‘Nature reminded me you still have to live’: Jane Weaver on grief, reinvention and 80s Russian aerobics music
Jane Weaver turns up to our interview in a Stockport restaurant carrying a plastic bag stuffed with albums. They are all old, the worse for wear – she’s taking them to be professionally cleaned later – and obscure: the closest the bag’s contents comes to mainstream is a compilation of soundtrack music from the 80s films of nouvelle vague director Eric Rohmer. “The music from the scenes set in discos or parties,” she nods. “Really good. Eighties, French, synthesisers. Some of it sounds a bit like Air.”
This all seems very Jane Weaverish. Over the past decade or so, she has released a string of fantastic, acclaimed albums, each one a left-turn from the last. They’ve taken in acid folk, space rock, eerie, drifting electronic experimentation, hypnotic, vaguely krautrock-y instrumentals and full-on pop, all of them informed by separate moodboards of obscure influences that speak of a profoundly eclectic taste and a lot of time spent digging through esoteric records. Even 2021’s glittery, pop-facing Flock was apparently based in an infatuation with “Lebanese torch songs and Australian punk”. She is the kind of artist who says things like, “I just kind of went down the rabbit hole of 80s Russian aerobics music,” in the same way that other people might announce they’ve been streaming that Noah Kahan single a lot.
Her latest album, Love in Constant Spectacle, is consistent in that sense. The cover art, she explains, is inspired by Belladonna of Sadness, a 1973 “adult animation” film about a witch in medieval France. Its themes of misogyny, feudal repression and moral depravity were such a box office turnoff that it bankrupted the studio that made it. And the music is another left turn. While the 52-year-old’s previous albums have been self-produced, on Love in Constant Spectacle she worked with PJ Harvey’s right-hand man John Parish in Bristol. In marked contrast to Flock’s neon hues, the results are stark, dark, guitar-heavy and occasionally folky, which seems faintly surprising: she abandoned a folky style