openupmy-eyes

[openupmy-eyes]

Interview with Mabel

I was lucky enough to chat with Brits Critics Choice nominee Mabel McVey for Sound Of Brit (interview in French is here).

Hi Mabel! 2017 has been quite a big year for you, you played a show in Paris last month and it was packed! How does it feel to know that you can sell out venues outside of the UK? Very surreal! In the UK it’s awesome but I think going somewhere else and just knowing that a little thing that I’ve created like a song that can spread to the whole world is actually amazing. It’s a great power! And it was such a beautiful show, I think Paris and London were some of my favourite shows!

How was the crowd, was it different from London? I think London can be quite hard, I’ve never had this experience, not at a headline show but I think people can be quite reserved. But I don’t know, people said to me when when I was coming here “it might be quite weird, playing Paris sometimes can be difficult too” and I was a little bit nervous. But then got to the show and there were so much love and everybody knew the words… yeah it was amazing, really beautiful!

This year you released your debut EP “Bedroom” and also a mixtape later, so what’s coming up next? An album? For sure! The album is really important to me this is why I am not rushing it. I’m working on it already, I’m quite a way into it and it’s bigger and better than anything I’ve done before I can say that already. With the EP and the mixtape, I just wanted to show people that I can create bodies of work but without going to the album too early because I think you don’t wanna do that.

Could you tell us a bit more about the musical colour of this album? On your EP you’re singing a lot about relationships, are you going to explore different themes? I always write in the same way I think, relationships are interesting and I definitely always write about them. I’ve been exploring other themes as well, like a lot of things I grew up with such as battling with anxiety and depression. In the battles I think it’s important to talk about that too. When it comes to the sound of the album it’s similar to what I’ve done before but I’d say I just take a bit further, being more daring and I’m experimenting with other sounds. I’d say there are slow jam vibe and nineties influences are still really present and then when it comes to up-tempo: afrobeats, it’s really important to me. I never explored up-tempo until Finders Keepers, I’ve always found it really hard, I was always like “how am I going to do that”. I love to dance but it’s difficult! Stuff like straight-head pop with four-on-the-floor… And I remember just being “afrobeats are important to me”, growing up I’ve got roots in West-Africa and I felt I should try that because that’s a great way to go up-tempo. The first song I did like that was Finders Keepers and then my next record which is quite up-tempo is all in that world.

And did you expect that Finders Keepers would be such a massive success? It’s crazy, it was always my favourite song! I can say now that I have new songs to come that I like even more but up until that point of writing that’s always been the most important one to me. I think there was some people around who were quite nervous because it was different to anything that I’ve done before. But it’s an important part of me and I wanted my fans to hear it and let them decide, let’s see what they think. That’s the best thing that could happen to me that my favourite song is also my fans’ favourite song. It’s just amazing that’s how things worked! Because you know my fans essentially decide…

So your fans have an influence on your work? Definitely! Because I didn’t even put that song out as a single really, it was a little taste of the EP. Bedroom came out as a single and Finders Keepers just went so far past Bedroom! And we were like “shit, we didn’t even get a video!” so we shot one. It came out in March and we’re in November now and it’s still in the top ten in the UK! So that’s amazing!

On Finders Keepers you did a collab with Kojo Funds, is there any other artist you’d like to collab with on your new album? I’ve seen you were talking to Zak Abel on twitter… Zak is a friend and he’s an amazing performer but I’m not sure about any collab. We’ve been writing together because it’s fun to write with other people and he’s a good writer! Who else? I think there are so many amazing women in the UK like Stefflon and Raye, so I’m hoping something will happen there. We’ve been writing but any time we write we just end up hanging out and going out so it will take us a year before we write a song! Some other UK artists like Stormzy, I’d love to do something with him, he’s amazing! Some American rappers… Tory Lanez I love him!

So mostly urban and rap artists? Yeah definitely! I like rap and R&B and it’s a big part of my identity, but then yeah some afrobeats, I’d love to do something like that. Maleek Berry would be really cool too!

I’ve read you were a massive fan of Beyoncé, are there any other inspirational female musician that you look up for? Lauryn Hill, Aaliyah… From the present day probably Kehlani, SZA, just any women who are fearless in their writing. I think Lauryn Hill and Aaliyah were very much in a man’s world sort of bossing that vibe. Then you have Destiny’s Child, I grew up in the age of, thanks to them, Survivor, Independent Woman, I got taught that you don’t need somebody to love you to feel good about yourself and I think it’s a message that I want to send to my female listeners.

You started to write music quite young, do you remember the first song that you’ve ever written? It’s so funny because I do remember it but I’ve sworn to myself to never share it! Basically it’s funny because it was a love song and I was five years old so at that time I’ve definitely never been in love! So it’s funny our obsession with love and how it’s start so early and how we place so much importance on it. But yeah, it was about a guy in my year… I literally don’t know where he is or what he does.

You said before that you were struggling with anxiety and I was wondering how do you manage and deal with it when you’re performing in front of audiences like you did when you opened for Years & Years at a quite early stage of your career… I think I only get anxious or nervous because I care and it’s about using all that energy. Anxiety takes a lot of energy, brain power, physically it gets me tired because it’s about taking all that energy and turning it into something positive. For me it was about disconnecting with the Mabel that reads, the Mabel that hangs out with her friends and being that other thing. Which is like I don’t even think of myself as human, just being pure energy, that’s what it is. Taking all of that negative stuff and stop thinking “what if this or that happens?” and just owning it. I think it’s the best feeling in the world.

To be on stage and to feel the crowd with you? Yeah, it used to scare me but I realised that if I jumped then they’ll jump too but I have to do it! I have to go in! If I scream then they will too and it’s just amazing, having that connection with people!

Did you have any awkward moment on stage though? Oh yeah there were definitely some awkward moments! Like when I scream and nobody screams… There’s always some moment and I’m like “what if my bra is not in place, what if…” but I think it’s what I really learned from my mum… it’s that fuck it! No matter what happens, because shit happens but it’s just about owning it! But I think people like the flaws as well. I’ve got a thing now, because I used to be so scared of performing, when things would go wrong I just wouldn’t say anything, carry on and get to the end of the show and I would think “I didn’t enjoy that” because I was so focus on that mistake and thrown by that but now it happened a couple times on tour and I just say “you know what? Something went wrong, we’re just gonna start this again”. People like that because they’ll see I’m human, we’re all human, everybody fucks up, shit goes wrong – oh my god sorry I swear so much! I like just admitting and sometimes they are even my favourite moments because people cheer, they���re with you, they’re like “we love that you’re human” so I think “thank god!” because if you think I’m some angel you’re gonna be disappointed!

Your music and fashion sense are both quite inspired by the nineties, if you could only keep one trend from this era, which one would you pick? That it’s so hard! Okay I’m going to say two things: one music thing and one fashion thing! I’d say it would be the harmonies, nineties harmonies, they’re amazing, I think people neglect that so much in modern music! I travel with two back-up vocalists and in all my shows we do a section where it’s really broken down, it’s just me and vocals. So I’d say that, a lot of nineties R&B were based around that. And in fashion it would be the nineties lip-liner! That’s like an everyday thing for me, I usually do a really tacky nineties lip-liner with a lip gloss and it’s really the vibe!

Finally, if you could pick an era to live, would you stay a millennial or be a nineties kid? Yeah it would be the nineties, I feel like I was meant to be a teenager in the nineties. I always ask my auntie “tell me a bedtime story! Tell me about the year 1996!”.

And what can we wish you for next year? The album, a lot of touring… it’s gonna be even bigger than this year!

[openupmy-eyes]

Get To Know - Stereo Honey

This is the full (and rough) transcription of my interview with Peter Restrick, lead-singer from the upcoming indie rock band Stereo Honey. They’ve been one of my favourite new act of this first semester of 2017 and I highly recommend you to go check them out – I mean, they have two songs so far so that’s easily done. I tried to order this messy chat in the French article, which, I hope, is nicely written but in the meantime if you can’t read Fr and are still interested, here ya go! x

 Hey, thanks for meeting me today! I just want to say I’ve seen you guys in Nottingham last month for Dot To Dot and you were really good! We had a blast! To be fair it was quite a surprise, we didn’t really know what to expect as you don’t have much material out yet. 

Yeah it’s right, we’ve got two songs out at the moment and we’ve got another single coming up in a month or so. Are you gonna release an EP? Yeah we’ve got plans to release an EP towards the end of the year, that’s the idea. We’re excited about releasing new material for sure, I think every band and every musician gets impatient like “I wanna do it now! I wanna do it now!”. 

Yeah like you record it, you mix it and you feel the urge to upload it straight away. 

Exactly and our thing is that we got so many songs and we’re just desperate to show them to people but we want to do it the right way and at the right time. So yeah, the EP at the end of the year, we have an acoustic version of one of our tracks The Heart that we released a couple of days ago and then we’ll see from there! 

So now tell me about the band: how did you meet, how long have you been together? 

Nicky the guitarist and Ben the bassist are childhood friends. They’ve known each other for a ludicrously long time, since they’re 7 years old.  Then me and Jake the drummer, we’ve probably known each other for about 5 years I’d say. But we all played from different bands before. Are you from London? I’m not from London but I’ve lived here for 5 years as well as the rest of the band. I moved here for uni and I started sessioning as a drummer. So when I first met Nicky and Ben I was drumming in a band they were also playing in and we really liked one another, we really liked each other’s musicianship; so we got this idea, we were like “hey let’s play together!”. 

Yeah, I guess sometimes it just clicked right? 

Yes exactly! And so obviously I was drumming and we were like a three-pieces. I was writing songs, writing lyrics and I was trying to sing at the same time but it was just going terribly! Because I was just getting out of breath all the time, I couldn’t do both! I really tried! But we got to the point of utter frustration where this wasn’t working and at the same time we were looking for a singer as well cause I wasn’t the singer yet, I was the full-on drummer. So it went for me from singing and drumming to “oh you should do the singing outright”, so we found Jake. Then basically we locked ourselves in a room for a year, we were like “right we’re not coming out until the live show is amazing and until we got two albums worth of songs” so that’s what we did! 

That’s quite funny that you were a drummer at the start because you do have a really great voice! You might already have heard the comparison but when I saw you for the first time I thought “wow they’re like a mix between Nothing But Thieves and Gengahr!”. 

Oh great! Thanks, I love Gengahr! Mad love for this band! Also Nothing But Thieves they’re absolutely incredible! 

Yeah they’re amazing live too, are you planning on seeing them today? 

Yeah hopefully! I think we’re not clashing. I’ve never seen them live before, I’ve seen hours and hours of them on Youtube but never seen them in the flesh, so that will be cool!

What else are you listening to at the moment or like when you’re recording music? 

We dig back into golden oldies, I mean I grew up on Jeff Buckley, Nirvana… Ben really likes Wild Beasts, he also listens to a lot of Beach House. We aslo love old Coldplay… 

Old Coldplay not new Coldplay? 

No, No! New Coldplay is fine! It’s fine it’s just old Coldplay was something else. It was absolutely stunning and they released a new track quite recently called All I think About Is You, it’s like they’ve gone back to their old sound and oh my god it’s pure fire! It’s amazing! I’m enjoying listening to The Hunna at the moment, they’re brilliant! We like Radiohead… I listen to a lot of stuff day and day out. 

And if you could get a support slot for any band alive and still touring at the moment, so you can’t pick Nirvana sorry mate.

 Argh okay so there’s two. The first one… he’s a little bit niche but he’s my favourite recording artist it’s a guy called Richard Hawley, he’s from Sheffield and I think he’s got the most perfect voice I’ve ever got in my life. We wouldn’t go on tour because it fits or because it’s right but just because I absolutely love him. He’s written a song called The Ocean which just makes me cry every time I hear it. I would go on tour with him selfishly, so I could hear that song every night and cry my eyes out! I’m the band weeper, I’m the one who gets emotional the most. 

Do you ever cry when you sing your own songs?

 No!!  I cry when I write them… because for me writing is really therapeutic, it helps me deal with stuff. You know I remember songs I listen to when I was eleven or twelve years old, and I remember being like “oh that changed my life!”, there are really formative moments. So when you’re listening to songs and you’re like “holy crap!” it’s life affirming and life changing and both in term of listening to or writing a song, drawing or painting something, creation helps you deal with stuff! So yeah when I write them maybe… bit of crying, bit of anger. And yeah I said there were two acts I’d like to support, the second would be Arcade Fire.

We’re running out of time so last question: how would you describe your music? 

I’d describe it as an emotional narrative, we write songs about stuff and we try to tell a story about what happened to us, to me so yeah it’s like an emotional narrative.

You know what to do: https://soundcloud.com/stereo-honey 

French Version available on SoundOfBrit: http://soundofbrit.fr/

[openupmy-eyes]

Get To Know - SHELLS

I met the lovely SHELLS in Paris when she was supporting The Naked And Famous for the European leg of their tour (full FR article here).

Who are you SHELLS? 

My name is Sarah Shelldrake, so that’s where the name SHELLS came from. Also people always called my grandpa Shelly so it was nice to have it. I wanted just to keep it simple.

 For how long have you been doing music?

We always sang in my house. I’ve got three sisters and my dad would always play his guitar and sing. We had a piano from a young age my granny gave us her old piano and we used to just write awful songs on it, sing really loud and harmonies with all my sisters. So we always had music in the house.

 And I guess that beside playing you were also listening to a lot of stuff?

Yeah! My dad is a bit of a rocker, so he would play things like The Rolling Stones, Bob Dylan or The Beatles. And my mum loves things like Whitney Houston and Céline Dion so she would always be singing massive female power ballads. So there would always be a lot of music around.

You’re not playing in a band, was it always been a project of yours to go solo?

Things have always changed for me, I was in a band when I was 17. I think I joined the school jazz band and that was really fun! Then I was in function so I sang in function bands and at the moment I’m doing a solo project but I play with band members. So I think it’s always different, it’s always going to change.

 And you’ve been writing on your own too or did you collab with other people?

Both! I write alone and I’ve been writing with a lot of people as well. So it’s probably a nice balance, working on your own sometimes but also with other people.

 You release your first EP, Shapes, last year in December, what were your main inspirations?

It was an expression of what was going on at the time. It’s four songs and they are just the four songs that represented me the most at that time. So yeah, they’ve been inspired with everything going on around, I was living in London for a few years, so the people I’ve been working with and meeting in London they’re a big feature of the music. So I guess it’s the same for everyone, it’s a representation of what you were doing at the moment.

 And lyrically could you tell us a bit about your last song Jailbird?

Jailbird is about appreciating that you can liberate yourself from something. It’s about feeling freedom and going for that freedom. It’s a metaphor about feeling like a jailbird.

It’s cool that you’re not writing about, you know, love and relationships like a lot of artists do.

Oh, I think all my songs are about love but I wanted it to sound like it could refer to anything, not just love but also a new job, family, a partner or how you feel in general. It feels nice to saying that too because every time I get that feeling of like I am setting myself free again because of the lyrics so it’s nice!

So making music is just liberating for you?

Yeah in general pretty much!

About your artwork, it pictures shapes (of course) did you choose it because it looked just pretty or you had another thought about it?

I was really inspired by synaesthesia; do you know what it is?

Isn’t it when people hear music and they can see things like colours? You have it?

I don’t, but I did a research project into it just because I found it so interesting. It’s not just seeing colours and shapes it’s also taste, you can taste things, you can smell things, one sense or more being affected by another sense. And I found that really interesting so the artwork is based on the relationship between senses in particular colours and shapes and sounds. So there’s a lot of research and science behind the shape the sound frequencies make.

 Did you speak to someone who has synaesthesia to know what your music make them see or feel?

I spoke to people about some other music but not these four songs. I spoke to them about a music project I did a couple of years ago, but everyone is different, that’s what I found. People have different interpretations of music, people with synaesthesia will feel different things for different songs. That was something else I liked about it, that is completely exclusive for each person. So in the end I did a lot of research about what keys or songs created what shapes or what moods made what colours, but in the end I found that personally a lot of it was subjective so you might feel something different from me. So the shapes on the artwork are really really basic, the representation of those things.

 It reminded me a bit of Clean Bandit aesthetic.

It did! Afterwards it also looked like a Gameboy! *laughs* But it was a nice process because they started much more complex as shapes and then at the end I really like the simplicity of each. It is quite an important thing for me.

 Yeah, even in your music, I’d say that your song are quite light produced, do you have new stuff coming up which have more things going on?

Yeah definitely, there’s a second EP coming up in the next few months and it will quite different. There will be similarities to the first EP but it will be a development of it, so different and more instruments and different production. Again, I guess it’s just a representation of where you are a bit later on so it will be “heavier produced” as you said.

 That will be interesting I’m excited to hear it! And about touring you have new dates coming soon after supporting The Naked And Famous?

So I will be doing more recording for a couple of months but I got a headline show in April in London in a church called Saint Pancras Old Church!

[openupmy-eyes]

Welcome stranger

Hi! I’m Céline and I’m eighteen year old. I’m French (so please forgive me if I make afew spelling mistakes or typos) and I’m originally from a little town in theNorth East of the country but I currently live in Bordeaux for my studies.Although I like communication and even more English (the course I have taken), university is not really my thing. As life is way too short to do things you don’t like, I decided to finish my second semester and to change my plans: I got admitted in a private school of communication and next year, I will move out to Paris! This is both exciting and scary at the same time and I really hope things will just work out for the best. I created this blog because I needed a new project, something personal, but more organised and productive than my personal tumblr (that you still can visit at this address if you like funny stuff, random things and a lot of fangirl breakdowns: http://selvne.tumblr.com/). I hope I will succeed to keep it updated as frequently as I want. 

I love music more than anything in this world. I believe it is an universal language, an amazing way to gather people all together and to make them feel emotions. I do play piano, a bit of guitar and I also love singing but I’m not really talented, it’s more my hobby, something I do for fun and it will stay like this! I hope I’ll manage to find a way to work in the music industry though. I want to get the wider culture possible, so I decided to try to listen to one new artist or band I don’t know yet everyday. It does not matter of what kind, even if I’m keen on indie and rock music, I think I am quite open-minded and I can appreciate every kind and style. I also like cinema, TV shows, books, traveling, always discovering new things…

 I will post my thoughts on this blog: my opinions on things I liked or disliked, reviews of gigs I went, new albums I listened to, pictures… In English or in French, it depends of my mood. I hope you will like it, don’t hesitate to reblog or comment, I’d appreciate it! 

 X