Four years after her debut EP kick-started the hype, Beth Jeans Houghton has an album, a new home in the US and a veteran rocker boyfriend.
"So many people have jobs that they don't really like. I don't ever
want to retire," says Houghton. "As long as I'm able to do stuff, I'm
going to be happy to do it for a long time."
In fact, she has
already been doing it for quite a long time. The debut album may only
just have been released, to positive reviews across the board, but the
oldest of the songs on Yours Truly, Cellophane Nose (named after a prank
played by Houghton and a friend, where they stuck boiled-sweet wrappers
on their faces and waited to see if anyone would point it out) dates
from when Houghton was 17. Despite early press attention in 2009, when
she was first placed in the freak-folk genre alongside Joanna Newsom, in
a canny move of creative control she refused to negotiate a label deal
until the album was recorded; its release was further delayed by the
illness of producer Ben Hillier.
One positive effect of the
three-and-a-half year wait since Houghton first arrived on the scene has
been craftily to sidestep the new-folk boom, which might have drowned
her complex, subtle sound in a sea of Mumford and Sons. The glorious
Yours Truly, Cellophane Nose, while it still has at least half a hoof in
the freak-folk of 2009's Hot Toast EP, encompasses a wide and wonderful
range of sounds, from the spiky Vampire Weekend-like highlife
indie-punk of "Atlas" to the baroque Kate Bush whimsy of "Carousel",
with lyrics touching on subjects from her mother's pregnancy with her
brother, on "The Barely Skinny Bone Tree", to overly-perspiring lovers
on "Nightswimmer".
Houghton, it's clear, is set on doing things
her own way, even if it means losing out on the precious opportunities
that hype offers. Unsurprisingly, she comes from the proverbial creative
background; her parents were both graphic designers ("My mum used to
draw the streetlamps on maps, isn't that cool?"), while her brother, Ben
Jeans Houghton, is a respected artist who has designed sleeves and
directed videos for her.
"My parents always encouraged drawing and
creativity and stuff, and anything that involved your imagination," she
says. "They never told us we were weird, whereas other parents would
have. So we never noticed."
Everyone else did. From the release of
Houghton's first EP in 2008, her textbook wild-child, free-spirit
back-story became the stuff music hacks salivate over. She left school
at 16, having taught herself guitar, and played her first gig at 17, the
same year she was pulled onstage with Devendra Banhart at Green Man
festival to perform her own song "Milk Bottles".
Her
attention-grabbing wardrobe has featured hotpants, wigs and, in one
memorable press shot, Dali-esque eyeballs painted on her breasts.
Interviews might typically feature tales of her Arctic-fox spirit animal
or of how she was going to live in a yurt, or focus on her
synaesthesia, a condition in which, in Houghton's case, words and
numbers become confused with colours and numbers.
"It makes
absolutely no difference to the way I write songs," she insists, "And
even if it did, I wouldn't know, because I've always had it." The
development of her material and the burgeoning identity of the Hooves of
Destiny have apparently reined Houghton in a little. If not exactly
mature or serious, as her whimsical stage banter proves ("My mum gave me
a hat for Christmas – just like a balaclava but with a moustache"), she
is a decidedly less wacky performer now. It's much the sort of change
anyone goes through between the ages of 17 and 22. You wonder sometimes,
though, whether she feels that she is marketing a version of herself
that she has outgrown.
"It's more that other people are promoting
old versions of me," she says. "I find that people will take bits from
interviews or reviews from, like, four, five years ago. If you took an
excerpt from someone's old diaries they'd be completely different and
it's the same with this. People will hold on to what they've heard a lot
about, which is funny to me. I'd want to know what was new and what was
happening now."
One thing happening now that Houghton is
resolutely refusing to talk about is her relationship with Red Hot Chili
Peppers singer Anthony Kiedis. She replies to a question about whether
she frets that her band might get increasing attention for the wrong
reasons with an unruffled: "I'd say no, and no comment."
Now,
Houghton and the whole band are planning to decamp to Los Angeles, also
birthplace of the Chili Peppers, for at least as long as it takes to
record the next album. It is less fuelled by romantic convenience,
though, than by a romantic obsession with the apotheosis of the
rock'n'roll band. West Coast America in the 1970s, specifically Pamela
Des Barres's riotous memoir I'm With the Band, and the great American
weirdos like Frank Zappa and Captain Beefheart were her early
obsessions, thanks to raids on her parents' record collections.
"It's
just hearing these stories and the idea of travelling and working with
your friends. You might get paid measly amounts for it, but I'd always
choose happiness over riches," she says. "And it is so unbelievably fun.
Plus, it's really cathartic singing songs. I get to express my feelings
and leave them behind. Otherwise I'd probably end up all stressed up
and depressed and insane. So let's never stop!"
Beth Jeans Houghton plays Queen Elizabeth Hall, London tonight, for BBC 6 Music's 10th birthday
______________________________________________________________________
Author: Emily Mackay
Source: The Independent
Date: March 16, 2012
Original article: HERE
Brak komentarzy:
Prześlij komentarz