Ready for take-off
Long-time Lyttelton musician Aldous Harding has just signed a threealbum deal with a major British indie label – and she’s recorded the first of them with PJ Harvey’s legendary producer. reports.
Grant Smithies
When Christchurch folk singer Aldous Harding picks up the phone at her temporary home in Bristol, she sounds both exalted and exhausted.
‘‘I’ve just been out and had something to eat, and now I’m home again at last,’’ says Harding, who is an unforced eccentric: playful, brittle, lovely, odd.
‘‘It’s been a really full-on day, and now I’m just lying here on the bed with my head spinning. I’m probably gonna put on some Bach and just blob out.’’
Harding is in the final stages of a hush-hush project, and it’s my job to spill the beans. She’s relocated to Bristol for a month to make a record with John Parish, the composer and guitarist best known as long-term producer to PJ Harvey.
This hook-up makes immediate sense. Harding and Harvey have a similar fearless intensity, and Parish is renowned for getting unexpected new things from his collaborators.
‘‘I’m amped to be working with him,’’ offers Harding between yawns. ‘‘I emailed John and sent some demos, and now here I am, in Bristol. He has an ear like you wouldn’t believe. He’ll hear that tiny little thing in an arrangement that you didn’t even know was bugging you, then whittle it away and make the song really forceful.’’
Parish’s work on PJ Harvey’s Mercury Prize-winning Let England Shake was ‘‘a wake-up call for everyone’’, says Harding. That album changed the game, so here she is, 12,000 miles from her Lyttelton home, working with the guy who helped make it happen.
‘‘I’ve just been in the studio for nine hours, with a choir of six women screaming beside me, so I’m pretty knackered. But I’m thrilled with how things are going. The album we’re making together is not what people might expect.’’
Pine needles in her hair, dirt in her mouth. The first time I saw Aldous Harding she was dead. She lay in a shallow grave between creaking pines at Castle Hill, near Arthur’s Pass. A skinhead in a bright yellow jersey dug her up, wiped the filth from her face, kissed her, then biked away.
Directed by Martin Sagadin, it was the video for Harding’s song No Peace, and her voice was a wee shivery slip of a thing throughout, trembling like a chilly ghost.
I dug up other songs online. There was a deep inky blackness at the heart of most of them; a desolation, a sense of smashed hearts and gathering dread.
Forged in her adopted home of Lyttelton, it was a sort of rural gothic folk, all gathering storm clouds, lonely gullies and beaches where driftwood lies bleached like bones.
She sang about a world beset by dark forces, with comfort in short supply, and the breathy tremulousness of her voice added an extra layer of vulnerability.
Long-listed for the Silver Scrolls songwriting award, Hunter rolled out over a tangle of fiddles and acoustic guitar, her voice again with that peculiar shiver that dragged you in and kept you out at the same time.
Stop Your Tears found the singer lamenting that she would never marry her love and would instead ‘‘die waiting for the bells’’. Pills in an urn; Baudelaire in the afternoon: I had no idea what was going on, but there was deep pain in it, and great beauty.
I watched a video of Harding singing live in Auckland’s Whammy Bar, and she seemed as intense as her songs. She swayed a little as she sang, closed her eyes here and there, looked intermittently furious.
She stared frowning into the crowd, and a dark tale poured up out of her and flooded the room. The song was Horizon, and the tension was so thick, the audience seemed to be holding its breath.
She was, she says, extremely nervous at that show. Also, out of her gourd on too many energy drinks. ‘‘I had, like, two litres of Red Bull that night. I was so nervous that I wouldn’t have enough energy, so I overdosed on the stuff and gave a very intense performance.’’
She pauses, yawns long and loud, continues. ‘‘Actually, I do that a lot. I end up drinking far too many energy drinks to get into the zone, then running down the street, feeling crazy. I tend to overdo things.’’
Perhaps someone should hide your energy drinks before each show? ‘‘Nah, man. Wouldn’t work. I just sniff that stuff out, like a pig with truffles.’’
Both live and on record, Harding sings in an accent that wavers between countries, continents, worlds. The vocal delivery is sometimes very weird indeed, with hints of folkie fellow travellers Joanna Newsome, Linda Perhacs and Vashti Banyan.
‘‘I have no idea how that sound came out of me on my early songs. My themes are old, and I felt old, and a bit… cursed. A bit witchy. And I’d only just started properly writing songs, so I was still trying to find my voice. I just arrived at that sound and it helped me get away with singing those dark words.’’
Formerly part of a loose aggregation of players clustered around Christchurch string band The Eastern, Harding also did time in a duo, alongside acclaimed Port Chalmers folk singer Nadia Reid, her ex-flatmate.
Anika Moa once saw Harding singing solo on the street in Geraldine, back in the pre-Aldous days when she still called herself Hannah. Harding was busking to raise cash for a ticket to Moa’s show later that night, but ended up on stage as the support act instead.
Co-produced by Ben Edwards and her former boyfriend, Marlon Williams, Harding’s self-titled debut album came out on Lyttelton Records in 2014. Ears started flapping, both here and overseas.
A showcase in Australia led to her signing with a well-connected booking agent. She relocated to Melbourne, toured Australia, then scored major festival gigs across the United Kingdom and Europe throughout 2016, and a support slot for cult band Deerhunter across the United States.
UK music mags Mojo and Uncut praised her debut album to the skies, and music blog The 405 declared her a ‘‘toweringly talented songwriter’’.
The connection with John Parish opened other doors. PJ Harvey’s saxophonist features on her new album, as does Parish himself and Seattle singer, Perfume Genius (Mike Hadreas).
And when Harding played New York’s Webster Hall last year, saxophonist Doug Wieselman (Lou Reed/Yoko Ono/Rufus Wainwright) joined her band.
‘‘Hannah’s been impressing all sorts of incredible people,’’ confirmed Harding’s manager, Olivia Young, when I phoned her in Auckland recently.