By Kate Hutchinson
The Guardian | November 14, 2016
People talk of watching musicians who are overcome by their music when they play, but there’s being “a bit intense” and then there is looking as if you’re willing the demons out of yourself using every iota of your concentration. New Zealand’s Aldous Harding – who was recently recommended by Charlotte Church in the Guardian – is in the latter category: a folk artist whose performances strike that rare balance between fragility and full-blown possession.
I caught her by chance in a moist room that smelled like hamsters at London’s Visions festival in August. The audience were transfixed as she hunched over her guitar protectively, hushing us with her haunted stare, her vocals going through more costume changes than a musical – from Dorothy to Wicked Witch. For once, if you read the comments below YouTube videos from her first US tour last month, they recount similarly breathless first encounters.
“I’m focused on my future,” says a deliriously jetlagged Harding, now embarking on another European circuit, of her engrossing stage demeanour. “I’m ignoring my past, apart from the bits that I draw from to help me focus on my future. I think about how I felt when I wrote the songs and I try to remember that. If I don’t have that, I’m screwed.”
The past complicates the present for Harding. The daughter of folk singers – her forename is actually Hannah – she grew up in Lyttlelton, near Christchurch, and was discovered busking in the streets by NZ artist Anika Moa. But the bleak eponymous debut that followed, which she has been touring for two years, is the “manifestation of what was happening inside my head” during what was, she says matter of factly, “straight up, a nervous breakdown”. You can hear the desperation in songs such as Stop Your Tears and the fiddle-seared Hunter, along with some bleak religious imagery that she says was “strictly to do with the mild psychosis that was happening”.
It’s deeply affecting music, but the more that interest in Harding grows – her album was only released in America last month – the harder it is for her to revisit its themes. She’s far happier now, she says; and, besides, her standpoint on songwriting’s healing power has changed. “I think about it as not so much ‘I need to get it out of me’, it’s not that my thoughts are poison, I just want to write good music. I don’t put myself in these nightmarish situations to write any more.”
Her new material is no longer filed under the the “gothic fairytale” tagline with which she has become associated but is more inspired by Scott Walker and new love (Harding lives in Lyttelton with her partner, bluegrass musician Marlon Williams) but also “the desperation to be loved”. They speak more to Harding’s theatricality, too. On recent track Horizon she sounds like a dejected French chanteuse at the end of the night, angrily calling out a former lover; on What If Birds Aren’t Singing, They’re Screaming, a song she “wrote on the bus when I was thinking about how I never wanted to smoke weed ever again”, she comes off like Nico, alone in a cabaret. And yet Harding isn’t inhabiting different characters; these voices all belong to her. “There’s no other way that I want to sing that song,” she says, matter-of-factly.
Eventually these songs will come out on a new album, Party, next March, (a title she tells me that, in spite of songs like Horizon, is not ironic), recorded with PJ Harvey’s right-hand man, John Parrish. She describes the experience as “the best thing ever. Every now and again we’d rub up against each other like two old porcupines about stuff but he’s so gentle and patient”. For now, though, there are those piercing live shows, disappointingly few in the UK so far – all the more reason to go and be sucker-punched.
Featured Image: Stare thee well: Kiwi troubadour Aldous Harding (Photo: PR)