17 minute read
Games
Vukovi, Nice N Sleazy, Glasgow, 24 Jan by Aimee Young
by Jock Mooney
Advertisement
1 2 3 4 5 6
7
8 9 10
11 12 13 14
17 16 15
18 19 20 21
22 23 24
25
26
Across 1. [Sings] What is love? (4,4,4,2) 7. A very long time, or energy company (3) 8. The grammatical term for figurative phrases (6) 9. The sound of a doorbell + an American word for penis? (4,4) 11. How Americans refer to the sexiest emoji (8) 14. A girl has no name [Game of Thrones] (4) 15. Skip, reverse, draw two, draw four (3) 16. She played Edward Scissorhands' love interest (6,5) 17. Oversharing (initials) (3) 18. Intense wanting (4) 19. Long before Tinder, there was... (8) 22. Hugs (8) 24. Gondor calls for aid (6) 25. Soulless way of measuring success (initials) (3) 26. Internet chat-up line (5,4,2,3)
Down 1. On Wednesday we make sweet weekly love (according to Flight of the Conchords) (8,4) 2. Amy's new passion in Sex Education season 2 (6) 3 . Ukrainian city, or a song by Caribou (6) 4. Care for or be liable to (4) 5. ‘Wild Wild West, Jim West, desperado, _____ _____’ (5,5) 6. Pasiphäe shagged a bull, this was the result, famously had to be contained in a maze (8) 10. Paul McCartney called this the best song ever written (3,4,5) 12. Sculpted pubes or gardens (10) 13. Make fun of someone in a playful way (5) 16. 2019 ITV police series starring Rob Lowe, cancelled after one season (4,4) 20. Lacking pigmentation (6) 21. Ornamental flowering plant, associated with virility in Ancient Greece (6) 23. What a birthday suit is made of (4)
— 17 — February 2020
M eant To Be
We chat to Glasgow’s rising pop stars Bossy Love about falling in love, building a future and owning the album they’ve always wanted
Interview: Katie Hawthorne Photos: Marilena Vlachopoulou
The first time I saw them I knew they were a bit of me. Exactly my type on paper. It was almost exactly four years ago, a chilly evening in March 2016. A small early-doors crowd were nursing lagers in Edinburgh’s La Belle Angele, well ahead of an Errors headline show later that evening. The lights dimmed and a band I’d never heard of just… transformed the room. In less than ten minutes they’d persuaded us to ditch our coats, neck our pints and creak our aging knees into urgent slut drops.
Bossy Love have absolutely no business being a support act: their live shows have more attitude than Mariah and more goofy, high-octane energy than an entire troupe of theatre kids. Frosty R’n’B borrowed from noughties popstars collides with an almost industrial dancefloor drive, and all of this is offered up to their audiences with the kind of easy, tipsy togetherness that makes every show feel like a house party. It’s not often you stumble upon a band that immediately demands your devotion, but when this magazine later described their gigs as “nothing short of cultish” it was no exaggeration.
Amandah Wilkinson and John Baillie Jnr met each other in 2008. Wilkinson was the driving force behind perky Australian pop band Operator Please, Baillie Jnr was jumping between drums and vocals for Glaswegian six-piece Dananananaykroyd, and both bands were supporting The Futureheads at Fat Sams in Dundee: an extremely noughties situation. The way they tell it, their meeting was fated. “Within ten minutes I just knew. I was like, that’s one of mine,” Wilkinson grins, pointing at Baillie Jnr. The feeling was mutual. “You could just tell,” he nods. “We just clicked.”
They stayed in touch, texting each other from the road, and the next year Operator Please had a show at King Tut’s. They planned to record some songs together during Wilkinson’s few hours in Glasgow, but fate intervened – again. “I couldn’t get into his house!” she cackles. “This was way before iPhones and I didn’t know which house it was. So I’m standing there, and I meet this boy...” “The only person walking down the street was my flatmate,” says Baillie Jnr, triumphantly finishing the story. “You had that gold Motorola razr!” Jump to 2012. Both Operator Please and Dananananaykroyd have broken up, and Wilkinson has moved to London, where she’s living in a grim converted warehouse and trying to write songs. “No windows. It’s dusty. I can hear people shagging all the time and I’m whisper singing in my bedroom.” One night she sends Baillie Jnr a track: “I was like, ‘Hey, what d’you make of this?’ Within half an hour he’d produced it and sent it back to me.” She turns to face him. “It was like you dived into my brain and made the song something I’d always wanted it to be.” In Sync When the pair talk about each other, it’s with the kind of affection and detail usually reserved for childhood best friends or very first crushes, filling in each other’s sentences with an exclamation mark (Wilkinson) or a deadpan one liner (Baillie Jnr). Their songwriting process is no less intimate. “I’ve never had this kind of synergy before, where someone can say, ‘Come on, tell me what this song’s really about’,” she says. “More so than ever I’m the most lyrically honest, emotionally honest that I’ve ever been. I’m the realest version of myself in front of John – and probably my boyfriend and my sister.” They laugh. “John knows more things about me, more secrets, that I haven’t shared with anybody. I can’t hide anything from him. It’s spooky, actually!”
“That’s what I’ve taken as part of my job,” he counters. “My job is to try and capture it, you know?” This symbiotic relationship is at the heart of their debut album, Me + U. The songs are made of Wilkinson’s lyrics and Baillie Jnr’s production, and its tracks form the full circle of a relationship. “So: first you’ve got your honeymoon phase,” Wilkinson explains. “It’s all sassy, it’s all play, and then you get in too deep, you’re wading in it, and it all blows up in your face. Then there’s the reclaiming of yourself, at the end.” At one end of the scale there’s a song like Foreign Lover (with guest vocals from Babe’s Gerard Black), a slinky, kitsch track about a ride-or-die long-distance romance. At the other there’s Muscle, a fizzing, furious retribution that unleashes a storm of pent-up frustration and twists Wilkinson’s bubblegum vocals into something far darker.
Me + U, the record’s title track, is tucked in the middle. “It’s the album’s soft heart,” says Baillie Jnr. A soaring, desperate ballad with distant, clubby bass and space for the sniff of a snotty nose, it hits hard for fans used to the band’s joyful live show. “I think that’s the beautiful contrast about Bossy,” explains Wilkinson, “we do have fun and it is all really raucous, but the songs are meaningful. Me + U is the result of a time where I felt the most devastated that I think I’ve ever felt. For the song to even make the record…” she exhales, smiling. “A lot of the takes I was crying, because I went back to that place and I’d forgotten what it felt like. I thought I had healed it.” “And then I cracked it back open!” laughs Baillie Jnr. “The most fascinating thing about that song was that it was about you finally processing it all, and now you get to see it as it was. It’ll give that off forever, like some fucking weird radiation.”
Taking ownership Their joint experience of the music industry has given them a steely resolve: they own all their music (something that’s less common than you might imagine: see the Taylor Swift/Scooter Braun scandal); they invest in themselves for the long term, recently building a studio – “like, literally” – so that they never feel rushed when recording; and, most importantly, they only do something if it’s fun. “I’ve been in one end and out the other of the major label machine,” says Wilkinson,“and there’s so much seduction in the idea of signing to a label but there are so many complications.”
“Exactly,” adds Baillie Jnr. “The label took you to a fancy dinner? No, you took yourself to a fancy dinner. You’re being signed by venture capitalists, you’re taking on debt and the more you do the less power you have.” They both remember exhausting, never-ending tours – “I’d look on our MySpace and there’d be 50 more shows that I didn’t know about,” Wilkinson says – and the full control they have over Bossy’s trajectory goes some way to explain why the songs, and those shows, feel so freeing. In the early years Bossy Love was a soundsystem – they’d DJ clubs and sneak their tracks into the mix. They’ve stealthily released songs for six years now, but it wasn’t until 2016 that they finally pieced together the live band, with the help of whirlwind keyboard player Ollie Cox. Wilkinson jokes about the pressure of a “longawaited first album”, donning an ominously deep voice to do so, “but this record just feels full,” she says, grinning at Baillie Jnr. “It’s full of everything I wanted.”
Good things take time. Any romantic can see that Bossy Love are built to last.
Me + U was released on 31 Oct; it gets its vinyl release on 5 Feb
Bossy Love in six songs
Call Me Up The final version of that fateful demo Wilkinson sent Baillie Jnr, Call Me Up is a sugary pop dream worth moving to Glasgow for.
Body The squelchiest bassline and a self-affirming rap verse combine for a perfect party-starter.
Breathe – Blu Cantrell (live cover) In which Wilkinson is effortlessly both Blu Cantrell and Sean Paul, this cover pours petrol on their live shows.
Up All Over Me A song so good they ripped apart the first version of their album to get it out sooner, it’s a whip-cracking, frosty riot.
Girlfriend Originally written for The Saturdays, Wilkinson says she thought, “Ah, that means I can be totally honest, and I won’t have to sing it myself.” Instead it’s Me + U’s opener, and a loving rebuttal to Robyn’s iconic Call Your Girlfriend from the perspective of the other woman – with a sneaky nod to the song in the form of Baillie Jnr’s synths. “What if Robyn comes after us?” Wilkinson laughs. “She could beat me up, she’s so cool,” Baillie Jnr shrugs.
Interlude A 37 second-long teaser, the album’s interlude is made from sneaky snippets of future Bossy Love songs. “They’re all finished,” grins Baillie Jnr, “I’ve got them on my phone right now.”
— 21 — February 2020 — Love Stories
Heartbreak, Hi
Ahead of her show at Glasgow’s Barrowlands on Valentine’s Day, we catch up with Angel Olsen to discuss her latest album All Mirrors
Interview: Tony Inglis
There’s an exchange in Greta Gerwig’s generous, brilliant adaptation of Little Women, between Florence Pugh’s Amy and Timothée Chalamet’s Laurie, that places the two characters at odds with each other on the subject at hand: love. Both are at a turning point in the story. Laurie, spurned by Jo, is in flux, reconsidering what his love for Amy’s sister, for anyone, means if it isn’t being reflected back. Amy is coming to terms with her place in the world; that if she cannot be the great artist she aspires to be, then perhaps marriage, describing it as an “economic proposition”, is all that is left. “I believe we have some power over who we love, it isn’t something that just happens to a person,” Amy tells Laurie. “I think the poets might disagree,” he pings back.
Angel Olsen’s love is multitudinous, allowing space for realism and romance. At least, that’s what she conveys on All Mirrors. It’s a powerful, affirming, dramatic, but never tragic, work about the ways in which we love and can be loved back. It clearly reflects on a recently dissolved relationship, but it would be retrograde to tag it as a ‘breakup album’ when it so actively engages in dialogues about platonic love, love as an artist, love as a professional, even loving the children you never thought your friends would have. And loving yourself: ‘I like the air that I breathe / I like the thoughts that I think / I like the life that I lead / Without you’. Spending time with All Mirrors is opening yourself up to countless epiphanies about how love manifests in your own life and relationships, such is Olsen’s clarity of artistic vision and deep wisdom.
Olsen is often portrayed as spikey and brusque during interviews. She would be entitled to be, picking up the phone as she does, whilst the US is in the midst of celebrating its most important national holiday, Thanksgiving, and she specifically is enjoying some downtime before heading out on the road.
That could not be further from the truth. We find her relaxed, the stress of an album rollout very much done and dusted. Her cat Violet, a star in her own right, sidles up to Olsen as soon as she picks up the phone from her North Carolina home, grappling for her attention throughout the conversation. When answering questions, she expounds when she wants to, prioritises brevity when she needs to. Like in her songs, little vocabulary is wasted – if the answer is obvious, that’s what she’ll say.
“I just went to a friend’s house and we played
Photo: Cameron McCool
charades and made pies,” she explains nonchalantly of her Thanksgiving. “I don’t really care much about holidays, especially when they’re rooted in our people taking land away from Native Americans,” she goes on, less nonchalantly.
Released in mid-autumn last year – rarely has an album’s chilly, gothic overtones resonated so seamlessly with the season it was put out – All Mirrors felt then as it does now: momentous. Even when the 12-piece string section recedes into the background, and Olsen’s voice quietens to a whisper, it still has the ability to slice your heart in two. It far outstripped the plaudits dished out to her previous work, even as Burn Your Fire For No Witness was given an end of decade re-evaluation. It was a great record when it arrived, and is even greater now.
“This thing that I just released a few months ago, people are singing it back to me in an audience,” she says of the reaction. “The very beginning of anyone sort of responding is always like, wow, that’s crazy that people are immediately into this weird material. I know it’s not an easy record on first listen. But I needed to do it and I’m really happy with the way it came out.”
With love can come strife, disappointment and hardship, and Olsen went through it all to arrive at All Mirrors. She has said that having her heart broken is the “coolest thing that ever happened” to her. “After My Woman, I didn’t know I was going to have another record to write about, or that it would be anything like this one,” she says. “And this just happened in my life. Okay, it was messy. And it was embarrassing. But it made me stronger. I didn’t go out and find a desk somewhere and say I’m going to write about the love of my life and the loss of it. Each song comes together and I have no idea what it’s all accumulating to mean or what the theme has been in my mind until the record is made. And then I’m like, well I guess I was thinking about that stuff a lot.”
On Summer, Olsen sings: ‘Took a while, but I made it through / If I could show you the hell I’d been to’. Atop galloping guitars, you can almost see Olsen ride triumphant over a dusty hill, red
setting sun behind her like a halo. It’s the aftermath of her experiences touring previous record, My Woman, which saw her dealing with personal struggles alongside the disquieting fug of depression settling in even as she dealt with the toing and froing of taking her music to audiences.
Now she is bringing All Mirrors to the stage, a far more ambitious and complex task to execute. It’s not the unabashedly personal material (“I don’t feel exposed in any way. I don’t feel like it’s ripping open a wound when I’m performing”) but the cinematic scope of its sound. And more importantly, Olsen is an unapologetic homebody these days. “It took me a long time to feel safe by myself as a human and, now that I wake up and feel that I know myself, I cherish the simple things. Going out and sitting on the back porch with my cat and drinking coffee, reading, going out on a walk and running into a friend. That to me is home.”
Olsen is an ever-evolving artist, but she is also a businesswoman, and few singer-songwriters talk so illuminatingly about that part of making music. Touring is increasingly the most important, to use an Amy March phrase, economic proposition, and so pulling it off is vital. She talks about having to be a “leader” and taking on players, and how important that is to them as a stable means of employment, with empathy and a willingness to continue learning. But it’s clear she’s a perfectionist. “I’m not the kind of person who is like ‘that sounds great’ when I don’t believe it,” she admits with a self-deprecating laugh.
“I value the people who work at presenting it with the integrity of the songs in mind,” she continues. “The presentation of it has become more interesting because not only can I zone out and forget who I am in it, but other people can look at me as a character or as some sort of artifact of the record. We’re all showing up to present the record and perform it as though it’s happening for the first time.
“I have a lot of new members in the band, and I think having the new energy around has helped me feel less like someone’s watching and scrutinising my arc, and more like people are showing up and performing because they want to be involved. It’s been stressful, but I’m so happy with the way everything is sounding.”
The last time Olsen played Glasgow, an audience member threw a note at her early in the set. That makes it sound like a wispy scrap of paper floating its way on stage. In reality, it was a foreign projectile coming fast out of nowhere.
“Stuff like that happens and I know that people wouldn’t do such a thing if they weren’t watching the show and engaged,” she says sympathetically. “But until you know what it is, when something’s coming at your face, you’re like, what the fuck? I used to be a whole lot more sensitive. I brace myself for all kinds of things. I’m ready to fight. I have a sense of humour about it now though.”
This month, Olsen will play All Mirrors at the Barrowlands on Valentine’s Day. There is romance to be found in these songs, and the way that Olsen performs them, that make it a good fit for this trivial holiday. It’s also hilarious, and a little masochistic, to imagine her singing lines like ‘Knowing that you love someone / Doesn’t mean you ever were in love’ to a room full of couples. She laughs heartily at the thought of it too.
Angel Olsen plays Barrowlands, Glasgow, 14 Feb
