LoneLady: ‘Most of my music has an urgency to it, I’m always anxious about the passing of time’

2021 has been a milestone year for Julie Campbell, the post-punk/electronic artist otherwise known as LoneLady. Her third solo album, Former Things, was warmly received, leading to a breakthrough TV appearance on Later...With Jools Holland; she also finally completed an experimental collaboration with Stephen Mallinder, formerly of Cabaret Voltaire, and musician and producer Benge.
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September brought her to the Piece Hall in Halifax, where she opened for New Order – and she returns there this month, to perform in the Spiegeltent. This time Gillian Gilbert and Stephen Morris of New Order are doing a DJ set.

Campbell is effusive about the venue and is looking forward to returning there. “It’s spectacular, isn’t it?” she says. “It’s practically on my doorstep, it’s less than an hour away from where I live in Manchester, and I’m ashamed to say I wasn’t aware of it, but I certainly am now.”

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She sees a similarity between the Piece Hall’s Georgian architecture and Somerset House in London, where she recorded Former Things, adding the show in September had been “really one of the most visually stunning gigs I’ve played”.

More than a decade on from LoneLady’s first album on Sheffield’s Warp Records, wider recognition at last beckons. Campbell acknowledges the Later...With Jools Holland clip was something of a watershed moment.

“The new album came out in June...and a lot has happened in that short space of time, culminating with that amazing opportunity to film a performance for Jools Holland,” she says. “It was so special to be able to film that in one of the mill buildings in east Manchester that has had a lot of significance for me over the years. Just to kind of document that space but also where I’m up to as well, with that single No Logic that was A playlisted on 6 Music.

“It just feels like it was a celebration of LoneLady, to be honest, and to document the new live set-up that’s got new equipment and new band members. Also the BBC crew made a beautiful film, I feel really grateful to them...It’s like an artwork, as far as I’m concerned. I’ve got that forever now.”

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Have recorded Nerve Up and Hinterland, her two previous albums, in Manchester, Campbell welcomed the opportunity to explore new surroundings while making Former Things during a residency at Somerset House.

“I’m from Manchester, I’ve lived here all my life, I love to explore Manchester and eulogise about it, but equally I very much need to get away from it, so I really jumped at the chance to become a studios member of Somerset House because it was really right in the heart of London,” she says.

“I’m an art school kid, my first love really is painting and drawing, to be able to have access to so many art galleries and things like that, I had a lot of new stimulation in London and I think that really fed into the energy of the album.”

Despite being offered room in the “proper studio spaces” at Somerset House, Campbell elected to record in the basement. “It’s very typical of me to choose the slightly harder task,” she says. “We stumbled across the rifle range en route to this other space, and I just paused. I found myself in this strange, dilapidated concrete room and I thought, ‘Hang on, what about this space?’ It resonated, it just said this is a very LoneLady type of space, so instead of renting proper studio spaces that had been done up and were all nice and warm and had heating and things like that, I ended up choosing this very cold, unheated, derelict basement bunker, but that’s what worked for me. I could afford that as well, and crucially I didn’t have to share the space, which doesn’t work for me either. There was a lot of good, logical reasons, not just irrational ones, to choose that space.”

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During the making of Former Things, Campbell fuelled her imagination by projecting arthouse films onto the studio walls. “We did that the other day in rehearsals, we got Ingmar Bergman films on the walls – I think it’s just about creating an environment, like a nest of things around me, making me feel that I’m in my right place, and one of those things I do is projecting images and films on the walls because I love the way it looks, there’s something really haunting about it.

“As well, when you work on your own like I do, I was on my own in a big concrete room, and I think it was just a way to get some movement in there or even some company, and I just like it, it looks cool and it makes me feel like I’m stretching into a sort of dream world.”

Former Things reflects on lost youth – something that Campbell has been thinking about a lot in the past couple of years. “The pandemic and lockdown actually really helped me generally in my life,” she says. “I was feeling in flux and sort of mourning how long ago now childhood seems. I was just overwhelmed with that feeling of loss, and looking back to when I was a teenager in my bedroom daydreaming of all the things to come. That image of a teenage me kind of grabbed me all the way through the record and decided what the record was going to be about lyrically and emotionally.”

Campbell feels she has become more direct as a songwriter over time. “I really wanted to get my hands on some electronic hardware and write using sequencers and drum machines instead of my guitar,” she says. “I’ve always loved beat-driven music and drum machines, it’s just that now I was really compelled for this record to have that urgency.

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“I think most of my music has had a sort of urgency to it. I’m always anxious about the passing of time; I think that feeds into it.”

As for the collaboration with Stephen Mallinder and Benge, which yielded the mini-album Clinker, Campbell says it had been a while in the making. “I’ve known Stephen for a while now because he came out and supported me on tour on my last album, Hinterland, in 2015. He was doing DJ sets, which was really cool. I’m a huge Cabaret Voltaire fan and since then we stayed in touch, we’ve worked together frequently, swapping remixes and we’ve played together. We’re just musical allies and friends.

“Then these sketches started circulating that were just beats and synths, so that album just came together in a fragmented but really easy way. It almost seems like that album just happened in the gaps while we were each doing our solo thing.”

Mallinder has suggested the album benefited from its slow gestation, and Campbell agrees. “I can hardly remember recording my guitar parts,” she says. “I recorded my guitar in my home studio but because it happened in the gaps of me moving to Somerset House and starting that whole adventure of what my new record was to become, in a way the Clinker tracks were happening in the margins. They were almost happening in my subconscious because I was very focused on my own record. So it came together in quite a strange place, kind of being rescued from these gaps that these tracks had fallen into.

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“It was maybe less than a year ago that a chance conversation with James Nice at Les Discques du Crépuscule meant that we ended up rescuing these from the hard drive and quite quickly turning it into a real release. Les Discques du Crépuscule is a great label, so I’m really happy that it happened.”

LoneLady plays at the Piece Hall Spiegeltent in Halifax on December 17. For tickets visit www.thepiecehall.co.uk. She also performs at Hebden Bridge Trades Club on January 14 and Record Junkee, Sheffield on January 16. lonelady.co.uk

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