Best of 2014 The DIY List 2014: The year St. Vincent took over

St. Vincent is #1 in The DIY List 2014 - read the full top 10 here.

Annie Clark is on a crackling phone line, and her old seaside hotel, she calmly explains, is “probably haunted”. Speaking largely in drawn-out yawns – “I’m doing this interview before I eat food, which has to happen three hours before the show or else I’m sleepy on stage,” clarifies Annie – she doesn’t seem especially fearful of any creaking doorways or dark spirits that might be lingering in the corner ready to pounce. Instead she’s been spending her day “walking by the ocean,” reading a book about 80s computer game music composer Rob Hubbard, and poking around dusty junk shops. “I’m pretty obsessed with oddfellows and freemasons, cults and secret societies,” she says, “and England is a good place to be on the look out for that.”

Annie’s interest in closed-off gatherings and her total indifference towards spooky goings-on in the hotel makes sense, really. If there’s any one word that represents ‘St Vincent’ - from initial conception to live show and realisation - it is fearless.

‘St Vincent’ is an album about running away from Texan rattlesnakes in the nuddy-pants, and then snorting lines of coke with His Royal Majesty of debauchery and gender-bending, Prince Johnny. There’s a hat doff given to American writer Lorrie Moore on that same song, and then two songs later behaving in a fairly careless manner takes centre stage again; this time throwing a television out of a window. That’s without mentioning the notorious “take out the garbage, masturbate,” on ‘Birth In Reverse’- delivered with a flippantly Bible-belt baiting nonchalance - or any of the other surreal images that her fourth, self-titled album draws on. Despite the varied and scattered directions ‘St Vincent’ takes, at the helm, Annie Clark manages to pull every reference point together into a strange and wonderfully weird universe of her own design.