Director drawn to simplicity of songs to revisit ’60s adolescence
Award-winning director Sally Potter has challenged British society throughout her 50-year career, in films like “Orlando,” “The Party” and “Ginger and Rosa.” Now, at age 73, Potter’s creative resolve forges on with her first studio album, “Pink Bikini.”
The self-released LP, now available, is a semiautobiographical collection of alternative tracks that detail Potter’s adolescence in 1960s London.
Across 12 songs, the filmmaker revisits tumultuous relationships and oppressive social strictures.
“There’s something very life-affirming about working in another medium, learning a new skill or making a change at what was considered to be a point in one’s life where you’re supposed to know exactly who you are and what you’re going to do,” Potter said.
Potter found lyrical inspiration in notebooks she filled with poems over her lifetime. Coincidentally, the songs on “Pink Bikini” deal with a variety of different subjects, including frustration with beauty standards (“Ginger Curls”), a “ban the bomb” march (“Black and White Badge”), and female authorship (“Ghosts”), delivered atop minor keys and alluring instrumentals.
“Some people say I have a rhyming gene,” Potter says.
This interview with Potter has been edited for clarity and length.
Q: Your background is interdisciplinary; you’ve co-composed or curated music in your films. But when did this album begin for you? A:
It’s quite a mystery to me, actually. Why now? Why this? I think I felt a very strong desire to work with the apparent simplicity of the song form. After making big films that always involve vast numbers of people and a lot of money ... the appeal of the short form is so enduring and so emotionally rich and so direct and so intimate.
Q: What was it like revisiting your adolescence on this album, at this stage in your life? A:
I’m not sure she’s ever left me, actually. I’m not sure that any of our young selves ever leave us. But revisiting those memories is such a strange thing, and that’s one of the things that the songs (are) about: Am I remembering this? Or am I remembering a photograph of this? And then in the act of telling the story, because each of the songs is a small story, one begins to kind of rewrite history.
Q: How do gender dynamics influence your songs? A:
I chose these teenage years because (it is) the moment of intense crisis around gender identification, when you first start noticing that you’re being treated according to the sex you were born. If I just speak about myself, and my generation of girls, as we were moving into puberty as a time of great loss, loss of freedom, dynamism ... all of a sudden (you’re) having to think what impression you’re making and the restrictions of being a female. At the same time, it’s an incredible kind of growth, seething with hormones, feelings, confusion, trauma, intensity and finding out very many things about yourself in the world. It’s a very brilliant, intense period to write about.
Q: Are there questions from your ’60s childhood that you think are relevant in 2023? A:
One can’t mention climate change too many times because I think the fear of everything ending — what’s bigger than that? There is nothing bigger than that. It’s paralyzing. The Cuban Missile Crisis, which (happened) when I was 11, looked very close to being World War III. I think (this generation’s) feeling of crisis is similar to then. Confusions around sexuality ... and domestic life. There are so many things in common, and those are the simple things.