep touring and every day I’m not on the road I’m like… it’s weird. It only took one tour to make me really keen for it. Playing shows, being with my band.

“I used to hate it. Everything about it. Probably because I didn’t believe in what I was doing.”

So why’d you do it? I ask.

“Because people told me that I was good at it. But now I’m more confident. I really like it.”

‘The beauty is so close to me’

Party may not appeal to everyone. For some, Harding’s voices, both in their intensity and their elasticity, will read as affectation and the album will stick slightly in the throat. But most, who find their way amongst its drama, it will not only be one of their albums of the year, it will engrave itself on the inside of their skull, it will softly enter their daydreams and violently invade their nightmares. The girl with the thumb in her mouth. The lilting saxophone. The nasal eeeeeeeeeees and aaaaaaaaahhhhs. The screaming birds. The hard-won happiness. The princess and the horizon. There will be Aldous Harding, the woman and the myth, living in their heads, refusing to leave.

 


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