Woman’s Hour: ‘It’s So Empowering To Be Able To Say No’ • Neu • DIY Magazine

Consider every band that emerges within the space of a year, and how few of those end up getting somewhere - anywhere - beyond a gentle tip or a slot in a local gig. Once you gain the taste of a higher calling you likely latch onto it for dear life. That’s largely why being in a band can play out as such a surreal experience. It involves saying ‘yes’ to everything and allowing, essentially, for things to stir out of control. All in the hope of potentially turning a page.

Woman’s Hour had that glimpse, and they turned away. In 2011 they released ‘Jenni’ and ‘Human’ on Dirty Bingo Records. Those songs were the product of two days in the studio with Richard Formby, best known for producing Wild Beasts. If it was happening to anyone else, it’d simply go to their heads. But these guys opted against everything. They hid themselves away, wiped the slate clean and started over.

We spoke to Fiona Burgess from the band about new beginnings and the value that existed in being shown the ropes first time round as a band.

There must be aspects of your Masters course in Performance Studies that tie in with the band. Your sound and image have become much more refined.
Photography and…art history, I find fascinating in general. In terms of performance and when I was doing my undergrad dissertation, I was looking at how photography and film have impacted live performance. It’s kind of difficult to detach the two. Some still believe that live performance is incomparable to a photograph or a documentation of a live event but all this thinking has directed how we are visually. It’s an interesting one because I suppose in the last year - me particularly because it’s me who does the artwork and all that kind of thing - I wanted to have a few more reference points. With all the portraits we’ve got and the ‘Our Love Has No Rhythm’ video, that was our first visual image. I was interested in…y’know you see all these band shots and they’re so generic and they don’t really tell you much about the individuals who make up that. Really the influence for that was an August Sander portfolio where in the early 20th century he made all these portrayls of German life, documenting the workers in Germany. I was fascinated by it because all of these artists were shown on their own. When you looked at them, they weren’t there with their paintbrushes or behind a camera or with their instruments. They were portraits of them as people. A lot of the reading on our website…I suppose it’s the idea that as musicians and as somebody who’s part of a band, it’s easy for people to miss that you’re all individuals. They can just see you generically as four people who merge into one. The truth is, and the reason we needed to take that year out, is we’re all so different. In terms of our interests and musical influences, just the way that we operate and think. It’s lovely and it’s really nice that we appreciate each other’s strengths and weaknesses, but I think we wanted to start off by showing each other as individuals. Of course we are a band and we do work together. But it seemed like something that was a lot more honest. We are a unit, but we’re also really different as people.

You started a clean slate really, didn’t you? You got rid of ‘Jenny’, the song and video.
You know what…The truth is that we hadn’t refined enough who we were and what music we were making, as much as anything else. We just weren’t developed enough to be on stage, metaphorically. At the time, everything we were doing was a learning process, but we were figuring all of these things out on stage instead of behind the scenes and not having to worry about what people were saying about us. Back then everything we were doing and making…People we talking and commenting about us and it felt like we weren’t ready for those comments because we weren’t in a place where we were truly happy with what we were making. I think we realised after that first single that it was a great experience to do it, because it made us aware of how unprepared we were. It shook us a little bit and made us think we actually had no control over our visual identity, or even sonically. We spent two days recording, nearly a year before it came out, working with Richard Formby. We literally had those two days and that was it. We hadn’t spent any other time working on those two songs. It happened really quickly but it was important. We spent a year going into the studio with another guy, Tom Morris, who was really generous with his space and his time. We kind of decided to take a long break and just make songs that felt right and felt like music that we were really proud of. It’s not that we weren’t proud of the stuff before but there was something not sitting quite right with us, with ‘Jenny’ and ‘Human’. We knew that we needed to spend a bit more time developing those sounds. We benefited enormously from the change. We made sure we didn’t make quick decisions without giving them enough thought. I think as a band you get a lot of pressure and it’s just made us able to say no a little bit more. It’s so empowering to be able to say no to things. We didn’t realise how good it felt. And so we learnt a lot from that. Now we all feel a lot happier with where we are.

It takes a lot of guts though to leave the spotlight like that, when you get a taste of what things could be like.
Yeah but, I suppose it comes down to…I’m someone who goes with instincts. If something’s not feeling right I find it really difficult to fake it. It felt like whatever would’ve happened from the start wouldn’t been right because it wasn’t a good enough reflection of who we were. Although it felt scary at the time it was actually a massive relief for us. We were like ‘phew, we can take time out’ and we suddenly felt really relaxed and we were able to work in a way that was non-pressured. Literally, nobody was even aware that we were making this music. As far as anyone was concerned we didn’t exist. That was so necessary for how we needed to develop. As scary as it was - and it was scary, it was a difficult decision for us to make - it felt totally right. I think sometimes you have to go with those instincts. In the long run it’s going to feel a lot more natural.

The songs that you’ve come out with now are perfectionist works in a way.
That was the problem with the first single. Me and my brother, we are perfectionists. It must be very irritating for some people. I think we realised how big a perfectionist we both were. We’ve been able to go away and perfect our songs and our identity. And that feels really nice. It’s nice that you can hear that it’s not something we’ve just bashed out. Some bands are amazing and really good at that. Unfinished songs can work. But I don’t think that we’re that kind of band. It felt really nice to create that that we’d be able to affect a little bit more.

I take it you recorded a lot at the same time.
We’ve got a lot of songs now that we feel really happy with. These songs that we picked to release are part of a bigger body of work. We saw it as that - everything we were making, it wasn’t like we were working on tracks, more on something larger. Everything somehow fitted in. In the process, we’d take aspects from one song and that would lead us into another song. Part of it is the fact that the equipment we’re using stays constant. There are certain sonics that crossover. But we have a sound that comes naturally. There’s a feeling behind it all that we think is continuous. We’ve had positive reactions from these two songs and if I compare how we feel now, in contrast to how we were before we put those tracks out…We were so nervous about how people would perceive it. But at the same time we felt really confident. We just hoped that people wouldn’t cling onto the last two tracks but would allow for our development. What feels quite nice is that, because we’ve now got these other tracks, we feel more excited than nervous now. It doesn’t feel like a big risk that we’re taking.