STATE OF INDIANA
SHE MIGHT HAVE SUNG IN FRONT OF THE QUEEN BUT MIKE ATKINSON FINDS THAT SINGER- SONGWRITER INDIANA HAS A SINISTER TAKE ON EVERYTHING
Singer Indiana has a sinister take on everything
Afew years ago, Indiana found herself with an upright piano, left for storage by her sister. Undeterred by lack of training, she taught herself to play, uploading home-made clips to YouTube.
moody, stripped down cover of Joe Goddard’s club hit Gabriel attracted the attention of its composer, John Beck, and the pair started collaborating. In April 2012, the singer made her live debut, gaining instant acclaim for her emotionally charged brand of leftfield electronic pop.
“I’d love to have the confidence to go out dancing on my own – I think that whoever’s got the balls to do that has got the biggest balls!”
Just over a year later, Indiana performed David Bowie’s Heroes in front of the Queen, in Radio One’s Live Lounge. Since the song contained the potentially treasonous line “I will be Queen”, its lyrics needed prior vetting – to “Queen-proof it”, as she puts it.
“First of all, her people said: we’re going to make her change the words. Then they spoke to the Queen, and she said: no, it’s fine, just don’t look at me. The thing is, I was so conscious not to look at her, that my eyes were darting round the room, and they hit her a couple of times. So I did actually look at her when I sang the line!”
Earlier this year, Indiana charted with Solo Dancing, whose video was stuffed with visual puns for more intimate types of solo activity. (Beans were flicked, chains were yanked, cats were stroked: you get the picture.) “I go dancing by myself, I go dancing with no one else,” she sang, over a steadily throbbing synth pulse.
“The song is about empowerment,” she says. “It can be a metaphor for anything: to be comfortable in your own skin, and to be able to do something on your own.”
For a gay audience, the song could be taken more literally; after all, many of us are no strangers to lone-wolfing it on the dancefloor. “I’d love to have the confidence to go out dancing on my own,” she admits. “I think that whoever’s got the balls to do that has got the biggest balls!”
No stranger to the gay scene herself, Indiana was introduced to the bars and clubs of Brighton by her late uncle. “He was also a music producer. And on his deathbed, he said to my sister, who was into music – singing, piano lessons, gigging, writing, everything – ‘you’d better watch her, because she’s going to be nipping on your heels’. I didn’t even realise I wanted to be a musician then. So he always knew that I had something in me.”
In the video for current single Heart On Fire, Indiana stars alongside Charlie Bewley, best known for playing the vampire Demetri in the Twilight Saga series. (“He’s the director’s friend, so I got him for a steal.”) As the story unfolds, we see her “acting like a sweet girl, whereas I am in fact a powerful woman in a powerful position.”
By the end of the video, she is revealed as an undercover drug enforcement officer, who has persuaded Bewley to set up his dealer friend in a sting operation. The theme of the story – that all is not what it seems – is explored further on Indiana’s debut album, No Romeo.
“On the surface, the songs could be interpreted as love songs or just pop songs, but if you delve a little deeper, each one has a meaning that’s more sinister. Each time I write, I always have to have, for some reason, a sinister take on everything.”
Unlike Shakespeare’s Romeo, who finds true love but is ultimately destroyed by it, Indiana finds only tainted love, and yet she survives. Even at her most vengeful – “all your sons and daughters will be broken, from now on and ever more”, she pledges on Never Born, the opening track – you sense an underlying vulnerability, and even in her most vulnerable moments, her core strength never fully deserts her. On Bound, she uses S&M imagery to trace a journey from submission to dominance (“this isn’t love, this is dangerous”), while on the album’s title track, she spurns the whole idea of romantic love: “I don’t need no Romeo… it’s not enough, it’s alright, but I’m sleeping on my own tonight”.
A happily settled mother of two in real life, Indiana warns against interpreting her songs too literally. “They’re not all necessarily about relationships”, she suggests. “I like to tell stories, but I do draw on experiences and refer to them in songs.” In conversation, she is cheerful, straightforward, and quick to laugh, but any suggestion that “Indiana” is an invented persona is firmly rebuffed.
“I don’t feel I have to step into any shoes. I create songs to say things I never would, but I am Indiana. My mum says I have an interview voice. She says I sound more sensible, whereas in my own environment, I am a whirlwind of things going on inside my head. My dark side is channelled into my music, and I’m thankful that I have my music, so that I’m not out on killing sprees!”