Marika Hackman: 'I’m free to do whatever the hell I want'

http://www.theguardian.com/music/2015/jan/25/marika-hackman-interview-we-slept-at-last-laura-marling

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It’s funny how quickly blue hair fades to green. Marika Hackman demonstrates, twisting the ends of hers into little splayed brushes. She looks like an art student, not a former Burberry model, but three years ago, while her friend Cara Delevingne was wrapping her belted mackintosh around Eddie Redmayne, Hackman could be seen on a billboard advertising aviator sunglasses. She also appeared on the fashion label’s online Acoustic music series – a rather better showcase for her music than a poster campaign – and racked up a fair few hits. When I ask about Burberry she head-butts the table.

“I look back at it now and it’s so naive,” she says. “Clearly the exposure a musician gets from that kind of thing is the wrong crowd – people who are interested in the sunglasses, which frankly I wouldn’t give a shit about. When you’re dealing with big brands like Burberry, people get scared and feel like they’ve got to say it was a great experience. Well you know what? It was kind of a little bit shit!”

Well that’s that out of the way!

“I’ve never been a model,” she explains. “I’m very awkward in front of a camera. It was one long day being prodded and preened and made to put on makeup to make me look like I’m not wearing makeup.”

Hackman’s debut album, We Slept at Last, is due next month. Her natural “awkwardness” translates as something else in her music. Her voice is boyish and unadorned, and her eyes-down approach looks intense rather than diffident. Her songs are full of surprising modulations that lie just on the wrong side of pretty and her guitar playing is steady as a mill-wheel. Hackman mixes something ancient and modern, and typically British, in the way only Nick Mulvey has done in recent years. Her songs sound as old as peat bogs, but as smart as Radiohead. In the past two years she has toured with Laura Marling, the 1975 and alt-J, and has struck up a musical partnership with producer Charlie Andrew.

Hackman, 22, is the daughter of two former animators who now live in rural Devon. She was a day pupil at Bedales, the Hampshire public school famous for hosting the children of celebrities (Lily Allen, Teddy Thompson, Sophie Dahl), letting them call teachers by their first names and – according to some troubled parents – turn up to lessons in their pyjamas. In a week when the 40-year-old James Blunt is still being made to answer for his posh start, Hackman is adamant that Bedales was nothing but a good thing. She and her brother Ben (now a record producer known simply as Hackman) were on bursaries – they couldn’t afford to board – but, perhaps surprisingly, she longed to do so. By sixth form it was just her and one other girl getting picked up by their mums; arriving home just when the fun was starting for everyone else, she applied herself to songwriting. Her father had pulled her first guitar out of a skip. She began composing at 14 and proudly presented her first song to her brother only for him to point out, “you’re such an idiot, that’s by the Foo Fighters”. She and Delevinge briefly formed a covers band at school and rehearsed the hits of the 1990s – such as Natalie Imbruglia’s Torn (“an absolute classic!”).

She cuts a wholesome, smiley kind of figure – you can’t imagine she’d really have suited the fashion world. Her lyrics, and her self-directed videos, reveal an appetite for the grotesque. In 2012’s Cannibal, she recreated a food orgy inspired by the “barforama” in the film Stand By Me: a panel of gluttons stuff themselves with jelly and solid blocks of butter (“they had buckets under the table”). In an early online hit Bath Is Black, written when she was 17, she sank into a tub of poster paint and “had black bogeys for days”. And the video for the new track Animal Fear will feature an evisceration of some kind (a Facebook shot reveals her 1966 Fender Mustang spattered with fake blood). Severed limbs, decomposition and emotional self-sabotage continue to inspire her – in the new song Monday Afternoon she is “breathing in the sickly sweet of my rotting skin”. She wrote the song about the time her appendix burst.

“I’m not a really unhappy, disturbed person but I’ve always had a dark side, I think everyone does,” she says, cheerily enough. “There’s an immense sense of relief once I’ve written a song: it almost feels like you’ve let something go. Songwriting is about trudging through the darker sides of your brain and sifting that stuff out.” The tracks for her first three EPs came together over eight years, but having received a publishing deal from Transgressive in advance of the full-length album, she decided to sit down and see if she could write 12 new ones in the space of two months. Thoughts of Lena Dunham’s disastrous “ebook deadline” in Girls spring to mind; as it turns out, the extreme pressure was a gateway to the dark place all songwriters have to go to.

“I started having trouble sleeping, and anxiety attacks, which I’m prone to every now and again,” she says. “I would be pacing around my room, unable to turn it off. I guess it’s part of the brain that everyone else can suppress or ignore but if you’re writing songs you have to go right in there. You get to that point in the day where you want to go to sleep and you can’t.” When she did finally sleep, she’d occasionally dream melodies – then wake up briefly and record sound files on her phone. She does not recommend it. “Not good when you’re semi-lucid. A risky little game. You listen back in the morning thinking you’re going to hear a smash hit and it’s just the biggest pile of…”

Despite the grungy appearance and creative interest in all things gross, early online reviews branded Hackman as a kind of Kooky Folk Lady – the archetype of the female acoustic singer-songwriter, the musical equivalent, perhaps, of cinema’s Manic Pixie Dream Girl. No one quite knows what Kooky Folk Lady looks like, or indeed whether she really exists, but girls with guitars have always had a slightly fetishistic appeal for the audience that prefers to look rather than listen. “Before I’d even done anything, I was being branded as this twee folk acoustic artist girl running through the grass with a flowing white dress on. I thought: no, I’m just sitting in my bedroom in my jeans and a shirt, writing twisted songs. I nipped that in the bud pretty quickly,” she says. “That was a very conscious decision on my part. To be more and more experimental on my first two EPs and escape it.”

The only way of fighting against the cliche was to keep moving and broadening her sound. As a result, Hackman has been through a steep development in technique and recording processes, unusual for someone who is only just about to release their first album. On We Slept at Last, her songs stand on a lush but airy electro-acoustic landscape full of unidentifiable instruments. The pace is leisurely but dramatic: every now and then, an economically administered chord or cymbal crash seems to open a hole in the floor. She and Charlie Andrew decided to introduce instruments she couldn’t necessarily play properly – the latest is a kantele, like a psaltery or auto-harp, a Christmas present from her Finnish grandparents. “I wanted to change with each record, and experiment with each release, right from the start,” she says. “Nowadays you can be far more experimental because your work isn’t being ploughed into this one precious record that’s got to sell a certain amount. People can always go back and find the EPs – I’m not going to sell them the same music twice – and I think people expect me to do something different each time now, which is a relief, because I write knowing that I’m free to do whatever the hell I want.”

At one point her mother suggested she might want to get herself some singing lessons.

“I was like, a) rude and b) I never want to ‘learn’ how to sing, just like I never want to ‘learn’ to play the guitar. I want to use the guitar and the voice to write songs, and to express them, but I don’t want to be a singer or a guitarist – if that makes sense!”

What goes on between her and Andrew in the studio is equally mysterious. The 34-year-old Andrew produced alt-J’s Mercury-winning An Awesome Wave and has worked with Madness, Deaf School, Darwin Deez and We Were Evergreen. “There is no butting of heads,” she says. “We have the same ideas, and we don’t really have to express them or talk too long about it – we just do it.” I ask her for an example.

“Well, with the song Ophelia,” she says, “I was watching True Detective at the time, and I told him, ‘They smashed that opening credit – I love that cowboy thing, maybe we should take it that way?’ and he said, ‘Could be cool…’ and we got to work.”

The main challenge was knowing where to stop. “It’s the same with painting,” she says (she did an art foundation course in Brighton, working mostly in oil). “You can keep going, keep layering it up, but at some point you’re going to ruin it.”

A few months ago, Hackman moved to London permanently and now lives in the East End, not far from Brick Lane. Her other significant mentor in the business, the itinerant Laura Marling, has recently taken a flat nearby. Last night they were in the pub. Hackman was the main support slot for Marling’s last tours in Europe and Australia. She must have learned a thing or two from her on the road.

“Yes. So I used to get really nervous,” she says. “Not to the extent that it would seriously affect my playing but still, a very uncomfortable amount of nerves. When I went to Europe with Laura, on the first night, we went out for dinner together. We were chatting away and we suddenly realised we had 15 minutes till I had to be on stage. Laura said, ‘All right, let’s go back…’ – and there was only time for me to pick up my guitar and walk on. My nerves just went that day, and they haven’t come back. She’s such a calm performer, and she’s so self-assured that you feel safe watching.”

It seems a long time since Marling’s first album appeared in a limited edition box set featuring, among other things, postcards and a hand-drawn board game based on the stories in her songs. I ask Hackman if Marling gave her any advice on how to manage her image, in a world still unsure quite what to do with each new girl-and-guitar.

“We’ve talked about it quite a lot,” she says, “But the thing is, Laura is now just viewed as a songwriter: she’s one of the only girls out there who is viewed that way. I’m not sure I can even think of another, who can stand there with a guitar and sing a song, and be valued simply as a shit-hot singer-songwriter, not a ‘girl’ singer-songwriter.”

I ask her whether Joni Mitchell would also be Kooky Folk Lady were she emerging now in 2015. No, she says, because the strong ones always rise to the top.

We Slept at Last is out on 16 February on Dirty Hit Records

Other female singer-songwriters to watch…

Rhiannon GiddensThe American folk songstress is perhaps best known as a member of the Grammy-winning string band Carolina Chocolate Drops, but in September 2013 she attracted critical acclaim with a sultry performance of Odetta’s Water Boy at a folk revival concert inspired by Inside Llewyn Davis. Her debut solo album, Tomorrow is My Turn, comes out in February. You might recognise Giddens from the recent Apple advert in which she covers the Gershwin classic Our Love is Here to Stay.

Courtney BarnettIt’s hard to believe that the Tasmanian-born art graduate Barnett – whose wry slacker folk has attracted plenty of critical and audience buzz – hasn’t released a proper solo album yet. So far she has put together a double EP on her label, Milk! Records, which she founded in 2012. But fear not: her long-awaited debut LP, Sometimes I Sit and Think, and Sometimes I Just Sit, is due this spring.

Susanne SundførWith lashings of electronica overlaying her melancholy vocals, the multi-instrumentalist Norwegian Sundfør offers a modern take on the traditional singer-songwriter model. She has collaborated with fellow Scandinavians Röyksopp and Robyn, and last year provided vocals on producer Kleerup’s hit single Let Me In. Her new album, Ten Love Songs, is out in February.

SOAKBridie Monds-Watson was only 14 when she started to record demos and play shows around Derry; by the age of 17, she had released two EPs and quit school to focus on music full-time. Her first single with Rough Trade, with whom she signed last September, was the pared-back B a noBody; she is currently touring the UK and Ireland.

Laura DoggettTalent-spotted as a teenager and recently signed to RCA, Bath-based Doggett is becoming known for her breathy, electronic sound. Her single Phoenix, produced by SOHN, attracted 30,000 SoundCloud plays in 24 hours, and she lent her song Old Faces, all husky voice and brooding lyrics, to the latest trailer for crime drama Broadchurch. Kathryn Bromwich