Anne Hogan: 'There’s something so magical about Bidston Hill'

“I’ve always wanted to work there,” she tells The Yorkshire Post via video call. “I’m from Oxton, which is five minutes from Bidston Hill, and I’m only about 15 minutes from there now, so I still go dog walking there a lot. There’s something so magical about Bidston Hill, there’s all the pagan stuff which was very influential on my Funeral Cargo album (from 2021). I’ve always wanted to go to the Observatory but never have.

“But I was looking it up and it said something about a research centre and I wondered if you could go in and do something... They said yes, you can pay so much money and come in on a daily basis or stay overnight, so I asked if I could record in the domes and they said I could record anywhere I wanted in there. So I was in there for two months on and off, for quite a lot of hours every day with no heating, it felt like I was in the Arctic. But you’re near the river, you’re on land but high up, almost in the sky, it was like a meeting place of everything, so I just felt immediately inspired.”

Hogan approached recording with “no particular plans, just see what happened”. Packing “loads of instruments”, she also took three field recorders which she set up in the domes and around the building. “Everything was practically under-fi it was so low,” she says. “As soon as it started raining, that was part of the recording. There was a leaf blower that came through the amp into the headphones at one point when I was trying out doing vocals in the dome and I was tuning to the leaf blower, it sounded amazing.

“There was a lot of that going on, the natural element impacted the recordings. The weather was dominant, in autumn and winter there were a lot of storms. I took the dulcimer in there, which I’d never really played and through force of circumstance I made myself tune it and as soon as I’d started playing it, I already had the vibe of Ice Station Zebra in my head after watching that in the morning, so the wind was coming through the cabin and I was playing to that.

“I tried not to have electric power if I could avoid it, but I have a 60s chord organ and I took that in, and a marimba and glockenspiels and bells and flute, tons of stuff, and just recorded them.”

The result is a 36-minute continuous piece that Hogan describes as a “mind trip”. “It’s sort of a lucky dip but there’s something natural,” she explains. “It’s just coming from within, you’re in the zone and nothing’s on purpose. I was in the sea, I was flying through the universe, I was in the Arctic or going through the forest.”

Hogan’s interest in experimental work goes back to childhood. When compiling a Baker’s Dozen of records that had influenced her for the website The Quietus, the 63-year-old asked if she could choose 13 7in singles that she heard before the age of 13. “To me that was the huge time when I was really impacted by the sonics,” she says. “I was so open, so free.”

She gravitated towards the “electronic, experimental, slightly avant garde sound of Joe Meek, that big reverb” along with the exotica of Martin Denny and Les Baxter, the arrangements of John Barry and the African records that her mother had brought home from her travels in the ’50s. “I can hear it in what I’m doing now,” she says. Later on came a fondness for David Bowie.

While studying politics at the University of Leeds in 1979, Hogan saw Soft Cell perform at the Futurama 2 festival at Queens Hall in Leeds. She recalls: “There were loads of acts on, and really good ones, but they were the ones that were like, wow. Marc was frenetic, wild, it really affected me, and Dave was pretty static, but it just looked amazing.

“I think their set was the padded cell and Marc was rushing around the stage going crazy. I took nine caffeine tablets so I was flying and had to be carried back to the university, how embarassing, but I did get to see Soft Cell.”

Soon afterwards, she became close friends with Almond and Ball.

Deciding to take a year out from her course, in 1980 she began DJ-ing at Leeds clubs such as Le Phonographique, The Warehouse and Amnesia, mixing electronica with post-punk and gothic rock. “There was that experimental scene at the Phonographique, people being very cool and open, girls, boys, you didn’t feel like you were going to get your head kicked in if you looked at another girl. That opens you up again to the other side of music, I found that thrilling.”

She also promoted gigs. “I had Depeche Mode play, that was one of their first tours. I booked Soft Cell, that was their big Amnesia gig and I DJ-ed at that, and A Certain Ratio.

“And a lot of people that I met early on in Leeds I ended up working with. I saw Magazine at The Warehouse and ended up working with Barry Adamson. I saw The Birthday Party and ended up working with Nick (Cave). It’s just how things work out, I guess.”

When Hogan went down to a record label party in London, she encountered Matt Johnson, of The The, who introduced her to Simon Fisher Turner, with whom she had her first studio experience on Deux Filles. It was, she says, “totally avant garde, so out-there, otherworldly...I had dolls in my headphones and started playing piano to the dolls, I was encouraged to improvise”.

After hearing Hogan play on that album, in 1982 Almond invited her to join his side-project Marc and the Mambas, whose initial line-up also included Matt Johnson. “I don’t think Marc even knew I could play the piano (before that),” she says. “When I got back to Leeds and played him the tape and he was like, ‘This is you’. So I brought my piano up from Birkenhead and I ended up being on the Mambas’ album. It was because he heard that tape that he knew to ask me. We already got on well and had so much music in common, he’d play me things, I’d play him things​​​​​​​, and we had a brilliant time​​​​​​​.

“My​​​​​​​ first gig ​​​​​​​(with the Mambas) I walked onstage and played a grand piano at the Theatre Royal, Drury Lane. I remember walking on, sitting down at the piano and I had a sort of bits of music and the lot went on the floor and I was like, great. But that was my first ever gig, it was full-on, it wasn’t like I had to pay my dues. I paid them after but I didn’t have to pay them then because they were already successful, Marc was already cool as anything. What a fantastic opportunity and I took it, of course.”

Hogan and Almond would go on to work together for 10 years on records by Soft Cell, Marc and the Mambas and ​​​​​​​his solo LPs. She likens him to an older brother.

“We were very close,” she says. “I was crazy about him. He was the first person that used the word homosexual ​​​​​​​to me, it just put a word to something I’d been thinking about and I felt safe. Stuff had been happening at uni but I was in denial​​​​​​​, I didn’t really know if I liked a girl or whatever it was. So even just that, he really helped me but he probably would never know that. It helped me to embrace something that wanted to come out. I think he helped me in a lot of ways.”

Depths of Disurbances is available in a limited vinyl pressing via https://boomkat.com/artists/annie-hogan. Annie Hogan’s DJ mixes from the Phono and the Batcave are available on her Mixcloud page.